so...let's suppose THIS happened. let's say this happened today, at some nightclub in a big city anywhere in the world. I feel like it would scarcely make any difference where.
a strange adult-looking person walks into the nightclub and then, after some dancing, suddenly explodes into two children who then laugh and frolic in circles. and then presumably they flee back into the night.
how do you think people would actually respond to such an event? I don't think anyone can be entirely certain, but I'll tell you my hunch anyway: it wouldn't leave any lasting impression. I think most people would find some way or another to rationalize it—it was some kind of weird promotional prank, everyone was intoxicated, there was a trick of the light...even if someone had somehow been lucky enough to be pointing a camera in the right direction at the right time the resulting shot would probably convince nobody, or it simply would be an uninformative blur.
Stevonnie busting apart in front of a live audience would simply get forgotten, in other words—safely kicked into the dustiest corner of memory. just one more scrap of weirdness in a chaotic world. a miracle happened in plain sight, and nobody quite let themselves notice.
suddenly I find myself wondering about all the Christians who claim that their lives are full of miracles; in a sort of bilious devil's-advocate way I've felt that there was something fake about this, that the concept of "miracle" was being diluted and cheapened. but now I feel like I've been way off base. I've been stale and conservative about miracles.
if only one person feels like they've hallucinated St. Florian in a splat of ice cream on a hot day, or something of that sort, and the person felt that it was a genuinely saving moment—maybe they were about to walk straight into the barbecue pit or something like that but then they fumbled their ice cream—then...that's a miracle, right? and it wouldn't do any good to photograph the ice cream later and point out that it only vaguely resembles a human face. the one person who saw St. Florian in an ice-cream splat was the only person who ever needed to see it. St. Florian wasn't trying to show off the glory of God to a crowd, he was trying to save one person's life! it wouldn't matter if nobody else could see the message.
anyway. I feel bad about missing something relatively straightforward, out of snobbery. this is a problem that I've had with being a kind of incidental Christian, a tourist who passed through; it's insidiously easy to feel a bit superior to the people who've sunk in deeper, even if they had no choice whatever in the matter.
~Chara
