Placidus, today’s saint, had a father who enrolled him when he was just 7 years old in the foremost Christian academy of the day (that day being the latter sixth century). Saint Benedict headed this school/monastery, and Benedict was heralded as the “Christian Aristotle”–Aristotle being the teacher and mentor of Alexander the Great.

Not long after Placidus came to Benedict’s school, he fell into the lake there. Benedict, in a distant building, divined that something life-threatening had happened to Placidus, and sent a man named Maurus to the lake with the directive o go and rescue the child. Taking Benedict’s blessing for his mission, Maurus rushed to the lake shore, walked out on top of the waters for a distance in excess of “a bow-shot from the land”–a distance of perhaps 75 yards–and grabbed little Placidus by the hair, pulled him out of the water, and took him safely back to shore.

So what happened next? Benedict and Maurus argued! They disagreed about the cause behind the water-walking! Benedict insisted that it was Maurus’s faithful obedience to go and save the boy; Maurus, in turn, contended that it was Benedict’s holy command and blessing that effected the miracle. Good grief! In the end, it was Placidus himself whose words decided the matter: the boy said that when he was being pulled up from the water by his hair, what he perceived was the holy clothing of Benedict above him…upon the body of Maurus. If nothing, Placidus was amply provided with the gift of diplomacy at such a tender age!

This still leaves the question of what sense to make of this miraculous salvation of Placidus’ life. Benedict did not see or hear the boy’s accident; Maurus was not a proven water-walker; and Placidus certainly managed to find himself way out in the lake by the time help arrived. Butler offers this less-than-satisfying explanation of the significance of what went down (or actually didn’t go down) at the lake that day:

This miraculous corporal preservation of Placidus may be regarded as an emblem of the wonderful invisible preservation of his soul by divine grace from the spiritual shipwreck of sin.

Huh? So a young child’s being saved from drowning is emblematic of his being saved from sin? Well, if the child felt that God saved his life through the quick actions of others, and, in response, wished to dedicate his life to God (as demonstrated to him by these others), then I can understand Butler’s spin on this. But if God needs children’s lives to be endangered to teach some message about avoiding sin, then that’s simply beyond any pale I can affirm.

This is the darned thing about miracles of any sort–that too often, a happy ending is used either to justify the initial tragedy (or near-tragedy) or even to make it seem necessary. Take the most foundational miracle claim of Christianity–the resurrection of a dead-and-buried Jesus of Nazareth. How many theologies have taken this miracle and then filled in the backstory by asserting the necessity of the crucifixion as part of God’s larger plan! It goes like this: God needed the sacrifice of a sinless human to forgive humans. Only a truly wretched Being would require the public humiliation and painful execution of someone who had done nothing wrong before forgiving other human beings their sinfulness. After all, if as God you possess the power to forgive anyhow, why not just make the unilateral declaration of Jubilee, of the forgiveness of ALL human sin? No executions, no crucifixions, no martyrs, no death needed!

Over time, I have found that I have had to create a firewall between all the amazing ways that God (by whatever name or mechanism) stirs up new forms of life and hope out of even the most unimaginable tragedies and the tragedies themselves. Frankly, I do believe in “God” as the power of new-life-arising-even-from-death–God as the irresistible force that cannot and will not be stymied by cruelty and oppression and death.

But I reject utterly God as the puppeteer for whom deaths and tragedies and human suffering are but so much fodder to demonstrate “his” power, “his” grace, “his” majesty, or even that “he has the whole world in his hands.” The idea that God chooses crucifixion as the way to get through to human beings speaks either to a rather feckless deity who simply cannot persuade “his” own creatures of anything, or of a god so unimaginably cruel as to be unworthy of anyone’s adoration (terror, certainly, but that’s about it).

I attest that good and life-giving things can and do come from a cancer diagnosis, the loss of one’s best friend in the world, the drowning of a child, or the attempted rape of a 15-year-old girl some thirty ears ago–most especially that there can always be reasons not to give up. Sometimes that alone can be the greatest miracle of all.