“When you get right down to it, dear, you see, people don’t want miracles.”
“But that’s what they do want,” I said. “Get the rumor started that a statue of the Virgin’s nose has started to run, and within twenty-four hours people will be lined up six deep.”
Brownie said, “Little miracles, yes. People will flock to little ones like that the way they would flock to a magic show. But you take a real miracle, like resurrection — nobody wants those kind, dear, because they make it so you’ve got to believe whether you want to or not.”
“You’re crazy,” I said. “That’s just the kind people do want.” People like Miriam, I thought. People like the fat lady with her corsage under the clock, like Charlie Blaine even, sleeping his life away on his kapok pillow. “They’d give their right arm for a miracle big enough to believe by.”
“They’d just explain it away like Easter, dear, and say it never happened,” Brownie said. “Take the miracle of life, for instance. People say it’s all just acids.”
— in Frederick Buechner’s The Book of Bebb
