It Ends as It Begins

It Ends as It Begins

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. [1]

In our human experience we often obsess over beginnings and endings. It is our way of making something easier to quantify or understand. Beginnings and endings, however, are artificial boundaries that carve out certain parts of our lives. For example, if we say our life begins at birth and ends at death, we mistakenly separate our earthly days from the eternal life of our animating soul, and we separate our earthly days from the larger Life in which they exist. Establishing beginnings and endings unnaturally restricts our perspective. What we separate by naming beginnings and endings is an inseparable part of the eternally flowing nature of the One Life in which we have our being.

In Exodus 3, Moses requests God’s name, saying the Israelites will want to know who gave the Ten Commandments to Moses. They wanted a description of God that would make their understanding of God boundaried and predictable. But God defies description, so the “name” God provided is often translated I AM. But we humans want to know I AM what? I AM who? I AM where? The Israelites, like us today, wanted a concrete description of God, something to distinguish God from everything else, but the nature of God cannot be set apart in that way. I AM (God is) now; I AM (God is) here; I AM (God is) who, what, and where I Am (God is), without beginning or end. If God is I AM, then everything that is is an expression of God. Everything, including no-thing.

Our beginnings and endings chop what are otherwise integrated aspects of a single reality into pieces that are easier for us to attain certainty about at the cost of a more inclusive perspective. They are misleading because they imply that our lives are a series of separate events instead of interrelated expressions of a unified experience. We perceive division in our experience of time and space as we spin through the same orbits of artificial boundaries and imaginary beginnings and endings. We confuse movement with growth. The centrifugal force of our delusions prevents us from attaining a transcendent view of the One reality in which our movement occurs.

For example, we define an acorn by its characteristics at a particular point in space and time: as a seed or food for squirrels or an annoying thud on the roof. The reality of an acorn, however, is not separate from the past, present, or future existence of the life-expressions of oak trees. Each acorn contains within it the potential for a full-grown oak tree. It also contains the history of oak trees and the potential for oak trees yet to emerge. When we describe an acorn in terms of beginning or end, we remove it from its eternal nature, both as an outcome of the process of arrival to its current state and for how it may emerge in time and space to come. There is a sense in which each acorn is the center of the oak tree universe because it is a nexus for everything past and future. Separated from that legacy, the acorn loses its eternal nature. Likewise, there is a sense in which each of us is the center of our universe, both in space and time, being a product of everything that has gone before us without beginning and containing everything yet to emerge without end. Nothing in what we consider past, future, or light-years of distance escapes the reach of our eternal heritage or legacy.

In the opening verses of the closing book of the Bible, the Lord God says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega…” In Greek, Alpha means beginning and Omega, end. But the important word is and. There is no separation of beginning or end, better or worse, younger or older. Everything is equally an expression of I AM in its infinite possibilities. And at the center of this unfathomable universe is us. We feel insignificantly small only when we consider ourselves as separated from the whole. There is no such division between us and God, however, any more than a wave is divided from the ocean. We rise and fall in time and space, but we cannot fall outside of the One.

As inseparable aspects of I AM, we are free to look beyond what can be seen, imagine outside the boundaries of accepted logic, and explore unmarked paths. No fear. No limits. Only a Love whose reach we cannot stray beyond.

This is the 38^th in a series of Life Notes on Time and Eternity. The opinions expressed are mine. To engage with me or to explore contemplative spiritual direction, contact me at ghildenbrand@sunflower.com.

Contemplative Events, all free and open to all:

Indoor Labyrinth, Friday February 2, Come and go between 9am and noon, Peace Mennonite Church, 615 Lincoln St., Lawrence, KS

Conversations on Death and Dying, Discussions about using death as an advisor, 8 week course beginning on February 8, Thursday evenings, 7:00pm, First United Methodist Church, 946 Vermont, Lawrence, KS, contact ghildenbrand@sunflower.com for information.

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[1] Revelation 1:8 (NRSV)