Miracles Are Organic

And the Dead Understand the Permaculture of Prayer

My father, a skeptical doctor, loved to quote the French novelist Emile Zola about the miracles attributed to the Lady at Lourdes: The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg. My father would raise his eyebrows slightly as he delivered the final words of this summation, a smug smile on his lips, as if this closed the deal. The foolish and the faithful might be hoodwinked by a little holy water, but not him, a modern man, a man of science, a man who could effortlessly see through the flimflammery of religion.

Except that my father, raised in the technological narcissism of the last century, didn’t understand miracles at all. He wanted an industrial light show. He wanted antibiotics and fiber optics and nuclear precision. He could remove a tumor with one hand tied behind his back. Could some mystical Lady really do that? Could she cure cancer? Okay, maybe some people said she could. Okay maybe some of the people my father thought would die didn’t and some he thought would get better keeled over, but the point is neither he, the skilled surgeon nor some mystic Madonna, could regrow a lost leg. Human beings aren’t lizards after all.

Trained to expect technicolor wonders, we’ve forgotten, however, to recognize a real miracle when one happens. Sometimes it is a miracle to get out of bed and face the day. Sometimes it is a miracle that we can forgive ourselves or our friends. It can certainly feel like miracles are everywhere on the first day of spring when we can step outside without a jacket to smell the peonies and the lilacs. Birdsong can be a miracle and so can a spot of sun or a breeze at the end of a long walk. All around us the natural world is offering us nothing but miracles.

I think of that man who had his leg blown off in the war, haunted by nightmares of what he is seen and wracked by pain who takes the long train ride to Lourdes. He hobbles along with the crowds to the sacred grotto and partakes of the holy waters. What is he expecting? Does he imagine he will look down and see bones and muscles and skin where there has been none? No. He has come because he is in agony mentally and physically and he can no longer love his wife, or enjoy his children, or smell the lilacs or wake up and get out of bed to face the day. He does not know how he can possibly go on so he drags his broken body to the Lady.

He is still hobbling when he returns home. Yet he claims that he has been healed. How can this be? Is he a naïve fool? My father would have said so.

But my father cannot imagine the healing of the soul. The pain in the man’s phantom limb has dissipated, the nightmares have eased, the wine tastes good again in his mouth. His wife looks beautiful to him and he wants the play with his grandchildren. So what if his leg is still gone? His life has been returned to him.

Every miracle will grow life within us, return life to us, but not always in the way we expect or imagine, particularly as modern people. We may not win the lottery (that of course is the prayer of those committed to an economy of money) but we may be able to pay our bills even so, enjoy our friends, find a great new couch at the yard sale, and feel the sun on our face and in our hearts.

The Lady at Lourdes appeared to a young peasant girl almost everyone—her teachers, her classmates, even her family—regarded as uninteresting and a little dull. She was the middle child in a poor family who didn’t do well in school and wasn’t thought to be pretty or funny or wise. She was off gathering sticks to make a fire at the local dump when the Lady appeared to her above the refuse, two gold roses at Her feet. The Lady showed a girl no one valued that she mattered in a place no one respected anymore…and life was renewed. The Lady shone on her and Bernadette blossomed.

Whenever we bring our prayers to those on the other side—call them madonnas or mothers, saints or ancestors—they want to renew life within us. Life changes shape, grows into new forms, effloresces and dies back, and then come back but the prayer of life is for life—wild, abundant, unexpected life. The green wick of life within us that sets our souls on fire and the green wick of life on this planet that will carry us forward.

When we hobble to the grotto with our petitions, we are not asking to have the Lady or the ancestors prove to us they are real—we are asking for a renewal of faith in the long story of our souls through deep time. That is the only miracle that generates more miracles, that is the permaculture of prayer. Prayer is not a vending machine into which we drop our coin and grab the miracle we have chosen. Prayer is rich loamy soil in which we plant our hearts and watch what grows from the seeds planted there lifetimes ago.

For much of his life my father was depressed—despite a healthy family, enough money, and a beautiful land to live on. Something was always missing for him right up until the end. He felt cast out from heaven and he didn’t believe in Heaven. He could not imagine the renewal of joy and life force within him, could not imagine what a miracle that might be, and could not ask for it.

Today I invite everyone to ask for the miracle of that green wick of life within them. Let us regreen the earth with our joy and our answered prayers. Let us align ourselves with the dandelions and the chicory that have the life force to break through the concrete in the city sidewalks, the ailanthus trees rising up towards heaven amid the apartment buildings, and the pigeon stepping into a spot of sun in the canyon of skyscrapers. Let us reach for life, ask for life, revel in life’s many miracles, each of which will renew the green life of this planet.

Ask someone you love today on the other side for a miracle—and then look around and look inside and see what happens. Watch what happens when you begin to surrender to the permaculture of prayer.

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This has been the free version of my newsletter…but there’s also a lot going on in my paid version, including a monthly meetup to discuss the dead and it’s only $10 a month and I’m finishing up a wild essay for tomorrow. You can find out more about my workshops here and pre-order my next book, Take Back the Magic, here.