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Pills and Miracles

Babies are miracles. We live in times that pretend at being jaded and struggling, but if you truly struggled, desperate for survival, you would understand the inexplicable beauty of new life in a world that is often hostile to our intentions. Plus, they're tiny cute people, they make silly gibberish noises because they can't speak yet, it's extraordinarilty adorable, I mean, what's not to like?

I'm second generation in the American culture that has had broad access to pills you could regularly take to prevent such miracles. Like any medical treatment, there are undoubtedly valuable applications, but there is something quite stunning in the phrasing "this pill prevents miracles". If you have read the Bible, you know most miracles are also terrible burdens, and it's not hard to imagine walking away -- Jonah did. But still, a stunning thing, that control over life is within our reach, and not just the control over death that has been with us since the first dark heart of humanity.

There is a vernacular, inspired by the 1999 movie The Matrix, that uses pills as a shorthand for worldviews. Red Pill, Black Pill, White Pill. Appropriately, they are referred to by color, an admission that all we know of these strange new worldviews is how they might appear, and not what they might do to us.

If pills can give us control over miracles, perhaps they might explain them? Perhaps they might make us closer to God or Gods, if we can manufacture miracles ourselves? This is the promise of modern ideology, and yet, I suspect it of being hollow.

In such an age, wonders no longer hint that we cannot stand idly by while Events Are Noted beyond human scale. No, wonders are more and more a reflection of will. As we get more wealth, more options, we learn more and more about who we are and what we want. People believe they can touch the face of God, but look only into a more and more pristinely reflective mirror.

That is, unless you look at others. For in you and them is the image of God -- that is not mistaken. But more than any particular worldview, you might instead have an aesthetic. If you see in others that same majesty, you might treat even the least among us as an honored friend. Perhaps the pill you purchase is for another, a literal pill, an expression that their life is precious to you. For many in the poorest reaches of the world still perish for lack of a medicine already invented, yet not in their grasp.

For the wonder was never the miracle, and all miracles have the same shape -- an extraordinary act of caring, one heart reaching out for another.

An act of God is not mere luck, but evidence you are observed, seen, important on scales far beyond the ordinary. And you were given a heart, to observe others with yourself -- if you'd like. Instead of having an entire worldview, perhaps view just a single heart out in the world?