Celebrating miracles

This evening at sunset began the eight-day celebration of Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights and the Feast of Dedication.  The 2013 celebration marks the unusual coincidence of the first day of Hanukkah and the American Thanksgiving holiday.  Very unusual.  If the rather complicated calculations are accurate, it will be 75,000 years before this coincidence occurs again.  Some say it will never occur again. It will surely never happen in our lifetimes.

Hanukkah commemorates a time after war when a small amount of oil--enough for one day--burned for eight.  A real miracle.  I've written about everyday miracles that we often miss. (Little Miracles, 11/4/2013.)  But this is a "big deal" miracle.  Every tradition has its stories of miracles.  Most of us grew up hearing both secular and religious stories of miracles or almost-unbelievable happenings.  They become just that--stories.  Often they are discounted or dismissed instead of being treated as lessons in how the world can work.

In The Game Called Life Lizzie keeps saying things are "incredible", a word that means not believable.  Her invisible guide Helen says that in the spiritual world they are believable; Lizzie, however, is just learning to understand how the spiritual world works.  In that realm all things are possible, and really the spiritual realm is all there is. 

In each and everyone of our lives we can think of people who were miraculously healed.  Back in the 1950s when cancer treatments were very primitive, my father's cousin was sent to cancer surgery.  As they often said in those days, "They opened her up, and when they saw how advanced it was, they just sewed her right up again.  They sent her home to die, something that they predicted would happen in 4-6 weeks."  She live another 30 years without further treatment.

I met a woman who had gone into the hospital for surgery for the removal of a tumor.  She'd been to have an MRI two or three days earlier, which the surgeon would use to make sure he removed all of it during the operation.  When he opened her up, the tumor was gone.  Not a sign of it.  In just a day or two the significant mass had totally disappeared.  The surgeon was totally perplexed.

There are other kinds of miracles too.  The rains that come in time to save the parched crops of a drought.  The woman who musters strength to lift a car from her child.  The man who missed the plane that crashed believes that the cop that stopped him, causing him to miss the plane, was a miracle.

On this day on which some people will celebrate Hanukkah, others will mark Thanksgiving, and some will commemorate both, perhaps we should take a moment to really celebrate miracles--and treat them as such.  Remembrances of miracles bolster our faith and give us strength and determination when we are tested. And, they leave us keenly aware of the possibility that exists around us in every moment.