Making Sense of Miracle… Paisley, Part 11

I come now to the brass tacks of fact and fiction regarding Paisley’s miracle, which will be the final post in this series. The ranging anecdotes I have recounted thus far may have left the reader with somewhat mixed signals. Had God answered prayer, or was He absent at the darkest hour? Was Paisley saved by a miracle, or by Pasteurian-Darwinian science? Was the experience a glory to God, or a reason to question His existence?

The force of such opposing arrows teaches a parable all its own, underscoring the deficiency of personal experience for navigating the waters surrounding miracles. Within the compass of a single individual (myself), one could distill nearly any moral to the story.

Nevertheless, real answers do exist. We need not wander in the mist between anecdotes. Malleable personal experience must be displaced by the stone of hard fact. To find it requires that we lift our gaze to a broader view. The cure for flat earth viewpoints hovers at high altitude.

So friends, this final post will present facts to make sense of it all. My question to you is whether you are interested in fact and truth, or whether you wish to preserve a favorite but somewhat fictional anecdote. We sadly cannot have both.

Facts about Our Miracle

Recall that when things were at their darkest, I had asked the doctor what Paisley’s odds were. It was a question that went unanswered, and it was eventually forgotten. I never really sought out my own answers to that question after it was over. The parents of miracle babies do not care.

It turns out that Paisley had a 3 out of 4 chance of surviving her illness. She had slightly better than a coin toss chance of coming out entirely unscathed (which she did). Here is what the odds look like for babies that contract bacterial meningitis:

Rustle up a coin. Flip it. Heads, your child is normal. Tails, and your child will either suffer permanent disability or horrific death. No parent ever wishes for a coin toss to decide whether their child turns out normal. Paisley came very close indeed. We were terrified, and we should have been. Her odds may have been 50-50, but the stakes on those odds were horrific.

Still, does a 50-50 chance constitute a miracle?

Before we answer, we must view the other side of the balance scale – the side quite unpopular among miracle recipients. Here it is:

Bacterial meningitis is contracted by infants at a rate of 3 children per 10,000 live births. For comparison, this is about half as often as SIDS deaths in the US. That means that Paisley was exceptionally rare – only three one-hundredths of one percent of children share her misfortune. Find your coin again. The odds of contraction are not a single bad-luck coin toss coming up tails.

Toss – tails.

Toss – tails

Toss – tails.

Streak of bad luck, we might say. We are not really even close yet.

Toss – tails.

Toss – tails.

Toss – tails.

We are still not close. This is but the halfway point. You must do this six more times, accumulating twelve consecutive tails-up tosses, without a single head among them. That is the extraordinary bad luck Paisley had.

Dispense with the flat, and see the earth from altitude:

Like it or not, we have facts to face. Paisley’s recovery was not a defiance of the odds; she had 3-in-4 chance of living and a 1-in-2 chance of being entirely normal. A coin toss. The razor-thin odds were not surrounding her cure, but her affliction. If we wish to say that something about her situation was next to impossible – and therefore must have involved the intervention of a divine hand – there is only one candidate on the table. Her illness was the “miracle.” Paisley had some very extraordinary bad luck, followed by just a touch of good. Hers is a black swan tale, not a miracle.

What if a natural explanation is not sufficient? What if we insist that God must have been involved?

If we credit God with guiding the final coin toss, we must confess that he guided them all. The full portrait thereby discloses a rather sinister character, going to extraordinary lengths to hand pick children and dangle them over a flame, all to appear heroic on the last toss. Recoiling at this indictment, we believers reliably leap to explain why our goal posts for virtue require sudden relocation. Equivocation follows. Good means something different with God.

Nevertheless, head-on car wrecks and other such accidents present similar lessons. The accidents nearly always pose far slimmer odds of happening than surviving once at the hospital. Where tragedy is concerned, we need to face down our own deficiencies. Our mental gauges for measuring the miraculous have a pervading glitch that hampers us – we count very selectively when surveying what took place. Miracle stories always shine light on only certain facts while neglecting others. The larger, balanced picture generally yields an inverted moral to the story. Line up your quarters – not starting when you became aware of the problem, but when God did.

