Seeing Miracles

Little miracles are going on. But you have to pay attention. And choose to notice.

Meme found on Facebook

I say this even as “murder hornets” were added to the "you survived April; welcome to level May" of Jumani memes over the weekend. And hurricane season is predicted to be bigger than usual.

Nevertheless.

I came across a very good description of faith and choice recently. I finally finished Brandon Sanderson’s Hero of Ages.  I mentioned this book in a post in March, while I was in the middle of it, before I ended up waiting six more weeks to get it back and finish it. (Pay attention when electronic media from the library shows up on your devices, or you might run out of time—is the moral of that story.)

I want to highlight chapter 75, out of 82 chapters plus epilogue, in this third and final part of the original Mistborn trilogy. There’s a character named Sazed, who is a Terrisman, in this magical fantasy world. I’ll try not to include spoilers—other than this small one: Sazed figures out his religious questions.

One of the tropes, the rules, of fantasy literature is that you can’t have the God of the universe show up and manipulate things. Sanderson knows this well. But he manages to talk about religious concepts nevertheless, which is important, since fantasy literature is a way for us to look at humanity from a different perspective.

Sazed--fan art
from Mistborn Wiki

Sazed is a keeper from among the people of Terris. Keepers have the assignment of preserving all knowledge, particularly from before the world changed a thousand years earlier. They specialize in different areas of study, and Sazed’s specialty is religion. He has dutifully gathered and retained information on every single religion ever believed in his world, by every people—except his own, which knowledge has been lost to them.

In a previous book, he lost someone he loved, Tindwyl. And that loss caused a faith crisis for him. He realized that, while he had often shared with others the religious beliefs that he thought might help and comfort them, he didn’t actually believe those teachings himself. With his personal grief, he wants to be assured that there is an afterlife, that he will be able to see her again. That would help him have hope—and even a reason for hoping—to forestall the apparently imminent destruction of the world.

One of the things he has done is run through every single religion, to find one that doesn’t have fallacies or contradictions that prevent him from believing. He has done this systematically, getting down to the last few. And as he completes that research, he’s quite despairing. He finds nothing. But he wants to know: Is there a real God, watching over them? Is there life after death?

At this point of giving in to despair, a character name TenSoon shows up, a non-human. TenSoon needs Sazed to go to his people, the Kandra, and convince them to help the world. And—the Kandra are in a way immortal, and their First Generation were alive before the changes to the world—they hold the knowledge about Sazed’s religion. So Sazed makes the journey to that previously hidden place. He has recently arrived there, and has studied and learned all they have to share with him, as we get to chapter 75.[i]

Here’s what he finds:

The Terris religion, as one might have expected, focused heavily on knowledge and scholarship. The “worldbringers”—their word for “keepers,” were holy men and women who imparted knowledge but also wrote of their god, Terr. It was the ancient Terris word for “to preserve.” A central focus of the religion had been the histories of how Preservation, or Terr, and Ruin had interacted. And these included various prophecies about the Hero of Ages, who was seen as a successor to Preservation.

Aside from the prophecies, however, the worldbringers had taught temperance, faith, and understanding to their people. They had taught that it was better to build than to destroy, a principle at the core of their teachings. Of course, there had been rituals, rites, initiations, and traditions. There were also lesser religious leaders, required offerings, and codes of conduct.

It all seemed good, but hardly original. Even the focus on scholarship was something shared by several dozen other religions Sazed had studied. That, for some reason, depressed him. It was just another religion. What had he expected? Some astounding doctrine that would prove to him once and for all that there was a God?

He felt like a fool. Yet he also felt betrayed. This was what he had ridden across the empire, feeling elated and anticipatory to discover? This is what he’d expected to save them? These were just more words. Pleasant ones, like most in his portfolio, but hardly compelling. Was he supposed to believe just because it was the religion his people had followed?

There were no promises here that Tindwyl still lived. Why was it that people had followed this or any of the religions?

Sazed character concept found here

Instead of giving up at this point, though, he dives back into the research on the many religions. He goes through letters, journals, papers—everything. And this time, instead of looking at the doctrines, he looks at the people who believed. He expects to find evidence that the believers were fools, that they just hadn’t asked the deep questions about their beliefs. “Surely they would have seen the flaws and inconsistencies, if they’d just taken the time to be rational and discerning.” But that is not what he finds. “The people did not seem like fools to him.” He begins to see something important:

In the abstract, those religions were stale. However, as he read the words of the people—really read them—he began to see patterns.

Why did they believe? Because they saw miracles. Things one man took as chance, a man of faith took as a sign: a loved one recovering from a disease, a fortunate business deal, a chance meeting with a long-lost friend. It wasn’t the grand doctrines or the sweeping ideals that seemed to make believers out of men; it was the simple magic in the world around them.

