The Age of Miracles is in our Midst
The headline above is a revision of a little mantra — Gratitude is the hinge on which a sober life swings — often shared by an old sober booze-hound friend of mine many years ago.
Bernie was a remarkable little man. A survivor of trench warfare in foreign lands, he then faced the biggest battle of his life as he descended into full-blown alcoholism. Eventually, bereft of everything and everyone except a mother who never stopped praying for him, Bernie, a fully broken man, found sobriety and never took another drink.
By the time I stumbled upon him, he had been on his sober journey longer than I had been alive. He had two defining features. Bernie had the code of kindness down pat, and the gift of humility tattooed on his heart. But if you asked him about the key to achieving such a beautifully transformed life, his answer was simple: “An attitude of gratitude.”
I never forgot Bernie’s mantra, even long after he had departed this life to go wherever indeed sober booze-hounds go? But it was almost a decade after I first met him before I eventually put gratitude up-front-and-center in my daily spiritual practice.
Today my mystic code requires that I take time out with the living God every few hours and humbly contemplate the gifts that the ever-active Spirit of love and life has sent my way in the hours just past. It is said that: A grateful heart is a magnet for miracles. The key to miracles is realising that they keep coming in multiple little ways throughout every single day. Albert Einstein said:
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
I have seen the miracle of completely broken lives beautifully transformed, and I have been the recipient of root-and-branch change in my own. I do not believe in miracles; I am one. But it is the divine gift of an ongoing attitude of gratitude for the daily little wonders of life that is the biggest miracle of all.
Once an attitude of gratitude got grooved into my everyday life, comrades, I began to see that there are gifts aplenty, all around, throughout each day. The age of miracles is still with us. And the greatest miracle of all is that an attitude of gratitude awakens our mystic awareness to the extraordinary in the seemingly mundane and ordinary.
In the end, the sacred is without and deep within, and for the mystic heart that dwells in the miraculous moment, fully present — boundless and beautiful — in every little simple thing.
Miracles are in our midst, comrades. The practice of gratitude is the hinge on which the blessed, beautiful mystic life swings. The miraculous is in the now.
— Cormac Stagg, author of The Quest for a Humble Heart