(2 of 9)
It didn't. Soon the eye began to droop and the pupil became fixed. The baby's grandfather, Isaac Manly, a Harvard- trained surgeon, was worried about the child's symptoms but didn't want to frighten her parents. He gently suggested a trip to the ophthalmologist, which led to the pediatrician, then the neurologist. The first time the parents got a hint of what might be wrong was when they took Elizabeth in for tests and glimpsed the diagnosis on the hospital admissions form: "brain tumor."
The quest for an understanding of miracles is by no means confined to Catholic pilgrims or Protestant Fundamentalists or New Age stargazers. Author Dan Wakefield, a lapsed Presbyterian turned Unitarian, sometime TV scriptwriter and now itinerant theological investigator, has just finished a book, Expect a Miracle (to be published by HarperSanFrancisco next month). He was amazed by what he learned. "We all read these silly things, the man who saw the Virgin on the fender of his Dodge Dart,'' he says. "What I found, which is more interesting, is people you'd think of as very conservative."
He recalls a woman in Atlanta whose teenage daughter was hit by a car while Rollerblading. Doctors told the mother there was no hope; the best prognosis they could offer was that her daughter would be able to feed herself someday. "The family were Episcopalians and engaged very seriously in prayer, as did their church and the Sunday school," he says. "Two weeks later the girl woke up, and she is now back in school. These are not kooks. They only spoke to me because their minister asked them to. The stories I have are not all religious, and they are from all different religions. It is very vast, and serious. People like to dismiss it as the fringe, but there is a real, mainstream thing."
Five churchgoers sit around a table in the rectory of St. George's Episcopal Church in Hawthorne, California. They all hold different views about whether the stories of Christ's miracles are true; they disagree about how much they matter. "Whether those actions actually occurred is somewhat irrelevant to me," observes Alan Roulston, a mechanical engineer. "It's the spirit of the message that is more important."
But as they get to talking, they discover that they all have one thing in common: every one of them believes they have experienced a miracle at some time in their lives and were forever changed by it. Roulston was electrocuted on July 29, 1985. "I took 600 amps of 575 volts--it takes 0.15 amps to kill you," he recalls. "I spent a long time in a burn unit. But I survived, the way sometimes people survive being hit by lightning. So now I understand about people who would like a miracle in their life to 'show me that God exists.' "