It reminds him of Vin, another character’s, learning to trust the crew they had all belonged to—even after her childhood had taught her never to trust anyone. Trust was necessary in order to work together to accomplish their mutual purpose. Vin had to act on trust, and then the evidence of their trustworthiness became evident to her. For Sazed it was “Trusting that somebody was watching, that somebody would make it all right in the end, even though things looked terrible at the moment.” But how could he trust when he didn’t know whether he could trust? How could he believe when he didn’t believe?

To believe, it seemed, one had to want to believe. It was a conundrum, one Sazed had wrestled with. He wanted some one, some thing, to force him to have faith. He wanted to have to believe because of the proof shown to him. Yet the believers whose words now filled his mind would have said he already had proof. Had he not, in his moment of despair, received an answer? As he had been about to give up, TenSoon had spoken. Sazed had begged for a sign and received it.

Was it chance? Was it providence? In the end, apparently, it was up to him to decide.

This is interesting to me, as a believer. I’ve often been puzzled at nonbelievers who claim there’s no proof. But to me, what they’re ignoring is all the evidence of my personal experience. Because they don’t believe, they don’t see. Because I believe, I see. And I see more and more.

Sazed goes about putting the information away into storage, and is startled by some realizations.

He slowly returned the letters and journals to his metal minds, leaving his specific memory of them empty, yet retaining the feelings they had prompted in him. Which would he be? Believer or skeptic? At that moment, neither seemed a patently foolish path.

“I do want to believe,” he thought. “That’s why I’ve spent so much time searching. I can’t have it both ways. I simply have to decide.”

Which would it be? He sat for a few moments, thinking, feeling, and, most important, remembering.

“I sought help,” Sazed thought. “And something answered.”

Sazed smiled, and everything seemed a little bit brighter.

He realizes he has suddenly become a believer. After a lifetime of searching.

He would believe. Not because something had been proven to him beyond his ability to deny, but because he chose to.

There’s a line in one of our hymns, “God will force no man to heaven.”[ii] What Sazed had been looking for was to be forced—by the sheer weight of incontrovertible evidence—to believe. But what happens when a person has that much evidence and still refuses to act according to God’s known will? Even Satan knows God is real.

What God wants from us is to choose to believe. And with that, to choose God and all His Goodness. In order to make the choice, we need to act on faith, before we have total knowledge.

So, how does that apply to us in our trying times?

If we’re believers, we’re seeing an accumulation of miracles, instead of just an accumulation of hardships.

Here are a few I’ve seen.

·        My husband timed his broken ankle to coincide with the stay-at-home order, which actually made healing less inconvenient, and somewhat eased his usual desire to be out and about.

·        We had a lot of food storage on hand, without any panic buying needed, because our Church has been teaching us my whole life to have food storage for self-reliance.

·        The fresh food I’ve needed (and practically everything I can eat is fresh food) has mostly been available, with only some temporary missing pieces.

·        My husband already had a Zoom account for his business, which has been a great way to have little reunions with our kids. We like this so much, the plan is to keep it up every other Sunday indefinitely.

·        Most of my life our Church has emphasized home-centered, Church-supported gospel learning. But a year ago January our Church started a program that made that more understandable and harder to ignore. And we had a year to practice it. Then, this January, we cut our Sunday meetings from three hours to two—so the learning that would have been covered in weekly classes is expected to be done at home and just enhanced in the twice-a-month Sunday School. So when we were asked in mid-March to do home church during the pandemic, we were prepared and practiced at it already.

·        Because of these crazy times, people are turning to God. This has included a number of new convert baptisms locally (following all the rules to make those happen). And the Facebook group that started with the Worldwide Fast April 10, now called Worldwide Unified, is full of outpourings of little miracles, as well as calls for special prayers for many many reasons, followed by additional outpourings of love and support. Many people have talked about coming back to faith after years away.

·        I’ve had time for gardening—which I’d never really done much before, because Mr. Spherical Model always did that. I love seeing my little seeds grow.

·        I’ve had time for more music here at home, even though I miss playing with my usual group. We’re doing things online to stay connected and to keep playing some of the same music, separately together. And a year ago I learned how to use the software to write tablature, so I'm arranging a number of hymns and other pieces for the mountain dulcimer.

·         My usual fear of getting sick—because a regular cold can hit me pretty hard—is somewhat lessened, because everyone all around is being so careful. And Mr. Spherical Model isn’t going out to get any illnesses to bring home, so I’m actually feeling more safely healthy for the time being.

·        Doctors are making progress at finding treatments, with several promising drugs and procedures quickly making their way through trials. 

