Seven Miracles
I Have Witnessed,
or
Miracle: A Definition  
by Maisie Williams 

The First Miracle:  

  

The first miracle may be that miracles exist at all; the word so fragile it breaks over the tongue like glass.  

  

“To achieve sainthood,” my mother told me once when we were both still religious, “miracles must be attributed to you.”  

  

It goes like this: the penitent or desperate down on broken knee begging, Please Mother Teresa, Please Pope John Paul II, Please Sister Clare of Assisi. The pleases ring out one by one like solitary church bells, which join on the air to form a steady, constant rhythm like the beating of a heart. Please take away this sickness. Please return her to me. Please no more rain.   

  

Then, when at last the answer comes: Sickness gone; lover returned; water receded, that is the miracle.  

  

Of course, it is more complicated than that. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines a miracle as “a sign or wonder such as a healing, or control of nature, which can only be attributed to divine power.” Sign, wonder, divine: the words glinting off the page like rays of light that fall through my hand. Even now, I am unable to catch it, to pin it down. Still, when my mother told me the Church requires two miracles before a holy person can be declared a saint, I thought, “Only two!” Not knowing then how heavy the stuff was, how impossible, like being asked to bear the weighted fabric that forms the space between stars.   

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The Second Miracle:   

  

When my sister was born, my mother was thirty-nine years old. “Geriatric,” the doctors called her at Vanderbilt Hospital where the nurses stuck her in the TennCare wing for low-income pregnant women, and where she says one refused to bring her a glass of juice when she was bedridden, telling her to ask her husband to do it instead.  

  

She is thirty-nine when my sister is born with two knots in her umbilical cord, eyes open, breathing.  

  

The nurses are slack-jawed and inspect her over and over for signs of damage, this impossible prize from my mother’s long and painful final pregnancy. But she is perfect, my mother declares. Perfect in spite of reason or science, and so she is a miracle.  

  

I have heard this story again and again, the details fluctuating but falling fairly constantly into a set pattern. As I heard it, over time I began to think of a miracle as something like a wish that shouldn’t, couldn’t have come true.  

  

The formal definition calls for prayer. Was she prayed for? She was a surprise, a happy one in the end, but unexpected, nonetheless. Was she prayed for? My mother was constant in her devotions then, if casual about them. Was she prayed for? I never saw it, but faith is a private thing, my mother taught me. Faith is the thing which lives inside. Faith is the home which needs no house. Was she prayed for? In the silence after her arrival? In the wet wide eyes of the nurses clutching her small body? In my mother’s held breath like a stolen egg, a delicate thing that may crack without warning?   

  

I cried when my mother told me she was pregnant with my sister, cried vehemently, little sobs wracking my whole body. Was this an anti-prayer? Was this a knot in the cord?  

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The Third Miracle:  

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The miracle rises and expands like breath of air in new lungs, like the silken heat of a new star, bursts into being.  

  

My sister can see ghosts.  

  

Her eyes open far too early and fix on an empty corner of the room, away from my mother and the nurses and the noise and the light, and since there is such a sense of the miraculous already  

on the air, my mother decides this is a miracle too. In the emptiness, she reasons, are my sister’s deceased grandparents, their guiding spirits watching on.  

  

Of course, there is no great act of healing here, no divine force of nature, and no prayer-work at all, except perhaps, my father’s ardent wish to see his mother again, to show her this child.   

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The Fourth Miracle:

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In my mind, miracles may also be sudden, a single moment of divinity. Once, my uncle got into his car and a passing tornado lifted him and the car too, briefly still inside the storm. His heart might have beat wildly in a current of Please, please, please, had he known what was happening, but as quick as it took him, it placed him down. Car unscratched.

Uncle unscathed.   

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The Fifth Miracle:

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Like all forces of nature, a miracle must first be spurred by an equal and opposite action. Catholicism defines this action as prayer.   

  

I like to think of it more as an ardent hope. Once, when my father was far away and overseas, I hoped that he would return. In spite of all the no-jobs throughout the country, in spite of the recession, in spite of all reason, I hoped he would come back to me, and the miracle is: He did.

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The Sixth Miracle:

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When my father went in for his surgery, my mother spoke to her higher power and acknowledged the ability it had to take him from her. She told me the same thing when my teacher’s daughter had to be put under anesthesia for a procedure, and I told her not to worry, because my teacher said it wasn’t very risky. My mother scolded me never to say that. She said, you must always acknowledge their power, so you don’t tempt them into proving it to you. So, she spoke to them from the hospital room, and she acknowledged that they could take him if they chose, but she asked them not to. Then, she waited for my father to wake up, and eventually, he did.  

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The Seventh Miracle:

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Have you ever dreamt anything? Dreamt it when everyone said you were foolish and small and unreasonable? Dreamt it when even the atoms of the air itself pushed back against you as you tried to whisper the dream into the wind? If you have ever dreamed like that, if you have ever dreamed and that dream, however small, came true, then you have held a miracle.  

  

As I sat down to write this essay, to catch and pin the miracles of my life, I sat for a long, long time before the wide whiteness of the page and dreamed of words where there were none. Perhaps the act of writing is a miracle, too.  

  

And here are the words. Here are the beautiful clear spaces between them where you may catch your breath or rest your eyes. Here is the emptiness at the end that you may populate with your own words, your own miracles. Look, they are already falling like so many stars over our heads.  

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Citation:

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“Catechism of the Catholic Church.” United States Conference of

Catholic Bishops, Made with   FlippingBook, 1994, https://www.usccb.org/sites/default/files/flipbooks/catechism/890/.