Subtle Grace

In Praise of Simple Blessings

Reader, my name is Matt, and I . . . I’m a recovering mirac-o-holic. I relish stories of God’s miraculous intervention in matters of health, faith, love, opportunity, and more. I especially love these stories when they are my own. Like many of us, I have a few. And like virtually all of us, I would like more. But therein lies the problem. It’s not a problem with the miracles, it’s with the wanting. The expectation, the waiting. The worrying, the disappointment. For some of us, the disillusionment.

Inverting the famous lines from Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, perhaps the fault lies not in ourselves but in our stars—in our culture—if we are spiritual underlings. As a backdrop, let me share a story that forms a parallel case. Years ago, in the shady chill of a November morning, I listened to my dad speak at an outdoor Veteran’s Day ceremony at BYU. His subject, unsurprisingly, was patriotism. But he barbed his remarks by contrasting patriotism with a culture of heroism that denigrates it. These days, he said, we fetishize heroes: everyone wants to be a hero, and we inflate everyday figures—parents, public servants, sports figures—into heroes. Nothing against heroes, he insisted. He told a story of one he’d known in Vietnam, a soldier who jumped onto a grenade and spared the lives of others in his patrol at the expense of his own. But when we obsess over heroism, he remarked, we overlook patriotism. In distracting ourselves with grandiose narratives, we neglect the honor bound up in simple, sometimes difficult acts of duty and fail to heed the humbler rhythms of our responsibility as citizens.

This contrast often comes to mind when I perceive traces of a culture of miracles in our religious communities. The operative word here is culture, derived from cultivation, bearing implications for how we learn to see, and shape, our relationship with the divine. I’m not referring to those remarkable experiences when God seems to intervene in people’s lives in unimaginable and instantly transformative ways. Rather, I’m thinking of exaggerated cases that reduce the miraculous to the commonplace: overheated youth leaders equating simple testimony with a rending of the heavens, or young missionaries seeking a constant infusion of the “incredible” to justify and partly redeem the weighty toll of their daily grind. I’m thinking too of the kind of experience I had several years ago during a ward conference meeting when a stake officer gasped “Miracle!”—startling the room—in response to my bishop’s story of how neighborly befriending by our ward Relief Society had brought a longtime, less-active member back to church.

Faith that precedes a miracle is one thing. The social longing that craves Instagrammable memes of God’s favor is something else. We can’t help it: we’re creatures of an Age of Spectacle. We love it when our religious experience feels as massive as a Marvel film. And so we develop addictions to tales of the miraculous much as we do to heroism.

In defense of miracles, why wouldn’t we seek such experiences? Why shouldn’t we? Moroni declares that “God has not ceased to be a God of miracles,” and that if miracles disappear from our lives, it is only because we “dwindle in unbelief” (Mormon 9:15, 20). In an April 2022 talk in general conference, President Russell M. Nelson went one step further, encouraging Church members to “seek and expect miracles.”

I embrace that counsel; I love it. The challenge, for me, comes in applying it. When something miraculous has graced my life, it blows my mind and changes how I see the world and myself. But for that very reason, it exceeds all “seek[ing]” and “expect[ing].” So the thought of expecting miracles—of purporting to understand in advance not only that, but even how they (might) come to be—would cause me to wonder whether I’d witnessed a miracle at all. Might it have been some sleight of mind? Might I have projected it into existence? I think here of the story of a favorite twentieth-century poet R. S. Thomas, a deep seeker more than a finder of God, who wrote about how his father had gone to a mass, seeking remedy for a physical disability. He experienced a miracle at the meeting and was completely healed. At least until a couple of weeks later, when the disability returned. He later doubted he’d truly been healed at all. That’s not the kind of experience for which President Nelson is advocating. And it’s not the experience of those who have witnessed true miracles. But it can be the experience of those who “need” them (or who need them “needily”).

Struck by this tension between expecting miracles and the surprise that accompanies them, I decided to make miracles an object of my study of the Book of Mormon. What I discovered opened my mind. Yes, we find many miracles there as we conventionally imagine them, with the Book of Mormon itself helping inscribe these conventions in Latter-day Saint thought: heavenly visions (in the book’s first chapter), angelic visitations (as early as its third chapter), confounding coincidences (Nephi’s confrontation with Laban in the book’s fourth chapter), deliverances from danger, life-changing revelations, mass conversions, instantaneous healings, superhuman power, divine guidance, and so much more. Miracles are present even when they might elude our view, undergirding the most pedestrian understanding of the plan of salvation: because God saw that his children “should know concerning the things . . . he had appointed unto” them, “he sent angels to converse with them,” taught them “to call on his name,” and “made known unto them the plan of redemption” (Alma 12:28–30).

