Sense and Sensibility

Miracle on the Hudson — or Not

On Jan.15, at 3:25 in the afternoon, US Airways flight 1549  lifted out of LaGuardia with 155 passengers and crew. Seconds after liftoff, a collision with a flock of birds crippled the plane’s ascent. The pilot, seizing the controls from the co-pilot, instantaneously evaluated the peril and swiftly tracked a course along the Hudson River, into whose icy currents he directed the aircraft.  

We all know what happened next. The jet didn’t sink. The passengers, including an infant, were safe. The incident has grafted itself into our national mythology and granted the hero of the hour our most esteemed bequest: a spot on the 50-yard-line at our venerated national bloodbath: The Super bowl.

Almost immediately after the discovery that all 155 aboard the plane survived, the media had baptized the marvel: “The Miracle on the Hudson.” Suitable for framing.

This is the season for miracles in a country starved for them. Hope, the buzzword of the new administration and the beacon of a new generation, is virtuous and temporarily satisfying. But for sustenance, for girding our loins for the treacherous road ahead, we need a miracle. Just one.

Lent is about many things – sacrifice, empathy, repentance, surrender. But miracles are the tempo that builds the Lenten story. Christ cures the blind. He animates the lame. He opens the ears of the deaf and, perhaps best of all, he exorcises the demons that gnaw at us. In many ways miracles are the intercessors of the ambivalent. They upset the apple cart of faith, and are remarkably effective at gathering adherents. They offer what faith never can: Certitude in world drenched in doubt.

I cannot have been the only one in America troubled by the use of the term “Miracle on the Hudson.” Perhaps it is inevitable that the persnickety would wince at a term so freighted as “miracle.”

C.S. Lewis

Before you answer, a suggestion from Aristotle, particularly useful in my own profession: “Those who wish to succeed must ask the right preliminary questions.”What, then, was the miracle?

Perhaps one of the most familiar miracles in the Gospels is the multiplication of the fishes. We were all taught this story in Sunday school. Jesus is confronted by a vast throng, savaged by hunger. His disciples suggest that Jesus dismiss the crowds so they may return home to get something to eat. “No need,” Jesus says, and gathers five loaves of bread and a couple of fish, blesses and breaks the food, giving it to his disciples to distribute. Five thousand, Matthew tells us, “ate their fill.” And when the fragments were gathered up, they filled 12 baskets.

That, you see, is a definitive miracle in the way we were raised to appreciate them. From very little, Christ creates a banquet. Miraculous, right?

But for me, the miracle happens just before. If you read the 14^th chapter of Matthew, you will find the story of the death of John the Baptist. Herod has had John arrested because John had the temerity to tell Herod “It was not right” for him to live with the wife of his brother. This ticked Herod off, but not as much as it incensed his wife. So, on Herod’s birthday, his wife’s daughter, Salome, performed what we have come to  believe was the notorious dance of the seven veils. So taken was Herod by Salome’s erotic – err, exquisite – dance, that he tells the young woman she can have anything she wants. And what, prey tell, does little Salome want? Prompted by her mother, she wants John’s head on a platter. Herod waffles, but agrees, thus killing Jesus’ cousin and closest confidant, and not incidentally ushering in a cliché that plagues us still.

It is in the moments after Jesus learns of his cousin’s death that he is greeted by the hungry crowds. When Jesus heard this, Matthew tells us, “He withdrew by boat from there to a deserted place by himself.” This is one of many, many times in which Jesus absents himself from the mob, reminding us of the sustenance and urgency of solitude. The only man in the world who understands him, the one to whom he has submitted, the one, Luke tells us, who jumped in his mother’s womb at the arrival of Mary to his mother Elizabeth’s house – is dead. How many of us have endured the anguish of losing our most intimate friend?

And yet at this moment of vulnerability, with the wound still seething, the crowd confronts him—thirsty for his words, hungry for his solicitude, desperate for his grace. And Jesus? Who wants, more than anything, a moment to assuage his grief? What is Christ’s response. “His heart,” Matthew tells us, “Was moved with pity, and he cured their sick.”

If you are a working parent, this is a scenario too familiar to you. You have  been up to your eardrums in crises at work. You have missed deadlines. You have forgotten the Olive Oil at the Stop & Shop. Your car needs gas. You have just lost your closes friend in the world and you would like to tell that world to go straight to blazes. You want only to close your eyes and breathe in some stillness and indulge your reverie and mourn your friend.

But your husband has thrown out his back. And your daughter has a book report due – which is news to you. You have a PTA meeting and your dog has clearly ingested something non-organic.

And anybody would be entirely within their rights to say, as my mother often did, “Calgon, take me away.”

But Jesus. Doesn’t. Say This. His heart moves instantly to pity. His reflex is compassion. This, of course, is what makes him Christ and the rest of us believers the  haplessly devoted. You can look at Matthew’s story and tell me that the miracle is the multiplication of the fishes. But I look at that and I see that the miracle is reflexive compassion. For Christ, kindness is not a virtue; it’s an instinct. And our work as Christians is to make it instinctive for us, too.

I don’t think that God turned that U.S. Airways jet down the length of the Hudson River any more than I think he sent that flock of geese into those engines. I don’t think that a pilot who trains for decades for just this event is a miracle worker. But I do think that when that plane landed, and those passengers tended to one another, grabbing infants, and old men and hurling anxious women over their shoulder, that was miraculous. On the wing of that plane, as ferry boats pivoted on the water and raced to the needy, we saw people whose instinct was to help. We saw people, without regard to their welfare, wrench power out of places they never knew, keep their wits in the midst of fear and understand that survival is for everybody.

Does it take divine intervention to achieve such a miracle? I believe it does. I believe that the greatest miracle God achieves is the turn in our hearts, the expansion of our souls, the swelling of our compassion, the understanding that the way out of despair is too frequently as available to us as a neighbor’s need.

We are in the depths of a national crisis whose denouement is obscure, but whose victims will be legion. For many of us, the world will tatter in ways we can neither fathom nor evade. A thousand little cuts besiege the 300 million people of this country. When hope runs thin, they will look for miracles. And when they look for them, remember this: The miracle begins with you. You are the miracle, and have been since your birth. How tempting it will be to look for pyrotechnics when, we must remember, God spoke to Elijah in whisper.

Don’t look for the miracle. Be the miracle. The miracle is you.