It sounds awfully trite, of course — calling every birth a miracle, that is. I can hear you thinking: Next thing I know, you are going to be telling me that clouds and tree trunks and beetles and volcanoes are all miracles.

Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Exactly so. How did you guess?

But birth is in a category all its own. Nothing is as powerful as the mirror in which we see ourselves, not merely as we are, but as we can be and will be. But even orders of magnitude yet more powerful is the mirror into which we peer as fully developed, highly sophisticated and grown creatures, and see ourselves looking back from barely a pin-point of minutes-old potential energy that can, however, move the universe — and ultimately will.

Watching a child come into this world tells us — individually and collectively — a whole lot more about who we are than we even had a clue before. Bam! Pure enlightenment through «simple» biological replication!

And if that’s not a miracle, I don’t know what is.