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Whether the universe began as an enormous explosion of energy or was divinely spoken into existence, nothing we know or experience today was ever extant prior to that absolute flashpoint. Everything that matters—space, us, time—was set in motion as a result of that singular event. The genesis of the cosmos can be summed up in one word:

After.

God only knows what came before.

In the beginning was the word, and the word without a shadow of a doubt was Light. Ever since that primordial before-and-after either physics or grace has been unfolding: the everyday gift of a rising and setting sun. Except each sunset or sunrise is never really a solar event as much as it is a terrestrial one. The universe does not revolve around us, the sun does not rise. We turn toward or away from its light. Sunset would be more appropriately described as earth-spin on our skewed little planet. (Neither do we call it nightrise, even though that’s also more accurate.) Night, after all, is nothing more than the shadow side of a rotating satellite in orbit around an illuminated source.

Still, watch the last bit of daylight slip over the horizon at any day’s end, and it isn’t difficult to imagine and feel why so many of our ancestors made gods and monsters out of the sun and the night.

Our very words belie what we fear: we exclaim, “Tempus fugit,” (Time flies) and “Carpe diem,” (Seize the day) whenever we mean to encourage each other to make our day-lit hours count. But when was the last time someone emboldened you to “carpe noctem,” (seize the night)? We look for eternally blue skies in life, not some dark night of the soul. While we declare that daylight rises, night and darkness always seem to fall—they descend. We convince ourselves that the worst things always happen in the dead of night and tell ourselves everything will look better in the light of the day. And when that light arrives we sing ebulliently that morning has broken, as if it were the first day of creation. When night returns we lay our heads to sleep and pray to God our souls to keep.

“It is frightening to think how many things / are made and unmade with words,” the poet Rilke wrote, “they are so far removed from us, / trapped in their eternal imprecision, / indifferent with regard to our most urgent needs.”11 We can say our genesis was etymological, or we can say it was biological—neither explanation ultimately satisfies. All words have a life of their own, abandoning us when we most need them and evading our grasp when we most desperately need something to hold on to. They are made not for us but for each other: a sentence is never complete, Saint Augustine keenly observed, “unless one word pass away when it has sounded its part, in order that another 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 and Hinduism, amongst other traditions, view time’s passing in more cyclical terms. Rivers flow out in every direction from the primal headwaters of the Navajo creation story. Taoism teaches to live in harmony with a concept of time that is more like a repeating rhythm than a river. If time is a river it is one that flows in more than one direction. Or at least, as James Joyce would have us believe in his cyclical and final masterpiece Finnegan’s Wake,18 one that has no “once upon a time” or “the end” but recirculates all along life’s . . .

. . . riverrun, an image rooted in the ancient philosophies of Heraclitus, Plato, and Marcus Aurelius who each noted in their own way that we cannot step twice into the same river. The thirteenth-century Buddhist poet/priest Chōmei echoed their insights in the opening line of his classic tale of impermanence: “the flowing river never stops and yet the water never stays the same.”19 When we come to the banks of any river we find ourselves at the very shores of space and time.

Try as we might we cannot dam time; neither the clock nor the calendar slows its flood. “Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore / so do our minutes hasten to their end.”20 Nothing stands still. Modern physics reveals that the very building blocks of matter are not passive and inert, but constantly dancing with everything else in the universe. Every atom vibrates, pulses with energy, oscillates with the absorption and emission of existence itself. Everything is in the dynamic process of both being and becoming. Change is the eternal constant; life is liquid, riverine. Time can slow to a trickle—or overflow its banks and become a torrent. Regardless of the direction the river flows it branches into tributaries we call the past, the present, and the future—the rivulets Augustine called memory, attention, and expectation—what was, is, and will be.

The Romans saw the Milky Way—the great river of stars above our heads—as the luminous wake of a celestial ship. To the Māori of New Zealand it is a canoe crossing the sea. In Chinese astronomy, it is a celestial river; people of Eastern Asia believed it was the Silvery Stream of Heaven. The Aboriginal People of Australia see the band of stars as a river in the “skyworld,” and in Hindu myth it is Akasaganga, which means “the (Ganges) River of the Sky.”

Something in us has always understood the implications of the stars streaming by above our heads; the flickering, fleeting firelight of life’s timelessness.

In the beginning was flow, flux . . . change.

And ever since: nothing has been the same.

11. Rilke, The Poet’s Guide to Life, 130.

12. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions, 52.

13. For Taoist, Hindu, and Gnostic references see, for example, Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 51, 201–202; and Hooper, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tzu, 53, 55.

14. Griffith, Hymns of the Rig-Veda, II, 621–22.

15. In Eiseley, The Firmament of Time, 1.

16. Buber, I and Thou, 18.

17. Maclean, A River Runs Through It, 104.

18. In what is the beginning and end—and beginning again—of his literary classic: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun.” Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, 628, 3.

19. Chōmei, Hōjōki, 19.

20. Shakespeare, “Sonnet 60.1–2” in The Complete Works, 1606.