In the fall of 2008, about two weeks after I had been diagnosed with cancer, I went to see my parish priest. In my Catholic faith, anointing the sick is a sacrament in which the priest anoints a person who is ill with blessed oil to bring physical and spiritual healing, forgiveness of sins, and comfort.

What happened when I spread my arms out and was anointed on the forehead and wrists was something I did not expect. I felt a current of something like electricity pulse through me. I returned home and told my family and friends that I was going to survive. God had just sent me a message. They thought I was a little crazy and made sure that I went through with the chemotherapy, booster shots, and other treatments. I did. 

What happened to me is what Dr. Marc Siegel would call a “soft miracle.” In his fascinating and compassionate new book, The Miracles Among Us: How God’s Grace Plays a Role in Healing, Siegel, a Fox News contributor, explores the role that God’s grace plays in human healing. Cardinal Timothy Dolan has a much less rigid definition of miracles than the Church does. Dolan departs from the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church by focusing on what he calls “soft miracles,” often meaning faith in combination with advances in medicine, where a skilled physician serves as “the hands of God.”

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This wise approach from Siegel makes The Miracles Among Us not only a powerful spiritual read but a deeply intelligent one. Many accounts of God’s healing tend to be all-or-nothing affairs. A person is declared a goner when, in ways science can’t understand, he or she comes back to life. One such account in Siegel’s book is John Smith, a teenager who fell into a frozen Lake in St. Louis and was injured to the point where he was declared dead. Yet Smith’s mother Joyce, a devout Christian, began praying: “Please God, give me back my son.” According to one of the doctors, “Things change in the room.” Suddenly, John’s pulse comes back.

Miraculous. Yet, the majority of stories in The Miracle Among Us are “soft miracles,” people who recover due to a combination of faith and the miracle of modern medicine. “The accumulation of these narrow escapes from death is bound together with the glue of hope, courage, and faith,” Siegel writes. He describes one patient as “a man of science” who nonetheless attributes his “continued survival [to] an act of faith. If you ask him what keeps him going, he says it is the love for his wife, whom he doesn’t want to leave alone. ‘I need to be here for her,’ he says. ‘I will be here for her.’”

The Miracles Among Us tells the story of a doctor at Lourdes, France, where healing miracles attributed to the Virgin Mary have baffled scientists, as well as the recovery of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) after an assassination attempt. There’s a chapter on Fox News anchor Brett Baier, whose son Paul was born with heart defects. The most harrowing and inspiring story is that of Dr. Ellay Hogeg-Golan, a doctor in Israel who survived the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks with burns over most of her body, completed her training, and became a physician. “We dress wounds, and God heals,” she says.

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After finishing The Miracles Among Us, it’s easy to believe what Siegel does — that miracles are, in fact, quite common. “There are medical miracles,” he writes. “I see them every day. So do you. You may not recognize them right away. Nor do I. They are far more common than anyone knows about or admits. We tend to define them too rigidly. A miracle may not be a flash from the sky or a paralyzed person walking again or a blind man seeing, but rather an accumulation of coincidences that, taken together, are nearly impossible to predict. Sometimes the miracle lurks just below the surface. Sometimes, as Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, told me in an interview, the miracle is not the one you pray for or are expecting but is simply the one God has decided to give.”

Like the one he decided to give to me.

, 2025-11-18 10:00:00, , Washington Examiner, %%https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/cropped-favicon.png?w=32, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/feed/, Mark Judge