Believe? What Does "Believe" Really Mean, Anyway?

Her expression turned suspicious. "You believe in angels?"
"I do, Marcella. Don't you?"
She squinted, trying to see the invisible. "What's Rome saying these days?"
"About angels?"
She nodded.
"Same as always."
She shrugged. "Then I suppose I do." She scooped out a saucepanful of birdseed. "But it's one thing to believe in angels and another thing to actually see one. That's what separates Christians from loonies."

That conversation takes place in the excellent novel North of Hope by Jon Hassler. It reveals a lot about the character, but I think it reveals just as much about a lot of us. It's easy to believe in things like angels and miracles in the abstract, but have you ever heard a story of angelic intervention or a miraculous occurrence that you believed? I'm not talking about the ones in the Bible or that we read in histories of saints who have been dead for hundreds of years. I'm talking about stories related by people who were there, passed down through families--do you believe that angels appear to people you know (or might know), that miracles can happen on your block?

My aunt had scarlet fever as a young child, in the 1940s. Medicine, of course, was much more limited in those days, and the doctor had come and gone and said there was nothing to be done for her. My grandfather was a Chicago cop, working security at the airport, when a Cardinal happened to arrive on a flight. He broke away from his entourage, walked straight up to my grandfather, and said, "You have someone sick at home." My grandfather told him about my aunt, and the Cardinal gave him a medallion and told him to take it home and put it on her. He did. She recovered. And she carried that medallion every day of her life until she lost it to a mugger in her forties.

The funny thing is, it's the most religious people I know who don't believe that story--or rather, who believe the factual telling of it but are quite certain that her recovery was a coincidence. And maybe it was. Doctors have certainly been known to be wrong. There wasn't any flash of lightning or instantaneous healing or anything clear and dramatic to point to. Except, of course, that the Cardinal approached my grandfather, having no rational way of knowing the situation.

I strongly suspect that at one time, nearly every Catholic family had stories like that. When my mother was a child, there was a statue in her local parish that bled on Good Friday. Far beyond there being little DOUBT in any of the parishioners' minds, there was little intrigue, either. My mother, having grown up and attended mass in that parish, doesn't recall ever having seen it. When I point out that people travel across the country to see tortillas in the shape of the Blessed Virgin and such and inquire as to why she mightn't have thought it worth making the trip across the neighborhood to check this out, she's at a loss to provide the context to understand it. Everyone knew about it...and everyone took it in stride.

It seems our perspective has changed dramatically, but it's changed in two very different directions. Some of us are so desperate for a sign of the supernatural, for some "direct contact", for something tangible, that we'll make a pilgrimage to see a grilled cheese sandwich. And others are so jaded that we'll consider any possible alternative explanation for something that looks like a miracle. But what ever happened to those who quietly believed that angels and miracles were a part of life, a part they were grateful for but that didn't belong on the 10:00 news?

What about you? Do you believe in angels? And if you said yes, do you believe there's one in the room with you right now?