·        Researchers have concluded that young children do not spread the virus to adults. That’s pretty remarkable, if accurate. 

There are more, certainly. And plenty more I’m still praying for.

Maybe none of these looks like evidence to a nonbeliever. But at some point we will be able to look back, and I believe we will see the hand of the Lord more clearly in what is happening in His world, and under His control. At least those of us with eyes to see[iii] will see His hand.

---

[i] While all quotes are from the book Hero of Ages, I had an audiobook version. So I transcribed this portion. That means I may not have reproduced the punctuation and paragraph structure that Sanderson wrote in the book. But I believe I have been faithful in reproducing the words.

[ii] “Know This That Every Soul Is Free,” hymn 240, found here. 

[iii] Matthew 13:15-16. 

Look to Literature

With a global pandemic going on, if you’re spending more time at home than usual and wondering what to do, maybe it’s time to read a book or two, or ten.

We’re in the middle of this pandemic, so maybe there’s some literature to enlighten us. I’m avoiding The Hot Zone or I Am Legend for now. I’m less interested in the fear, looking more at the strategic and moral questions and how they’ve been handled.

cover image from here

Last week, I think it was the very day we were directed to avoid gatherings of ten or more people, I was in the middle of Brandon Sanderson’s The Hero of Ages, third in the Mistborn Saga. That series is made up of two trilogies, the first three from an earlier age, and the second three of a later age—early industrial age, with trains and guns, but still the semi-magical aspects of the earlier trilogy. I’ve read them all, mostly out of order. This is the last one for me, the third in the earlier trilogy.

One of the main characters in The Hero of Ages is a leader named Elend. He’s now the emperor, after the defeat of the Lord Ruler in the previous book—which ended up setting free an evil force that is wreaking havoc in their world.

There are a couple of significant oddities in their world: mist and ash. The dark mist comes out at night. People have been superstitious about it for centuries, worried it can harm them. But the ones with the special powers know the mist is safe, just a part of nature. Until now.

Now the mists are starting to kill people. Also, the mists are coming earlier, before dusk, and staying later, after dawn, encroaching on the day and shortening the time the sun is out for crops, so the food supply is threatened. It’s further threatened because of the falling ash, possibly from some distant volcano. This ash is very black, not a normal ashy gray, and the growing ashfall has to be shoveled off paths and crops each day, also threatening the food supply.

So, in this natural disaster, Elend is trying to gather forces to fight off the evil. I don’t know how all of that is going to go yet. But he’s moving an army toward a nearby city state that has some particular resources they will need. The plan is to negotiate if possible, but fight if necessary.

Meanwhile, the mist is attacking villages, and anyone out and about. It is like a plague. It doesn’t strike anyone indoors, even inside a tent such as the soldiers are housed in during their trek. So the soldiers can safely stay inside until the mist passes. But that is getting later and later in the day.

The mist seems to arbitrarily attack some and leave others. And among those attacked, some are killed that very day, while others remain ill and then recover—leaving some of their cohorts worried that they are cursed somehow. But once the mist has passed over someone, they’re impervious to any future mist attack.

Elend realizes that they can’t get into a battle while his troops are hiding in their tents until the mist passes. They could be attacked by an army of mist survivors. What he realizes they have to do is purposely expose themselves. All of them. While they are far enough out from the city to be safe from attack.

He knows he will lose men. He is calling on them all to risk their lives: follow his order and probably survive to become inoculated soldiers, but possibly die. These are healthy men, so he hopes that will be in their favor. But he thinks long and hard before giving the order.

By the way, an exact 16% die. To the man. Of those attacked with illness, they remain ill for exactly 16 days. Something weird is going on. But now they have data to work with.

OK, so that is one approach: mass exposure, acceptable casualty rate—with the survivors becoming an immune population.

I’m looking at the ways various countries are handling this Wuhan novel coronavirus known as COVID-19.

Elend’s way looks something like Italy or Iran. His 16% is a pretty high casualty rate—ours is unknown because exposure is unknown, but will probably turn out to be more like 1-3%. But we live in an age where wiping out even one or two of every group of a hundred we participate in looks pretty ugly. Also, Italy has an older population, which seems to be more susceptible to serious illness. And serious illnesses require hospital beds, ventilators, and other resources that aren’t usually required in such high numbers. Italy’s leaders are making the tough decisions about who gets those resources. And the world looks on horrified as they decide not to treat people over age 80, but just let them die. 

Korea has been possibly the most successful. To start with, they knew not to trust the Chinese government. With their first case, they caused “social distancing,” as we’re doing here. And they tested widely. Anyone who tested positive was put in absolute quarantine. Having testing resources was a huge bonus for them, which we are just ramping up to here.