Tragedy & Prayer

We must take a high-altitude view of prayer as well. Lifting my own eyes from their myopic and self-absorbed fixity, I looked around to find out what else had been going on in the world during Paisley’s crisis.

As I consoled my tearful wife, during that hour or so that we debated whether to make the phone call and then head to the hospital, around 900 souls on our little planet expired from starvation. Most of these were children. During Paisley’s spinal tap alone, about 45 more people succumbed. Horrific and lingering, most of these deaths occurred in the face of prayer. They showed no discrimination based on the individual’s faith. Unnumbered mothering arms were emptied of little ones, no less precious than my daughter.

But closer to home perhaps – during Paisley’s hospital stay, two dozen Americans died of meningitis. If you feel your eyes begin to glaze with indifference, I reverently submit the story of Caden Beggan, who suffered meningitis unto the bitterest of ends. Try starting at the bottom of that account and then read upward; see how far you make it. This may scalpel past any numbness regarding suffering. After reading, ask yourself – what was wrong with the Beggan family’s prayers?

Of course, by the time we left the hospital, one and a half thousand Americans had died in car accidents, rending a thousand families forever and for nothing.

Perhaps worst of all, after we returned home with Paisley from the hospital, in the interval preceding her baptism, a 45-foot tsunami swept the coast of Japan, blotting out the lives of 16,000 people and producing the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Among them were children, parents, the elderly, etc. How many do you think perished, lungs filling with the churning brine, while trying to reach the loved ones torn from their arms?

We need to get past ourselves. The true shape of things must be seen from high altitude. Counting all the prayers and all the disasters, prayer power seems strictly confined to statistical averages. Unless we venture the arrogance that our relationship with God is different. Which we often do.

Meningitis & Prayer

We can say a bit more about prayer and its relationship to meningitis, which bears on the question quite heavily.

No meningitis victim, from the smallest babies to the most enfeebled elderly, has ever – not once – had an amputated limb restored by prayer. The transcendent power of prayer seems curiously confined to the material limitations of medical science. Paisley was no exception.

Further, meningitis survival rates across the world have no dependence upon the faith of the victims, resting entirely upon the level of medical science and resources of the culture. The infection and mortality rates are all markedly higher in the underdeveloped world.

We haven’t the slightest evidence that prayer affects meningitis outcomes. Science does.

Community Crime

Getting beyond a selfish and narcissistic viewpoint isn’t easy. I have had to confront my past public claims regarding answered prayer, which I now see as a sort of crime against those whose coin came up tails. I did wrong in ignoring those brothers and sisters.

But friends, we also did wrong together.

Calling Paisley a miracle actually began with others, rather than with us. We were in no mood to disagree, and soon everyone was calling her a miracle. It spread so effortlessly through our community, like parched earth drinking in the rain. We had, after all, seen two cases of infant death within recent memory.

Paisley’s prayer-bathed recovery allowed the ancestral art of selective counting to again resurrect itself. We elevated her deliverance, never minding the two prior losses, and affirmed to ourselves that prayer had somehow mattered. We count the wins, you see, but the losses are chalked to quite another ledger. As Sam Harris so bluntly put it, this is how one plays tennis without the net.

Our faith communities teach and enforce the practice of seeing the cross in everything. We get there by forgetting 12 out of 13 coin tosses. We get there by circuitous explanations of failed prayer. We get there by ignoring the broader world and focusing on what matters to us. In short, we spin doctor the ledger of events, connecting very selective dots in order to see what we want:

We lie for Jesus. We carpenter our miracle tales from hand chosen lumber, in order to affirm that our prayers really do something. Honesty demands an end to such spin doctoring. After all, the star and crescent are quite unmistakably in that picture too. If you have eyes to see…

Regrets

It has been said that workaholism is the only socially acceptable addiction. Perhaps so. Likewise, miracle stories may be the only socially acceptable type of fibbing.

