Hi, I’m Wayne Jones, and welcome to re:Christian, a critical and satirical reconsideration of Christianity, the Bible, and God. This is episode 7: “Prayers and Miracles.”
I watched two movies over the past week or so that just happened to be about Christianity. I didn’t choose them for that reason—it’s never content that determines whether I will give a movie a try, but always whether it seems that it might be well acted and well made. These were both just excellent. One is Argentinian from 2001 and called La Ciénaga (or The Swamp) and the other is Romanian from 2012 and called Beyond the Hills. It’s probably unlikely that a lot of people have seen these, or perhaps even want to, but just in case: over the next three minutes or so I’ll be talking about details and spoilers in both of them, so you might want to fast-forward if you plan on watching them. La Ciénaga is about the interactions between the lazily rich (notably a husband and wife who are both alcoholics) and their friends, their extended family, and their servants. I found the whole thing mesmerizing but others might think that, as they say, “nothing happens.” For me, the acting was pure in the sense that these never seemed like actors. It felt like an invisible documentarian was allowed to just walk around everywhere. And the details were precise, and—well, I could go on for an hour about it, but it’s two particular incidents that I wanted to pick out.
There’s an ongoing mention and a couple of scenes throughout the movie about the supposed miraculous appearance of the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. Someone talks about it excitedly on TV but the camera always misses her, because all we see is the side of a building. In the final scene of the movie, in a busy house where there’s lots going on all the time and often a lot of people running all over the place, the little boy (perhaps seven or eight years old) climbs a ladder, climbs to the top, and plays on it for a few seconds before he falls backward onto the outdoor stone patio. The movie presents this all very subtly: there’s no stupid orchestral music when he falls; there’s no hyper-dramatic scene where his mother finds him. Just a single faraway shot of a small crumpled body on the ground, and then the voice of a woman in the background saying she’d been to town for the appearance of the Virgin, but she hadn’t seen a thing. And then the movie ends.
The other movie is set in a secluded convent run by a priest but where all the work is done by about a dozen nuns. One of the nuns is visited by a friend she’s known since they both grew up in an orphanage. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour movie so I’ll get to the end: the friend dies because of an intervention ordered by the man to get the devil out of her. The police come. Several nuns are taken for interrogation. The female doctor is livid at what the nuns and priest have done. But while they’re waiting in the vehicle, it’s raining, and when a large truck passes them, it splashes mud across the windshield. It just sits there for a couple of seconds until the driver turns on the wipers to clean it off, and then the movie ends and goes to black.
So, why am I going on about these two movies? I also don’t watch movies for messages either, but the endings of both of these have something in common. In broad terms, it’s the contrast between the silly and misguided devotion to supernatural things like Virgin Mothers and Gods and religion in general—between that and the harsh reality of life, where absolutely devastating things happen, and there doesn’t seem to be any ethereal benevolence or ability or desire to make them stop. The trite line is that prayers are supposed to be answered, that is, God will take time from his busy schedule of either, one, letting people do awful things to each other, or, two, doing a few awful things to people himself, or, and mostly, three, doinging sweet fuck all except preside in heaven and wait for people to worship him, just as many of his humans get their little hit of dopamine when they are liked or friended or whatever’d on social media—so, to return to my point, people pray in the belief that God will take time from this schedule and actually answer those prayers.
It has to be admitted that he is fitful about it. Even during my brief period as a believer in my teens, I know there were things I prayed for that I was not granted for some reason. I’m not singling myself out as special. In fact, prayers not being answered is likely the norm. I saw it parodied recently in a cartoon my brother sent me, where a reverend is calling 911 to ask that they send help because his church is on fire. The 911 operator responds: “All the fire trucks are out helping taxpayers. Have you tried praying?”
The other downside of praying is that it wastes your time, when you could be taking life-affirming steps to address whatever issue it is you are praying about, or doing something practical like getting counselling or like calling on the reserves of strength and resilience you have inside yourself in order to improve yourself. I’m not saying that you are all alone in this. If you have a supportive partner, or if you have solid friends and family members, they can help, too. And in fact they will likely want to help you, while God of course is busy working on his nails or planning the next tsunami.
Miracles are odd phenomena. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2022) defines a miracle as:
a fact or event accessible to the senses (opus sensibile) produced by the special intervention of God for a religious end, transcending the normal order of things (the law of nature) … it has been argued that on a genuinely theistic view miracles are not only possible but even probable, for if God is held to be the supreme first cause responsible for, but not subject to, the laws of nature, it would be likely that he should, from time to time, act directly without the intervention of secondary causes.
You can see from this definition how Christianity uses a neat little trick to be able to say with a straight face that the laws of nature, which include things such as gravity, can in fact be “transcended” because God came before nature and so it makes perfect sense that he should be able to have his way with it. It’s as if I could say to my friend a kilometre away that even though my car is in the shop and I won’t take public transit or walk or run or otherwise be transported, I’ll still see her in about five minutes. How? she asks, not illogically. Well, I don’t think I mentioned that I am able to fly, I tell her. My point is that if you posit one ridiculous thing then that can cascade down and enable a whole series of approximately equally other ridiculous things.
Miracles can complete the loop and become a scourge that priests and pastors and televangelists use to dupe people into believing in God. Your grandfather was dying. The minister prayed over him and touched him on the forehead. Now your grandfather is alive and thriving. It’s a miracle! However, there are such things as coincidences, or as events that were going to happen anyway without the supposed intervention of a minister. An old man can be feeling unwell, and then feel better, without the laws of nature having to be broken.
To sum it all up in a few words … The laws of nature are not like the laws of parking: you can’t break them and then everyone goes on with their day. By definition, the laws of nature can’t be broken. And as for prayer, it makes me sad to some extent that Christians are encouraged to do this for such a variety of reasons. There is no God, so again by definition, what you call praying when you are on your knees beside your bed is just you wishing for something to happen instead of trying to do something about it.
Amen.
And that’s all for this episode. Thanks for listening. Check the show notes for a full transcript and for how to contact me. And please join me again on Monday.