For anyone familiar with Lewis, seeing the newness of God’s creation runs deep. When it captures us, it’s landing on a new shore; it’s walking from inside a wardrobe and pushing out into belief, to imagine what is from what truly is.

For Lewis, imagination is attached to faith, is attached to miracle. In order to see Nature in a most complete way, Lewis says we must distance ourselves from her and turn around and look back. “Then,” he says, “at last the true landscape will become visible. You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current.”

The challenge for the moderns and the post-moderns alike is to think nature is God, and it is this fallacy that keeps science digging in the soil and shooting rockets to fish out planets and stars and blackness. Why are we here? and How are we here? they ask, rather than, Whose are we? and Whose place is this?

In the end, whether by human error or by something unknown, the pundits and scientists tell us the Earth is dying. “How could we ever have thought this was the ultimate reality?” asks Lewis. “”Offer her neither worship nor contempt.” Instead, the “cure” comes when we see her as a created thing – “this half-shy and half-flamboyant creature, this ogress, this hoyden, this incorrigible fairy, this dumb witch,”  says Lewis.

There is nothing independent, neither us nor the world we inhabit. So, we could say that all of it -from the rules that we recognize as controls for nature and the occurrences that break the “normal,” are all equally miraculous. And this is when the supernaturalists stand up and say that the latter explains the former – it is by the miracle that we know the natural, the resurrection that we know the life. And, why do we love? Because he first loved us. And it is this that ultimately answers whose we are and whose place is this.

There is much more here.  See “A Chapter Not Strictly Necessary” in Miracles for reference to the quotes above and the whole text for much more on the subject of miracles.