Miracles

“Miracles appear in the strangest of places,” begins Yesterday’s Wine, my favorite song by Willie Nelson.

Strange places, indeed. Oh, I’ve had some miracles occur in places you’d expect: a Catholic church in Pennsylvania where a nun took me for worship on my fiftieth birthday; the sanctuary at my parish in Arlington, Virginia, where I first received communion as an adult; a non-denominational chapel, also in Pennsylvania,where I stood in the pulpit and delivered a sermon with stained glass images of Luther, Knox and Calvin looking on.

Then there are those other places:

• the subdivision near Cincinnati where I was walking a dog and decided the only chance I had for a secure financial future was to get a federal job (never mind I’d never held a government job and had been to DC twice in my life; less than six months later, it had all happened, based on a telephone interview)
• a meeting room the summer I turned seventeen where a moment of sportsmanship occurred, resulting in a scholarship without which I likely wouldn’t have gone to college
• a week of Wisconsin sunrises and talking and singing with a new friend who saw a scared, unconfident person through my self-important bluster

I’ve been to Fatima, and I’d like to go to Lourdes before I leave this earth. And yet, I can’t imagine they or any place else could compare to what I experienced in a dormitory room the evening of my forty-ninth birthday. It was the night amid tremendous internal turmoil that I summoned up the courage to ask someone I barely knew at the time to pray over me, a request I’d never made before to anyone. The following minutes remain one of the most profound spiritual events of my life.

The point is, it doesn’t take a big cathedral or a little chapel. Miracles are floating around there every minute of our lives, if we’re willing to be present and open.