Miracles in the Public Record

Tuff and Sully Broke the Rules and So Can We

Last week I wrote about my embarrassing belief in miracles. To talk of miracles can seem so fluffy. It doesn’t seem relevant in a day and age with “real” problems, when so many of us are fearful and hopeless about the dark future into which the real world feels like it’s careening.

But when I speak of a miracle, I mean an intervention in exactly such a world. It’s the overturning of the reality that – like ours today – seems to be an inevitable, unstoppable train. The train jumps to a different track, even when the rules of physics (or politics, power, psychology, or the limits of human benevolence) say it’s impossible. How does this track jumping happen? Usually — deliciously — it happens through people, when we’re able to tap into a higher consciousness, see a fuller train track map, and break those rules. Any one of us, and all of us collectively, have that potential. So today, I want to share a couple of examples in hopes that they will be inspiring and supportive to you. These are not my own stories, but rather they are miracles in the public record.

It was an ordinary morning August 20, 2013 for Antoinette Tuff, a single mother who worked as a bookkeeper at a school in Decatur, Georgia. She got up and spent some time reading the Bible and praying. Then she made breakfast for her son and went to work. She had been through hard times in her life. And her husband of 33 years had recently left her. She was devastated. She could never have guessed that that day was going to change her life. That day Antoinette Tuff’s trajectory intersected with that of a would-be shooter who came to the school with an AK47. And that day, Antoinette Tuff made history.

It was also an ordinary day on January 15, 2009 for a flock of Canada geese commuting south for the winter, and for the pilot Chesley Sullenberger, known as “Sully.” Sully boarded a U.S. Airlines flight at LaGuardia airport and entered the cockpit, preparing to fly to Charlotte and then Seattle as he had done thousands of times. He says, “It was literally like 10,000 other days. It was routine, until it very suddenly, shockingly became the emergency of a lifetime.” That day, Sully’s life intersected with that of the geese, and that day Sully too made history.

Some people believe that God is like a watchmaker. The watchmaker just sets the universe up, winds it up, and lets it run. From that moment on, everything just operates according to preestablished mechanisms. You might also call this God the Rulemaker. The Rulemaker designs an infinitely large field of dominoes, standing a half inch apart, in unfathomably complex patterns and then gives the first one a push. All of life is just the inevitable falling of dominos, one after the other, including us humans.

No offense, but God the Rulemaker is a boring God. And it’s not just me who thinks that. Everybody thinks that. Nobody cares about a God who just sets everything up and then leaves. Nobody prays to that God, nobody sings hymns to that God – that God wouldn’t be listening anyway. In fact, that God doesn’t even exist in any meaningful way because the Rulemaker is just another way of saying “the laws of nature.” The rules all got set up at some point, somehow, and from then on it just ran – atoms and molecules colliding, a bookkeeper and a gunman colliding, geese and airplanes colliding. It’s just rules playing out in an empty universe.

When the 20-year-old gunman, named Michael Hill, walked into Antoinette Tuff’s school on that ordinary morning, it seemed that the Rules were in place. Tuff was sitting at the front desk, spelling a colleague who was on break. Hill walked in with his AK47 and said to her, “we’re all going to die today.” He was clearly planning to kill himself and a lot of other people. He told her that he was mentally ill and off his meds. Tuff knew, as we all know, how this movie ends. We see it playing out tragically, over and over, in this gun-flooded country. The tragic outcome is part of the Rules.

When that flock of Canada geese hit the engines of the U.S. Airlines plane, tragedy was also inevitable according to the Rulemaker’s Rules. The geese destroyed both engines of the plane (at the same time as the engines killed the geese). It was suddenly deathly silent in the cockpit. Without power, they were not really in an airplane at all anymore – they were in an object hurdling through the sky in a downward arc. And because it was soon after takeoff they were still at a low altitude – over New York City. This was a horrific loss of life for the geese and an unfolding human catastrophe.

We know that God the Rulemaker is alive and well. The one who made the rule, for example, that our consumer economy will lead to ecological collapse, which will lead to mass (including human) extinction. Or the rule that if you keep getting hurt in your life, you’ll grow a thicker and thicker shell until you can’t open your heart at all. Or the rule that peace can only be won through military force – we’ve tried everything else already. Or the rule that if a 20-year-old white guy comes into a school with an AK47 or a flock of geese destroy both engines of a plane, it will be unsurvivable. We know all about that God.

