LITMIR.BIZ

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may succeed it.”12 And so we cannot imagine a beginning without an end, a before without an after, nor a light without a dark to put it in.

      We could know an entirely other world, though (to paraphrase Wittgenstein, the great twentieth-century philosopher of language), if we simply spoke different words to each other. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue,” the Hebrew Bible tells us (Prov 18:21). The sun did not rise only once at some primal beginning. Our story begins with always—with every day—not “once upon a time.”

      Then Again

      Once upon a time there was no time. Whatever the word was in the beginning, in the beginning there was nothing: no light, no matter, no energy, no space or time . . . no anything.

      Begin with something out of nothing—or before nothing. Begin before anything mattered. Begin with endless burning night, with the entire universe squeezed into the space of the nucleus of a single atom, with an inferno of becoming about to become. Begin with a mass of roiling hydrogen and helium—with primeval nuclei colliding and fusing and transforming—a furnace of confusion.

      Begin with us, beginning.

      Today, most astronomers agree on a figure of about thirteen-billion years (give or take a billion years or two) as the approximate age of the physical universe, a number that, in relation to our lived experience of time, is virtually incomprehensible. We might as well say the universe is as old as eternity. In fact, some physicists now refute the “Big Bang” theory and posit instead a so-called “Steady State” theory, or that the universe may indeed have no beginning at all. Which is kind of what the Bible says (and so many of the world’s sacred scriptures say) about our beginnings in their more poetic original languages: not that something was or wasn’t “in the beginning,” but that we are part of a wonderfully mysterious beginning-less beginning that unfolds in a now that is somehow beyond now.

According to the Tao Te Ching, the classic Chinese text fundamental to the philosophy of Taoism, in the beginning was only Void, within which was That or the One which has no shape or sound yet is the origin of all origins—that which has no beginning and no end—and which Lao Tzu called the Tao, or Greatness, or the Great Integrity. Krishna referred to this same beginning-less beginning as an unknown and unknowable All. Similarly, the Gnostic Gospels talk about a time “before That-Which-Is ever became visible.”13 In one of the sacred Hindu texts known collectively as the Vedas, the great creation hymn in the Rig-Veda says of the earliest beginning:

The non-existent was not, the existent was not: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. . . . Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day’s and night’s divider. That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever. Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminate chaos. All that existed then was void and formless. . . (Rig-Veda 10.129.1–4).14

The Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah embraces the notion that a primordial Nothingness brought forth the beginning and the end at once. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi said that a more rightful translation of the Hebrew words of Genesis 1:1, the very beginning of the Bible, would be “In a beginning,” rather than “In the beginning”—that we are always beginning, a part of an ongoing story. Not once upon a time but all the time. Ultimately, that the beginning even ever was is a matter of faith, as the poet-priest John Donne pointed out: “When it was,” he continued, “is a matter of reason, and therefore various and perplex’d.”15

The Jewish writer Martin Buber begins his classic treatise on the philosophy of dialogue, I and Thou, with: “In the beginning was relation,”16 a thoughtful re-arrangement of what is perhaps the most familiar “in the beginning,” the one that introduces the New Testament’s Johanine gospel, itself a re-arrangement of the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Genesis. The word that allows for such re-consideration is the word word itself—or more rightly, logos, the Greek original long since translated into the English word with which so many of us have become so familiar. Logos, like so many words, doesn’t really have a precise equivalent in language other than its mother tongue. “Word” is a perfectly appropriate translation, but so is meaning or message. Teaching, communication, and wisdom can all work, too. One can even make the case that in the beginning was the reason, or the story, or the law . . . or even the thing. That’s the thing about words: hold them up to the light and they reveal how multi-faceted they are, like so many diamonds—every face reflecting the light at a different angle—the clearest, most brilliant ones hard and costly and rare.

      Time is perhaps the most faceted diamond, the shiniest gemstone in our dictionary. It is not linear but prismatic. Indivisible and atomic, time can bend light, space, and definition. Hours can stand still even as the clock goes on ticking. Time can fly, like a hummingbird: an emerald and ruby jewel on whirring wings—a glimpse . . .

      . . . and gone.

      Flowing Time

      We tend to view time, with all of its perceived beginnings and endings—its before’s and after’s—as progressing in a certain order and in a certain direction, all too often skipping right over now in favor of what was or what might be. We begin at a beginning and end at a conclusion. We make of time a river upon whose banks we sit and watch it flowing past:

      Time irreversible.

      In fact, before we ever thought of time in mathematical, astronomical, or even quantum mechanical terms we thought about it in agricultural ones. We paid particular attention to whatever river was nearby. For the Ancient Egyptians, life itself—both this side of death and after it—depended on the River Nile. The river was their calendar stretching over more than four thousand miles and marked three key seasons of life: flooding, growth, and harvest. Water and rivers flow throughout the Hebrew Bible, and at least one reference, the name of a Canaanite month, reveals further connection between flowing water and flowing time: Ethanim, the month of steady flowing, when only the most perennial streams still held water (1Kgs 8:2).

      The first book of the Hebrew Bible tells of a primordial river that flowed out of Eden to the four corners of the earth (Gen 2). The New Testament concludes with a vision of another river, one that flows by the throne of God and by which Eden will be restored (Rev 22:1), a river that circles back to the original headwaters described in the Book of Genesis. The Ganges River is sacred to Hindus, the most auspicious place to perform one’s devotional meditation and bathing, not to mention the whispered offering of a sunset puja, or prayer. In fact, that religion has seven holy rivers and many others whose waters are significant. A dip in any one of those waters is thought to cleanse one of sin, an act that reverberates with the splash and dunk of Christian baptism, first performed also in a river, as we know from the story of John and Jesus on the shores of the Jordan in the desert country of Judea.

      According to the revelation of the desert Prophet of Islam, Muhammad (peace be upon him), in the beginning was not light but water—the life-sustaining connection of a single atom of oxygen to two of hydrogen combined just so.

In fact, time is a river whose current is swift and flows in one direction only through all three Abrahamic faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Along its banks our salvation unfolds in an orderly progression—eschatologically—from the creation of the world to our fall and redemption; from judgment to last days to heavenly paradise. In other religions time, and therefore life—not to mention divine grace—isn’t quite as linear. Besides, no river’s course is perfectly straight. Just as our own stream of consciousness can take surprising twists and turns, any river always finds its way by whatever route necessary back to its source: the sea. Eventually, as Norman Maclean wrote in his short story, “all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”17

Buddhism

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