The odds of my birth.
That single sperm cell, out of the initial millions of genetically diverse cells, is the one and the only that makes it into the egg.
And that this conceptional unlikelihood – the odds already so rare and outrageously far-fetched that even a gambler in despair would shun them – has been repeated in every generation of my lineage for thousands and thousands of years, each new generation multiplying the unlikelihood.
And then the impossibly complex myriad of circumstances, strokes of luck, synchronicities, close calls – unbroken from the beginning of time – that witnesses my father meeting my mother, my grandfathers meeting my grandmothers, great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, generations and generations of arrangements, accidents, illicit trysts, seductions, violations, – back and back and back through time in a stupefyingly magnificent and improbable sequential river…
The odds of my birth seems so outrageously absurdly unlikely as to border on the miraculous.
But there’s nothing miraculous there.
There’s nothing in it that is unnatural, or beyond the scope of possibility.
It is truly a marvel… but it’s not a miracle.
I’ve never seen a miracle.
I’ve seen, and participated in, things and events that seem astonishingly unlikely but, nonetheless, possible.
But a miracle? No… no miracles.
Miracles are for the weak and the meek.
Unable to bear the cross of chaos they’ll line up to get a fix of ‘deus ex machina’, robbing the truly awe-inspiring courage and improbability of marvels and replacing them with the symmetrically sculpted supernatural action figure of miracles.
According to the story, Satan tempted Jesus with miracles but he refused.
But the authors of the story wrote them in nonetheless, burying the courageous bloody and enmired flesh of Jesus under the sleek, shiny and squeaky clean miracle of Christ, perpetuating a most awe-inspiring lie, an opiate for the pain of existential angst, for the cross of uncertainty, that generations and empires have been hooked on ever since.