But that – that -- is not our God. To the extent that we have a God (and I know we don’t all use that word) it’s not God the Rulemaker. It’s God the Rulebreaker. The Rulebreaker is the power to break the domino chain. It’s the power we tap when we stop our extractive plunder of the earth and begin a process of healing. It’s the love we tap when we can open our broken heart one more time. It’s the wisdom we tap when we find new paths to peace when it feels impossible.

On August 20, 2013, Antoinette Tuff channeled the Rulebreaker. Even though she says now that she was screaming in fear inside, what came out of her mouth was calm, motherly, and compassionate words. She talked gently with her would-be murderer. She formed a connection with him and told him about her personal struggles. She said she would talk to the police for him and got on the phone with 911, relaying messages back and forth. Eventually she convinced him to put down his gun and give himself up. She offered to walk out of the school with him as he turned himself in. She worked the plan out with the 911 dispatcher and reassured Hill that the police would not shoot him.

“It’s going to be all right, sweetie,” she said to him, “I just want you to know I love you, though, OK? And I’m proud of you. That’s a good thing that you’re just giving up, and don’t worry about it. We all go through something in life. …You going to be OK. I thought the same thing, you know, I tried to commit suicide last year after my husband left me. But look at me now …everything is OK.” They walked out together, he was arrested, and everyone survived. She saved Hill’s life and her own, and the lives of countless children in the school. A former FBI hostage negotiator called her performance “amazing.” The whole conversation was recorded on the 911 call, and you can listen to it online. It’s breathtaking.

For Sully, the Rulebreaker also manifested in his extraordinary presence of mind and his ability to bring his own experience to a crisis. He knew they wouldn’t make it to a local airport. He made the radical decision to land in the Hudson River. Water landings rarely turn out well and Sully knew it. And this January day, it was below freezing. If people ended up in the water, they wouldn’t last long. But with a calm, focused, intelligent determination, he landed the plane in the water, and everyone survived. The cockpit recording is available online. It too is breathtaking.

Through Tuff and through Sully, something happened. Some shift in the universe, some glitch in the matrix, the train jumped the track, and the domino chain was broken. They defied destiny. Call it God or not, there is a force in the universe that makes our transformations possible. That force is flowing around us and within us. It’s like a tumultuous river racing, ever changing, and it’s right here next to us – so close – even flowing through us. Maybe the river is that mysterious, bubbling, chaotic soup of the universe as it was before the rules were written onto it. That deep river doesn’t know the rules. And every once in a while, we humans are able to scoop our water bottles into the deep river and drink.

Now some might get fussy about the theology here and say, “Well it’s still just following the rules –Tuff’s life experiences and Sully’s extensive training made them each uniquely qualified to handle a difficult, but obviously not impossible situation. Sully himself might see it this way, although he is a religious, churchgoing Methodist. He explained his miracle like this: "One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I've been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education and training. And on January 15, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal."

Antoinette Tuff, on the other hand, directly attributed her miracle to God. She said when she listened to the 911 call later, “I recognized my voice, but I didn’t remember the words I said. Because they weren’t my words. It was God speaking through me, reaching someone desperate and broken, finding a spark of light in the darkness, with the most powerful weapons of all–compassion and love.”

Call it experience, call it God, call it the genius of the human spirit – call it whatever works for you. I don’t pretend to know what it is. I also don’t know why this divine genius breaks through in some situations but not others. And I don’t know why the innocent geese had to, once again, pay the price for the human hubris of flight. This sacrifice of non-human creatures to our appetites is a recurring pattern that was not broken here.

But I do know that if there is something worth worshipping, something worth celebrating, something worthy of our faith, if there is something that we all should be striving day and night to embody it is something like the energy of the Rulebreaker. In the Hebrew liturgy, there is a morning blessing of gratitude for the “Matir Asurim” – the One who allows that which is forbidden. It is one of my favorite names for God. If we were to pray to the Matir Asurim, our prayer could go something like this:

God of the sacred shattering of everything we think we know, manifest through us. Give us the power to break the rules when the rules would break us. Allow what seems forbidden. Give us the power to guide our own collective destiny based on love. Give us the humility to understand that we don’t know how the story ends, no matter how inevitable the ending might seem. We just don’t know. We call on you, knowing that you are part of us already, to give us strength and courage to defy destiny. Make transformation possible now, today, through us, in our lives, and in the world.