It happened again. The same question comes every year, year after year. It arises from one of the fresh-faced explorers in a baptismal preparation class: "But what was before the beginning?"
The question always arises during the discussion of the creation stories in the Bible. Though in our tradition of Biblical interpretation we most usually interpret these pre-historic narratives as truth-telling stories as opposed to literal scientific fact, the concrete young mind often engages the story in literal terms. What exists before the beginning of everything, even if we understand that beginning point as something akin to the big bang?
What I love about this question is its intuitive assumption; something exists before anything you perceive. How else could it come to be? Even though the theological point is that creation arises out of nothing by agency of the mind of God, the naïve consciousness knows something else.
They actually intuitively know that Mary Poppin's song is true: "Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could." In other words everything comes from something.
Indeed, if the cosmos as we know it has a beginning point, the original singularity in time and space, then the God that brings something out of this point of origin precedes it. And then - wrestling with infinity and the mysteries of quantum physics - it dawns that only human minds are shackled to a notion of linear time with beginnings and endings. What if God and the sacred dimensions of existence just are? It always has been. "In the beginning, God ..." simply points to the truth that God is. We become aware of beginning points. But are they that? Or are they the latest activity within this eternal field of infinite time and space?
Somewhere beyond our notions of time and space God is and God creates. And the young person who hears the very definite sounding creation story somehow knows that. They can't explain it but they know it. And I just love that.
