Miracle Workers

I don't think that three robins make a spring--not in Chicago, where I live, anyway. So I can't call what I'm going to talk about a trend. But within a week I've encountered three women saints, each one a miracle-worker, in three separate works of popular culture: two movies and a novel. This has made me wonder what's going on. If I were a trend-sniffing, politically correct hack writing this column for what Jimmy Breslin calls "the New York Times Newspaper" instead of Beliefnet, I might be announcing a revolution.

The three women in question are Sarah Miles, the heroine of the debris that director Neil Jordan made out of Graham Greene's novel "The End of the Affair," Helen O'Reagan, the heroine of the film "The Third Miracle," and Rachel Lane, the heroine of John Grisham's novel "The Testament." All three work miracles, all three are dead by the end of the story, and all three seem to go on working miracles after their deaths--although Jordan lost his nerve, changed Greene's ending, and denied Sarah the sanctity Greene clearly intended for her. (I conclude that Jordan, a man of unquestioned talent, is an anti-clerical Irish agnostic who has the arrogance to think he's a better storyteller than Greene. He turns the secular rationalist in the novel who tries to talk Sarah out of her faith into a rigid priest who tries to talk her out of her adultery--which in Greene's version she has already given up!)

This gripe aside, all three stories are compelling. In two of them, "The End of the Affair," and "The Testament," the heroines bring back a dead man they love to life--and offer their own lives in sacrifice. In the other, "The Third Miracle," Helen O'Reagan, who is already dead. miraculously brings a priest back to his faith in his vocation. Playing that role is Ed Harris, who looks so much like a priest that he probably ought to be one. Nearly everyone in all three stories rejects the miracles. One exception is Sarah's lover, Bendrix, in "The End of the Affair," who (perhaps much like Greene himself) becomes angry at God for taking Sarah away from him.

I read the novel and saw the two films shortly before reading a Sunday Gospel that featured one of Jesus' more spectacular miracles: the changing of water into wine at Cana. As I read, I smiled, thinking about the significant numbers of clergy--and the many theologians--who are made uneasy by the prodigality of the miracles Jesus works. The Gospel stories abound with them. Jesus is in fact uniquely self-effacing among the storied wonder workers of his time, in that he warns people not to seek "signs" and miracles from him--yet he nonetheless performs quite a few of them.

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