I have several dozen books about Unitarian Universalism in my home office. I looked through them all, and only three have any kind of entry in their index or table of contents for “miracles.”

I love a magic show, because the magician appears to do the impossible. But I also know that they deal in illusion and use specially-designed props.

Through the years I have heard people use the word miracle to describe things that I would assign other names: good luck, good medicine, pure chance, hard work. Overall, I’m with the everything is a miracle camp, one of those people who use the word often and mean it.

I’ve always loved the line from Alice Through the Looking Glass in which the Red Queen declares, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Sometimes we make our own miracles. Consider, for example, the existence of the CLF, a church without walls, available around the world, at any hour of the night or day, to anyone who comes seeking connection, compassion and spiritual growth.

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Miracles. Everybody always gets so worked up over that word.

It was six years into my time at a previous settlement that it happened. I’d fallen in love with the congregation, with its can-do attitude, its involvement in the community, its history of justice work and its music.

We human beings are shaped and molded by the stories we tell one another, including those we tell our children.

I have always loved houses of worship, even when I was “unchurched,” so when I learned that the fourth largest Christian church in the world—the Cathedral of St. John the Divine—was in New York City, of course I had to visit.