Other countries have been trying other methods. Quarantine the elderly and immune-system compromised, while others can go about their lives almost as normal. Denmark is trying this; we’ll get data from them that can be used in future decision-making. If it works, it’s less financially devastating than semi-quarantining everyone—or totally quarantining everyone, as China has had to do. Great Britain was on the Danish path but found casualties too high and moved toward more general lockdown.

We’ve had a more general lockdown in the US, getting more and more strict as the virus spreads. The plan here is to lengthen the time frame for people to get the virus, so that the supply of beds and ventilators and other resources does not get overwhelmed. To “flatten the curve,” as they say, based on this graph:

image from here

People have been spreading a meme that says, “Hey, remember when everyone rushed to the store to buy toilet paper at the same time and it ran out before the supply could be restocked and everyone freaked out? Now imagine the same thing at your local hospital. But instead of TP that’s out, it’s beds and ventilators. That’s why everything is cancelled. That’s why you should stay home.”

Another book that came to mind during this crisis is Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith. It’s about a doctor/researcher. It has been too long since I last read it, but I remember a couple of things about Martin Arrowsmith, the main character. He is pretty flawed. He has some idealistic reasons for researching cures for plague outbreaks. But there is also a lot of excitement at the chance to take on a real life problem, to have personal purpose. Arrowsmith wants to find out who he is, and be more than he has been. And he needs to be better. His wife, Leora, and his mentor, Dr. Gottlieb, give him support in that quest. Gottlieb describes their world in religious terms:

To be a scientist—it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of very obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victim all different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious—he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith (p. 267).

Often Arrowsmith is restless and dissatisfied. Then comes the excitement of a real outbreak in the West Indies. Bacillus pestis among rats, spreading to people, thought at first to be just a flu. He has the opportunity to experiment. And the ethical dilemma of experimenting on people. But he goes. And he makes what he thinks is likely to be a cure. Tragedy strikes. And guilt. And resolve. Go ahead and read it.

The book, from a century ago, is way behind the science of today. But it’s probably still worth reading, because it’s more about the life inside this man’s mind than it is about science (although a scientist did help Lewis with the writing of it).

I watched a video a couple of weeks ago, on body language, looking at a CNN interview with Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the CDC. Mandy, the bombardsbodylanguage.com commentator/instructor, points out how his face lights up, and he smiles, talking about what we would normally consider bad news. But this man is a scientist, with responsibility over outbreaks such as this. His work has suddenly gotten very exciting. He’s not thinking about the mass casualties or economic disasters about to befall us; he’s thinking about what energizes him: the opportunity for new and exciting discovery. This might not seem like a normal human response, but it is normal for a type of person who does a specific type of work—and we need people who do that work. 

CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield
screenshot from here

There are actual people out there, doing research, working for a response to this virus as fast as they can. Just this morning Glenn Beck interviewed a man named Gregory Rigano, Stanford Advisor to SPARK, and Project Lead for Clinical Trials for COVID-19 prevention, who was reporting that two drugs—I think working together, but both are also being studied separately—anyway, these drugs have been shown to cure the disease 100% of the time in six days. He referred to an immunologist from France, so I think that’s where this combination has been tried. He’s was asking for healthcare professionals to join in the open-data clinical trial. 

He hoped that within a couple of months, the treatment could be widespread. He still calls for social distancing, so we don’t overwhelm the available resources. But these drugs may give us time for other remedies and possibly vaccines to be developed in a year or two—without the world economy having to shut down until then.

The drugs he mentioned are generics that have been around for several decades. One is hydroxychloroquine, which was developed shortly after WWII for treating malaria, and has also been used to treat rheumatoid arthritis. The other is azithromycin, the antibiotic often referred to as Zithromax, or in its package called a Z-pak. The FDA has already approved these drugs; they just have to approve them for this off-label use.

Later today President Trump held a press conference announcing the FDA’s allowing for hydroxychloroquine and a couple of other drugs (I didn’t catch all the names, but azithromycin wasn’t among them, so there are additional ones) to be used for the off-label purpose of treating COVID-19. This is a very hopeful development. 

The FDA Commissioner, speaking alongside the President, said that, when he was a cancer doctor and researcher, he knew how important it was to offer a patient hope. Not false hope, but real hope. He believes the announcement today, along with other efforts to combat this illness, offers real hope. I think he’s right. I’m much more hopeful today than I was even yesterday.

We live in interesting times. My Utah friends and family lived through an earthquake, and its aftershocks, yesterday morning. One meme started referring to all that’s been going on as “apocalypse bingo,” and the card is filling up.

Our literary friend Gandalf had this conversation with Frodo over such times:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”        —J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

image found here