Beginning, again

”In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered over the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.  Then God said...”


In the midst of the past several weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about beginnings, again. I guess it’s not too surprising, given some abrupt changes and moves in my life. It’s also not surprising given the time of year.  The fall is just on the horizon. New academic years are upon us those of us who teach or study. For me, especially, a new job is luring me away from the places I’ve called home for the last several years. During such times, I often turn to the few verses that kick off the cosmological jazz of Genesis 1: “In the beginning…” Beginning. Something about reading this story as a discipline of imagination or a sung prayer opens my heart to the newness.

Hold at bay what you know of the story. Don’t think of what scholars call the “Priestly” creation story in Genesis 1-2:4a as “how everything started.” Let’s not start at the very beginning. These little, scribbled words of Genesis are or rather, perhaps, can be a story of how everything—moment to momentbegins, gets going in the fragile love of the universe. Fresh starts rarely happen, for good or ill: shadows cover the face of the deep, while a wind from God, tender breath, sweeps, swirls, froths and foams on the face of the water.  We might be haunted by mourning, loss, transition, relationships raw from disagreement or loves ended.  Even God begins with quite a bit of baggage. The chaotic depths of the past, frustrations and loves of work and relationships, our physical pains from past injuries or pleasures, our past and future hopes, all flow, sometimes tumultuously into this moment. Even this moment.

Catherine Keller, the theological expert on these beginnings and verses, writes in her book Face of the Deep (Routledge 2003) that, “Beginning is going on. Everywhere. Amidst all the endings, so rarely ripe or ready. They show up late, these beginnings, bristling with promise, yet labored.”

Such tender labor. And God said meekly or with wonder or with a playful twinkle, “Let there be light…” Ripe or ready, in the beginning, in each beginning, this is not a divinity who decides to get “His” way, who tells creatures precisely what to do, who forces upon us a cheaply thought-out agenda. This is a God of mystery who subtly beckons, seduces, opens our desiresas my Lutherans say more tamely, “calls” usto begin, to risk new experience out of nerves, to begin again. Let there be, may there be, there could be…

Hopeful love and risk always seem to go together. In each and every beginning. God hovers over the vulnerable depths of our hearts, our imaginations, our loves and work with one another and beckons us to create, to keep going, to try something new, to love and think differently. As another of my heroes, Alfred North Whitehead writes in his  Process and Reality, “God is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.” Let there be, may there be, there could be… 

Life is a wrestling with a creative everydayness—in the habits we take on as our daily routine, the friendships we make, the times of change, the emotions we remember, carry, and transform, the injustices we face, when we move, when we start new *fill in the blank. All beginnings are complicated, strangely ordinary, and could go any way right or wrong or usually both. The grace of time is that those ordinary beginnings, whether we feel them mundane or extraordinary take a bit of time, become new every morning. And there’s evening and morning, the first day, the beginning of a new week, a new year, a new time. Let there be, may there be, there could be…bristling with promise.