Earlier in the school year one of our 3rd graders was diagnosed with a very serious form of knee cancer. Her leg had to be amputated above the knee about a month ago and this after a series of chemotherapy treatments where she lost all her hair. It has been amazing how her third grade classmates and the entire school have responded to her and her bravery through it all.
She had the knee portion of her leg amputated and her foot reattached backwards where her knee would be and this will act as a knee when she gets her prosthesis.
This video will show you how successful this surgery is and the woman in the video was the same age as our 3rd grade parishioner when she had the surgery done. Please continue to pray for Kelsey's complete recovery!
I've never heard of this before and it is truly amazing!
5 comments:
Amazing indeed. Makes a lot of sense, too. I wonder who came up with it?
Miracle? No. Miracles have no natural explanation. This surgery, while a tremendous benefit to the child, has an entirely natural explanation. There are all sorts of reconstructive procedures that are wonderfully amazing: a lost thumb is replaced with the great (big) toe, the lost nose is replaced with a latge flap of skin form the forehead, and coral is implanted to act as a "scaffold" for bone re-growth.
One of things that brought me around from being an evangelical atheist to the True Faith is a realization that even things explainable by the known sciences are truly miraculous. Even the very idea that human beings can create things like high-definition televisions is miraculous in a sense. Surely our use of science to come up with extraordinary medical cures is miraculous in its own way...
There is a wide gulf between humans and any other creatures; we are set apart chiefly by our self-awareness and consciousness. Truly extraordinary. Miraculous, even.
The idea that the miraculous and the scientific must be confined to their particular realms is rationalism taken to an extreme -- an extreme that until the Enlightenment no one bought into. I reject the idea that these things are independent. They are, in reality, completely overlapping spheres.
Might a miracle also be one of probabilities, even though explainable by natural laws? For instance, it's theoretically possible that the motion of all of the atoms in a brick could, by random chance, sync; if they did, the brick would spontaneously move by several inches or even jump up into the air. This would be extraordinarily rare but nevertheless explainable by accepted laws. No miracle there. But if it happened at a crucial moment in history or even microcosmically in someone's life (e.g., brick jumps up and trips someone just before he was about to walk in front of an approaching train), the miracle would be in the timing, which might not be explainable by science.
One could even tread on to thin ice here (I submit the following speculation to the Magisterium, intending no heretical statement and willing to be corrected) and ask if natural process could explain the splitting of an egg cell into a zygote. If so, the miracle is not that it happened, but that it happened at the exact moment of Mary's "Fiat" (and further, would not have happened if she had withheld that "Fiat," thus introducing the issue of causation as the miraculous element).
A slightly different example is Christ's stilling of the tempest. Storms end all the time. The key to the miracle here is--arguably--the timing, i.e. the causal relationship. In other words, one can posit that the Christ worked a miracle not of meteorology but of cause.
Thoughts?
A miracle is that for which there is no known natural explanation. (That is not to say that there is no possible natural explanation.)
If a brick were, due to some rare natural cause, to launch itself off the ground and land on the head of a person about to commit a heinous crime, thus preventing the crime, this would be a providential event, but not a miracle.
God's providence is at work in our lives daily in ways we rarely notice. Sometime we do, and that, itself, is a great grace.
The splitting of the fertilized egg into 2, then 4, then 8 cells is a natural process. In the case of the Incarnation, this was miraculous, for it was by the "overshadowing" of the Holy Spirit, not the natural introduction of a spermatozoan, that the process was initiated.
Spontaneous oocyte division is rare, but not unknow, The process, parthenogenesis, is common in aphids, rotifers, nematodes, but far, far less common in more complex organisms.
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