`Good' waits to be noticed

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

I was driving to Beverly a few weeks ago and listening to a tape I'd borrowed from the library, a book tape. The tape "Joshua" was a religious parable, which I hadn't realized when I'd checked it out. It was preachy and overly dramatic and tacky.

But I was on a long drive in a car with a broken antenna, and it was this tape or nothing, so I listened.

The story was about a guy named Joshua who was really Jesus returned to Earth in the late 20th century. Of course, Joshua was a woodworker with blue eyes and wavy brown hair. And, of course, he was kind and of course, he could look into people's eyes and "see into the depths of their souls."

The book was a two-hour cliche wrapped in purple prose, a Danielle Steele for the devout.

And yet, in spite of its flaws, there was one part that struck me as I listened and that continues to fill my head.

Joshua is on an ocean-liner on his way to Rome. A young boy, whose father he knows well, slips and falls down the ship's steps, breaks his neck and dies. The ship's doctor wraps the boy in a blanket and takes him to a room. The boy is alone in the room when Joshua appears. Joshua puts his hand on the boy's neck, tells the boy to wake up and the child does.

The ship's captain, standing outside the door, observes all this, confronts Joshua and asks him to explain this wonderful miracle.

Joshua looks at the captain and asks why he is amazed?

He reminds the captain that he is surrounded by miracles every day. They are everywhere. You are a miracle, he says. This ship on this sea are miracles, but you don't notice. You have grown so used to everything.

Now maybe this thought is tacky, too. It's certainly not revelatory. It's something we all know, or something we all used to know. Because as children we were naturally and unabashedly suffused with wonder. Everything intrigued us.

"How come there are two of me when I look in a mirror?" a child asks.

"How come when you drop something it falls to the ground, but when you throw something in the air it doesn't stay up there?"

"Why are some people boys and some people girls?"

"How come the earth doesn't get tired of spinning?"

I remember watching each of my children discover their hands and their feet. I remember standing in the doorway of their bedrooms. Nap time was over. Their silence had called, unusual because I was used to their cries. I walked down the hall and heard gurgles and saw them, on their backs, their feet in the air, their hands above them. I remember the wonder in their eyes, each of them thrilled by something that had been a part of them from the beginning, but something that they had only discovered.

The miracles are everywhere is what the tape reminded me. We just need to rediscover them.

For a while each spring, we do. We're aware now of the earth's beauty. Spring takes our breath away. Grass, suddenly green, shocks of forsythia, magnolias and dogwoods; tulips standing at attention one day, then warmed by the sun and at ease the next. Because of the drabness of winter, these things stand out.

But by June the greens and the flowers blend and become ordinary and ordinary seems miraculous.

And yet it is. An ordinary day is so full of miracles - air to breath, food to eat, work to do, children to love, the earth under our feet, family, friends, music, books, movies, baseball, dogs, smiles, embraces.

Television and newspapers ignore all this, and constantly barrage us with everything that is wrong with this world. They fill us with evidence of evil and hate. And all the goodness goes unnoticed.

One guy robs a woman at a grocery store.

A million guys don't.

Six men beat and kill.

Six million men don't.

A city erupts in violence.

Hundreds of other cities remain calm.

There is far more good in this world than evil, billions more decent, well-intentioned, caring, flawed but persevering people than bad. Beauty and goodness surround us, but it isn't televised and it isn't written about.

But the goodness is there and the beauty, too, miracles just begging to be noticed in these troubled times.