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‘Do you believe in miracles?’ someone asked me last week. Viswashkumar Ramesh believes in miracles. He’s been talking about June 12, when a plane crashed in Ahmedabad killing 241 people, including his brother; but he walked away from the wreckage – the lone survivor.

Miracles went bang out of fashion in the eighteenth century. Scientists say ‘Some things can physically happen and some can’t. The laws of nature can’t be suspended.’ Theologians counter. They say, ‘Science studies things that happen repeatedly. Faith rests on events, most obviously the resurrection of Jesus, that happen once, uniquely.’ Science and faith don’t have to fight.

Meanwhile moral philosophers argue, ‘It’s all very well for one person to be saved, but what about all the others? Why weren’t they saved too?’ In truth, theology has never had much of an answer to the moral problem.

Today attention focuses more on the emotional complexity of being the only one to get out alive. Viswashkumar said, ‘I just sit in my room alone, not talking with my wife, my son.’ We recognise survivor guilt. We understand PTSD. The enormity of his trauma is hard to comprehend.

For me, the question of miracles starts in the wrong place. It takes our existence for granted. But if I pause for a moment, I begin to apprehend my life, breath, relationships; the wider creation, the beauty, texture, detail and wonder of every single second. Then I reflect on the very fact of my being here, my parents having met, the occasions I could have died, the mystery of metabolism and oxygen and blood vessels and air. All this is a constant, overwhelming, indescribable miracle.

And in the astonishing process of conception, how many elements could (and indeed more often than not do) go wrong? Every one of us is an extraordinary survivor against the odds. Each of us can sit back and ponder the chances of our becoming a fertilised egg that somehow got implanted in a womb.
Behind that, the very existence of the world, the universe, is a mind-expanding wonder. Whether you believe in a creator or an impersonal beginning, it’s an awesome thing to contemplate how unlikely any kind of existence really is. We spend all day trying to get our lives under control. In truth, the whole thing is way beyond our imagination.

Viswashkumar Ramesh is a miracle. But he’s discovered in a traumatic way something that is true of everyone. We’re all a miracle. Everything in existence is. It’s all gift.

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