It saddens me that I mythologized Paisley’s song as I did. The great strokes of a classic hero tale can all be found within it: the revealed crisis, the helpless victim, the hatching villain, the heroic savior – a mingling of things that actually happened alongside characters and forces that were sadly never really in evidence. In truth, necromantic powers were never seen. The windows never rattled. No voice was ever heard. We saw no phantoms nor angels. In truth, her recovery did not change direction in response to prayer, and most critical decisions were made before our many friends began the upward cry. Faith so easily looks past all of the facts, hurrying to construct a spiritual interpretation of what happened.

The book of Job, as we love to forget, expends a good deal of ink to dissuade such nonsense, assuring us that our guesses about that spirit realm are probably dead wrong. Job also reminds us that Paisley’s crisis may simply have been a divine ego-wager with Satan. Nobody likes crafting songs out of that explanation.

Thus, while my wife and I will always treasure her song and regard it as capturing the hour, it will never escape the shadow of myth and embellishment, fossilizing the intermingled real and imagined. A cherished regret.

The Neglected True Story

Scores of you, my friends, helped us at the darkest hour. Hundreds of people on four continents prayed for Paisley. For this, I am still and ever grateful. The light in Paisley’s eyes remains even now a reminder to me.

Yet another army also stood behind Paisley in that February darkness. Indeed, there actually had been unseen forces in play – miraculous forces, of a kind, though not of the sort we usually allow to ascend the stage of recognition alone. When credit is given to them, it rarely comes apart from the embellishment of myth.

You see, a great silent body of determined and un-thanked scholars had labored for centuries, dedicating their lives as physicians and scientists, to the difficult puzzles of illness. They slowly unraveled the causes of human affliction, unlocking the world of bacteria and viruses that no holy text ever disclosed during the passing millennia. These white coats remain largely anonymous, yet they battled and kept scrupulous records of what they learned. Their bricks of knowledge, one by one, raised the great tower of collective understanding. This army of unknowns faithfully passed the baton from one generation to the next, doing their unsung duty for humanity, even against the oppositions of faith when necessary. Sporadic flashes of brilliance emerged from time to time, as discoveries and insights came from the Great Names that we know. They finally pried open once-unsolvable puzzle boxes – yet only by wielding the long lever constructed by those that came before.

Then came Paisley.

Her doctors were able to invoke this long collected power. They harnessed the sunlight of four hundred years, the investment of uncounted lifetimes. They channeled and lensed that mighty beam, bending it to save a single fledgling life.

Paisley’s song could have told this tale. There was no need to imagine the dynamics of angels and demons, which were never, as it happens, actually felt or seen. There actually had been unseen forces at work, a great invisible army of the dead, which beat back the darkness. As was their custom, they again did their duty, un-thanked.

So I find that there are actually more to whom we owe thanks, not fewer. We rob them, when we crowd the the stage with our myths, taking the credit of our beliefs and of our prayers, against all evidence.

In Conclusion

Who makes miracles happen? We do. This bit of reality becomes clearer as we become honest with ourselves, and as we stop stretch-covering the fault lines of our conceptions with mystery. The fact is that we make miracles happen in our telling – in the fractional, selective, neglectful and myopic telling that we choose for our stories. We take the great events of our lives as an opportunity for affirming what we wish were true, i.e., what we believe. So we confect our evidences as we will, singly and together. Yet I think we can do better, and I for one intend to try.

I maintain that we have fact available to us, but will we refuse it for a prettier fiction? Truth before comfort, and may comfort follow. To do less is to dishonor the critical hour; to besmirch the deepest points of human resonance that we will ever feel; to paint our dearest moments with the brush of mythology; to craft for tomorrow those certain cherished regrets.

For me at least, such transgressions flutter away in a tramp of giggling footsteps that daily orbits round my knees, and a parable hope carries me forward to the day when she can surpass me, and inscribe the straighter line.

Thanks for reading along on this lengthy series. I hope that I have squarely answered the questions raised, and I hope that this gives food for further thought.

No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.

~ Joseph Conrad, Author’s Note to The Shadow-Line

~

Related Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonatal_meningitis

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/sids-rate-has-declined-but-2300-us-babies-still-die-annually/2013/08/05/56dffca0-f0b6-11e2-9008-61e94a7ea20d_story.html

http://www.meningitis.org/disease-info/types-causes/pneumococcal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starvation

http://www.poverty.com/

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