This Is an Age of Miracles
And our griping is ingratitude
WE’RE in a bad mood, we people of the West, no matter our ideological or partisan predilections. We all agree on this much: Our politics are broken. The economy isn’t working right. The healthcare system isn’t working right. The media stink. The planet is overheating. We are addicted to our phones. Millions are addicted to opioids. Everything is run for the benefit of the already privileged.
All day and night, week in and week out, the message we preach to ourselves is simple: Things are bad. Try to argue the point and the wrath of the easily outraged will rain down upon you.
So pour out thy wrath on me, if you must, when I say we live in a glorious age and we are guilty of the sin of ingratitude for thinking otherwise.
In St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells two of his disciples to bring the good news of miracles to the world: “The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up.”
Two thousand years later, we cannot raise the dead. But the miracles therein described are almost everyday events for us.
In our lifetimes, leprosy has been all but eradicated from the earth due to the development of a drug called rifampicin, which cured 12 million people worldwide in the 1980s and brought to a halt the natural spread of this once most-dreaded human condition.
Revolutionary treatments using stem cells are on the verge of ending macular and retinal degeneration, one of the key causes of blindness.
Extraordinary improvements in orthopedic medicine and surgery over the past few decades have effectively made it possible for “the lame” to walk again.
And out of the great sorrow and horror of battlefield injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan have come sophisticated new robotic prosthetics that have provided functional artificial limbs to thousands.
The most astounding miracle of our time, and the one that would have seemed the most like magic or divine intercession in earlier centuries, is the technology that has literally allowed the deaf to hear.
You have probably seen one of these clips on YouTube. A person who has received the device known as a cochlear implant sits in front of the camera.
Then a switch is flicked and, just like that, sound enters the consciousness of someone who has lived in silence for years or for an entire lifetime. The ineffable expression of wonder is invariably followed by joy and tears and still more joy.
The latest of these clips, which doesn’t involve a full-on implant but a revolutionary hearing aid that can fit the tiniest of creatures, can be found by googling “seven week old baby hears for the first time.” Little Lachlan fusses and whines as the uncomfortable object is stuck in his right ear and then, all of a sudden, he calms down and is silent. A light slowly comes into Lachlan’s eyes as his lips unfurl into a grin, over the course of 10 unimaginably wonderful seconds.
It is as though Lachlan himself, this teeny tiny slip of a person who has spent all of 49 days on this earth, recognizes that something miraculous has been visited upon him.
We are seeing wonders untold unfolding around us — and we take them for granted. I am in no way arguing against working to fix our political system, improve our economy or help bring about the betterment of our fellow citizens. This is what public policy is about.
But the spiritual funk that has enveloped us is due in part to the inability to feel or express gratitude to the providence that has made it possible for us to live in an age of miracles and wonders.