Steeped in Catholic tradition as a kid, I thought I knew what a "miracle" was. It was turning water into wine, or walking on water, or God saving people from the killer hurricane He sent. Maybe it wasn't necessarily divine, but it should certainly have an element of the immortal about it, like the end of the Cal-Stanford game. Football fans don't need me to say which Cal-Stanford game. The miraculous one. If every game ended that way, it wouldn't be a miracle, now, would it?
Thrice. That's how many times I've heard ordinary childbirth referred to as a "miracle" in the last 24 hours. Most of my friends have been experiencing miracles, lately. Identical miracles. It's like Starbucks started selling mass-produced miracles along with the coffee mugs and dreadfully lousy CDs. Miracles are threatening to overpopulate and starve themselves out.
"When your dog did the exact same thing in your garage last year, was that a miracle?" I ask.
"You're so smug/self-righteous/pretentious," snorts the person claiming that cranking out one of the nearly quarter-million babies born every day is miraculous.