23rd April 2025

I’ve just seen a miracle. A Herring Gull is riding on the wind blowing up from the Portishead beach: wings perfectly still, barely a feather twitching, it hangs with a poise no hang-glider could ever manage, then suddenly wheels round and back to exactly where it was before. A wonder to behold.

The dictionary says a miracle is ‘A surprising and welcome event that is not explained by natural or scientific laws and is therefore the work of a divine agency.’ This would exclude what I’ve just seen, because of course the gull’s airborne skill can be attributed to the combination of aeronautical laws and instinctive skills instilled into the bird by evolution and its genes. But ‘miracle’ comes from the Latin and old French words for ‘wonder’; and the gull’s flight, irrespective of scientific explanations, evokes my wonder for its sheer grace and beauty, offered as a gift to me. The Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a poem about, not a gull, but a Kestrel, ‘The Windhover’, hovering in the ecstasy of brilliant flight. He addressed his poem ‘To Christ our Lord’ whose mastery over all things he saw reflected in the bird’s airborne freedom.

There are two incomparable miracles. The first is the very existence of the world, created out of nothing. The second is the resurrection of Christ from the dead, new light out of darkness. No surprise that our world is full of wonders, for creation is itself a miracle, and the new creation has emerged at Easter. As Hopkins wrote in another poem, ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God.’ Watch out!

Keith Clements