But there are also other species of miracle I had missed in previous readings. Some are slow to cohere, perceptible only over decades or generations, as when Mormon tells us that the Lamanites who were converted “through the preaching of Ammon and his brethren . . . never did fall away” (Alma 23:6). Other miracles are so wide as to escape conscious experience, as when the Lord subtly, almost imperceptibly, “did pour out his Spirit on all the face of the land . . . to prepare [people’s] hearts to receive the word” (Alma 16:16). Then there are the incremental accumulations of grace that reveal the chrysalis effects of Christian discipleship, as when Mormon asserts the happiness of “those who died in the faith of Christ” in their old age (Alma 46:41). Irreducible to the “wow” effect of instantaneous recognition, these most impactful miracles were probably never experienced as miracles at all.

This brings me to an important point, still in keeping with President Nelson’s admonition to seek miracles while also recalling my father’s distinction between heroism and patriotism. Has our passion for spectacle caused us to undervalue miracles we cannot immediately discern, like the act of God that is the simple blessing? I’m not talking the grand ones (e.g., the promise of eternal life or a windfall of unanticipated prosperity), but humbler fare, miracles in miniature. While miracles take myriad forms, blessings are exponentially more diverse and abundant. 

Take two small examples. Many would label a medically confounding or rapid recovery from serious illness a miracle. But what about the baseline of good health that gives us everyday life and makes illness seem like such a blight in the first place? That’s a blessing—or, better said, a practically uncountable succession of them, day after month after year. Or again, we sometimes hear stories about miraculous opportunities (for jobs or relationships) that come to people after they had nearly lost hope. But what about all the conditions enabling the slow development of capacities, the specialized skills and interpersonal qualities (e.g., for friendship), that convert a momentary windfall into a new reality, making the opportunity possible and rendering it sustainable? Those would be blessings, a whole diverse array of them.

Look, I can be as turned off as the next person by trite counsel to count our blessings. But their sheer plenitude is startling, and I find their affective difference from miracles (at least of the spectacular variety) provocative. Consider the effects of genuine miracles: Jesus raised Lazarus and doubters believed; David Whitmer beheld the golden plates and thus defended the Book of Mormon even after falling out with Joseph Smith. Miracles shock us into awareness and therefore almost compel our agency. By witnessing God’s hand, we feel ourselves snapped into obedience.

Blessings also reveal an attentive God, though they bear a lighter touch. They enter consciousness not as exclamation points but as question marks: Did I notice? How did the blessing arrive? What does it say about its Giver? They thus awaken different impulses of response. For instance, I come home, see my daughter, think, “She’s so amazing, what a blessing” . . .  and feel prompted to ask her whether I can take her to dinner. Or I find myself graced with a new idea for a writing project, consider other deadlines . . . and find a way to carve out a little extra time for the new essay. Or I feel moved by someone’s vulnerability in a talk at church, feel blessed by their insights . . . and am moved to text the speaker to express my gratitude. Other blessings, even subtler, pass more fleetingly across consciousness: sharp afternoon sunlight that diversifies the green of dancing leaves, the sweetness of a ripe mango, the casual smile of a longtime friend. Such graces make little outward demand on us, but they gently call something forth in us. In connecting us more deeply to our surroundings, they reveal or at least suggest a world designed for our partnership with God and others.

In this way, blessings elicit facets of our divine nature. One might even say that blessings resonate in a special way with Latter-day Saint theology. I think of it like this: If miracles carry an aura of necessity, then blessings evoke God’s pleasure. They are the grace of small accents on God’s works of art and on his children. Miracles reveal a God at work, a God willing us to do something specific, whereas blessings feel more like God at play, creating lovely things simply because God is a creative and loving being—as we are and might more fully become. Hence, while miracles evoke a God profoundly different from us, blessings reveal a God with whom we share a common nature, one we might more fully cultivate. To that extent, blessings always come to us from our future.

I’m grateful for miracles. I hope to have many more stories of them to share as the years pass. But I’m increasingly grateful for the smallest ones, blessings—for the ways they awaken me spiritually by drawing me gently into fuller attention. For the ways they reveal God not in occasional lightning flashes of operatic brilliance but rather in the chiaroscuro and matted pink of slow dawn. Blessings, small and simple things, deepen my love for a God whose boundless creativity can be so quiet, so delicate—so exquisitely beautiful.

Matthew Wickman is Professor of English at Brigham Young University. He teaches and writes on Christian spirituality, particularly the relationship between literature and spiritual experience. His most recent book is Life to the Whole Being: The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor.

Art by Colby Sanford.

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