Mother Teresa has been officially declared a saint by
the Catholic Church, and NPR had an interview the other morning with a
physician and historian about miracles.
In order to be canonized a saint, there must be evidence for two postmortem
miracles. Evidently, Mother Teresa
was judged to have accomplished that.
Lest you turn up your nose: The criteria for healing
miracles are stringent. It must be
established that the disease was real; that despite all efforts, the best medicine
failed to help; that the healing
was rapid, complete, and permanent (the healing must be shown to have held at
least twenty-five years). These are tough criteria, and for any miracles so
defined to exist at all would be a severe challenge to science.
NPR interviewed a physician-historian, Jacalyn Duffin, who
had been asked to explain a healing in a case of canonization. Dr. Duffin explained that she was an
atheist and her husband was Jewish, and so couldn’t be accused of any
bias. The healing she was asked to
comment on proved to be beyond her or science’s ability to explain. This encounter with the inexplicable prompted the historian
to go to the Vatican Archives and study the records of healing miracles from
1588 to 1999, altogether coming up with 1,400 cases. She gives an account of what she found in Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints and
Healing in the Modern Word.
For our purpose there are a few points to underscore. One is that the Church has always relied on the best medical
professionals of the time to make the calls on whether a case passes the
miracle criteria. Medical science
is steadily advancing, and therefore more critical. In spite of the increasing
sophistication, and the use of experts who are not believers, the ratio of unexplained
cases of reported healings remains the same. There is, nevertheless, a strong animus
against unexplained healings. In
her book, Radical Remission, Kelly
Turner notes that most physicians shy away from even discussing unexplained remissions
– and the word ‘miracle’ causes them some serious angst.
Dr. Duffin’s conclusion for NPR seems right on mark. The fact that a healing is unexplained
is not proof that God was the cause.
I would suggest, however, that the belief
in God – a super-placebo effect – might
be a big factor. In fact, there
are lots of mysteries without explanations. So what we have is not a miracle -- the result of divine
intervention -- but a mystery, an invitation to expand our mental horizons. And perhaps the mystery is in
ourselves.
One is, of course, free to believe it is a miracle, in the
strict sense; but there are difficulties.
To qualify as a miracle in the theological sense, we must assume that Mother Teresa survived death, was with God and responded to the
patient’s prayers from heaven.
That’s a lot to assume. How could anybody know? All we really know is that somebody prayed, said Mass, or performed some
other ritual act, and aimed it toward the desired healing outcome.
Mother Teresa got us started on this topic of miracles. Is the concept passé? Not if you choose to believe it. What then is the alternative? Instead of a genuine miracle, we must
settle for a mystery. Is it such a
loss? Instead of being awed into
submission, we embark on exploration for answers.
A final twist of irony. After Mother Teresa’s death, her
diaries were found. Bad news for
the pious, a fact that the combative atheist Christopher Hitchens gloried
in. The diaries revealed that for
the last 50 years of her life, her faith wavered and slackened most of the
time, while the rest of the time it was dead as a door-nail. This, in my view,
would make her a saint of ancient Stoicism, and place her in the company of
Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.
Whether as stoical mythology or magical psychokinesis, Teresa’s
canonization is a reminder of something unwise to ignore: our latent capacities
to resist and transform physical existence. We underestimate our powers to our detriment. As for the task
of unbinding our consciousness – the subject of this blog -- it’s another arrow
in our quiver.
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