Believing in miracles

[dweller]

Believing in miracles

A revolution of reason freed Prague 15
years ago--and the United States 228 years
ago. Why are we moving in the opposite
direction? Has any nation's intellectual
history ever before run in reverse?

BY HAL CROWTHER


PRAGUE--The miraculous Infant of Prague is a wax baby doll, 400
years old and roughly "the height and weight of a prairie dog," as I
described him when we first met in the winter of 1989. The Infant,
known to Czechs as the Jesulatko, is the best-dressed religious icon in
all the world. In 1989 he owned 45 spectacular costumes. Today he
sports 70--glistening gowns, capes, vests of silk and gold brocade to
match his marble throne and his tiny jeweled crown. Carmelite monks
at the Church of Our Lady Victorious change the Infant's outfits
according to the seasons and feast days; for a small fee you can climb
to the tower museum and marvel at the rest of his wardrobe.

Much has changed since last we met.
Only Prague's winter weather seemed
the same, cold and gray and brooding.
When I visited the Infant in December 1989, the Czech capital was in
the first flush of the delirium that greeted the Velvet Revolution, ending
40 years of Soviet-imposed communism. By sheer good luck, I arrived
on the train from Budapest the very day the old government fell, the
day half a million Czechs thronged Wenceslas Square and Vaclav
Havel and Alexander Dubcek exhorted the crowd from their balconies,
though few of us could hear them.

It was the first and only national
euphoria I've experienced, however
vicariously. Most Americans like me,
too young to remember V-E Day, will
die without savoring one of these
moments of soaring hope that reveals
a whole people embracing the future
and believing the best of each other.
Grinning patriots wearing
red-white-and-blue ribbons roamed
Prague's freezing streets for days,
embracing strangers and flashing the
universal V-sign, which in Czech
means "svobodu"--freedom. In a cafe
near the Old City Hall, a beautiful
dark-haired woman who spoke no
English took off her ribbon, pinned it
on my sweater and kissed me on my
forehead. Late at night on the Charles
Bridge, a thousand candles illuminated the statues of the saints, and
students huddled around oil-drum fires sang "We Shall Overcome" in
Czech.

"My face was wet," I wrote in my notebook after leaving the students
and their midnight vigil. "I'll remember it the rest of my life."

I was 44. For a secular realist whose adult experience of politics had
been assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate and Reaganism, this flood tide
of optimism was like taking heroin. After three days, it was like taking
an overdose. I retreated from the giddy streets, late on another arctic
afternoon, and ducked furtively into the Church of Our Lady
Victorious. The church was empty and pitch dark except for a single
bulb backlighting the famous Infant and three candles burning on his
altar rail. We were alone, the two of us--the overdressed wax doll,
famous for miracles, and the agnostic famous for dismissing them. If
this was a contest between faith and doubt, the little rascal must have
won. I was exhausted and emotionally overwrought, and the darkness
and silence and the shadowy choir of early-Baroque angels may have
helped him, too. But what I wrote of our meeting, to my present
embarrassment but strange satisfaction, was this: "Prayer struck me as
the only adequate response to the accumulation of feeling I felt in that
place."

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