The Holy Water Flowers

One
Sunday morning in the middle of last January, I was busily preparing my church
for the coming liturgy as part of my sub-deacon duties. My friend Mark greeted
me, pointed to flowers in vases on each side of the altar, and asked, “Can you
tell the difference between the two bouquets?”

The
flowers to which Mark referred were identical inexpensive bouquets from Safeway
brought by an elderly parishioner before the December 23 liturgy. I had
personally cut the stems, put them in water, placed them in their current
locations, and given them no further thought.

I
did now. After four weeks, one bouquet was, not surprisingly, withered. But its
twin remained almost as fresh as when I first put it in the vase.

“What’s
that all about?” I asked as we stood there marveling.

“On
Theophany, I put my old holy water in the vase with the fresh flowers,” Mark
replied, giving me an amazed look. (Theophany commemorates Christ’s baptism. In
Orthodox churches, a service is held in which the coming year’s holy water is
blessed and then distributed to the faithful.)

As
far as I knew, neither bouquet had been touched. Both bouquets had absorbed
most of the tap water in their respective vases, but the stem bottoms remained
immersed. The only apparent difference was Mark’s holy water.

When
I brought the contrasting flowers to the attention of the parish during the announcements,
all were just as amazed.

That
was Sunday, January 20, 2013. The “holy water flowers” were still fresh when I
took the photo accompanying this article on February 3. They finally withered
after an astonishing eight weeks.

Cheap,
grocery store-bought flowers don’t last that long no matter how well they are
cared for. Had we witnessed a tiny miracle?

Most
readers would probably say no, noting the ease with which the contrast between
the bouquets could be (but wasn’t) faked. So why bring it up here? That
experience made me think about the handcuffs the secular mindset places on the
objective search for knowledge.

According
to the meme, religious believers reject science if it conflicts with their
faith. But science also has its prejudices. Steven Pinker and his wife Rebecca
Goldstein recounted in a
Salon interview their refusal to explore a potentially supernatural
experience:

Q: I know neither of you believes in paranormal
experiences like telepathy or clairvoyant dreams or contact with the dead. But
hypothetically, suppose even one of these experiences were proven beyond a
doubt to be real. Would the materialist position on the mind-brain question
collapse in a single stroke?

PINKER: Yeah.

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah,
if there was no other explanation. We’d need to have such clear evidence. I
have to tell you, I’ve had some uncanny experiences. Once, in fact, I had a
very strange experience where I seemed to be getting information from a dead
person. I racked my brain trying to figure out how this could be happening. I
did come up with an explanation for how I could reason this away
. But it was a very powerful experience.

“How I could
reason this away.” Rather than being open to
all possibilities—with potentially uncomfortable ideological implications—Goldstein
fled from grappling with a mystical experience that might undermine her
worldview. How is that fundamentally different from religionists rejecting a
scientific hypothesis out of hand because it would materially challenge their faith?

Countless people
over the centuries have had inexplicable experiences. Terminal cancers have
disappeared, leaving doctors
grasping for a medical
explanation. Pilgrims at Lourdes have had documented
healings. Atheists and
indifferent agnostics have been driven to their knees by sudden, unbidden
religious awakenings. Flowers in a vase containing holy water lasted eight
weeks.

Are Pinker and
Goldstein right to sniff, or have so-called rationalists hobbled their pursuit
of truth by a philosophy of science that absolutely precludes even the
possibility of “supernatural” causation?

Perhaps there is
a middle ground between blind faith and staunch skepticism when faced with
scientifically inexplicable occurrences. In Orthodoxy, we acknowledge the power
and beneficence of science, while also accepting the reality of “mystery” in
which God chooses to momentarily overturn the natural order in ways that cannot
be rationally explained. In such cases, we simply accept the divine gift with
gratitude and move on—as my parish did with the holy water flowers.

Perhaps science
can similarly acknowledge humbly that there are phenomena that will never be
proved or explained, but at least some of which are nonetheless real—possibly
even evidence of a mysterious breach in the natural order.

I don’t believe
in and am not arguing for a “God of the gaps.” But my nearly sixty-five years
of life have convinced me, to paraphrase Shakespeare, that there are more
things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of secularism.

Wesley J. Smith
is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism.
He also consults with the Patients Rights Council and the Center for Bioethics
and Culture
.

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