Safe To Death

We watched a movie last night called The Maldonado Miracle. It's the story of a small border town in California, devastated by a failing local economy, being revitalized by a miracle that happens in the small Catholic church in town. A life-size crucifix appears to have blood streaming from it's eyes. The town becomes a religious destination and business starts booming again. Besides Peter Fonda being cast as the priest. . .the movie worked fairly well. There was one line in particular that seemed to sum things up for me. Towards the end of the movie, when it seemed as if the miracle had not been genuine after all (I won't tell you if it was or not), the Mexican lady who had originally discovered it is arguing with the priest who is getting ready to wash the blood off the crucifix. She says, "The difference between you and me Padre is that you need proof that there was a miracle, while I need proof that there wasn't." There is a world of difference in those two approaches to discovering truth.

I actually didn't think much about it until this morning when I was reading from The Prologue of Ochrid (a collection of the lives of saints and homilies) for June 19. I'll quote:

Saint Jude was one of the Twelve Apostles. He was the son of Joseph and Salome and the brother of James, the brother of the Lord. With Salome, the daughter of Angeja the son of Varahina, the brother of Zacharias, Joseph the carpenter had four sons: James, Hosea, Simon and Jude. This Jude is sometimes called: "Jude, the brother of James" because of his more famous brother (St. Luke 6:16 Acts 1:14). St. Jude begins his epistle in this manner: "Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ and the brother of James" (St. Jude 1:1). Even though he could be called the brother of the Lord as much as James, he did not do this out of humility and shame for, in the beginning, he did not believe Christ the Lord.

As I read this I realized how extraordinarily difficult it would have been to be a step-brother of Jesus and recognize Him as the Son of God. Jesus, being fully human, must have seemed so "ordinary" to members of His family that they simply could not believe it. But then again, perhaps that's not it at all. Perhaps we are all so crushed and disappointed by having dream after dream come to nothing in our lives, that we protect ourselves against further disappointment by "requiring proof" when something miraculous happens. We start living as skeptics rather than believers. In the face of death, which surrounds us in one form or another throughout our lives, we gradually start to believe in the primacy of death and lose hope in life. Perhaps that is the real source of our inability to believe in the miraculous. It's just safer not to.