Journal Time

with Ray Waddle

Beginnings and Endings …

Headlines these days are preoccupied with beginnings and endings.

How did life begin? The evolution/creation debate is a search for ultimate beginnings.

How will it all end? The blockbuster Left Behind fiction series hands us scenarios of Armageddon, a definitive cosmic finale for an anxious world.

Both trends — the search for certain beginnings and the hope of a righteous ending — reflect dismay with the present for lacking a confident identity, itinerary or destination.

I blame the post-2000 New Millennium hangover.

The big turn of the calendar six years ago offered a historic moment of opportunity, reassessment, new beginnings. But we worried so much about a bogus Y2K computer bug that no one had time to dream about our communal or spiritual life. Poetry gave way to fear. Next thing we knew, 9/11 changed everything, giving us a permanent war on terror, a new climate of worry about violent showdowns between Islam and the West.

Beginnings and endings ...

It's tempting to clutch primordial beginnings as a solution to national identity. Darwinian biology? A literal six-day account of divine creation? Both promise a sense of security, the secret about why we're here and what we stand for. Similarly, declaring the precise blueprint of the future — solar explosion? biblical apocalypse? — ends the tormented guesswork about human destiny. It tells us how to behave.

A focus on distant past and future is relief from the present's own bewildering cycle of beginnings and endings. Human life is crowded with them. They can seem painfully random. Soldiers die in the war — violent endings. Newborns replenish the family — miraculous beginnings. New friendships are made, new careers launched — fresh beginnings. Loved ones succumb to illness — unthinkable endings.

In national life, liberals and conservatives make sense of chaos in their own ways, pressing their versions of right beginnings and visionary endings.

The religious right customarily takes inspiration from the nation's past: America has lost its way and will restore its moral vision only if it returns to its biblical foundations. The religious left looks to bright future horizons: America's best days are ahead if it breaks old patterns of prejudice and lives up to ideals of equality and justice.

Debates about beginnings and endings help a society sharpen its questions about itself. But the debates quickly unravel into bitter feuds and talking points. They squander the present moment. Stoking resentments and crusades against every sort of enemy, they disdain the holiness of the next hour, the possibility of a change of heart (including their own), an unexpected breakthrough or other miracles of reconciliation.

Huffings and puffings about ultimate beginnings and endings are not the whole story. They obscure a different drama, the motions of something all-encompassing — the unfolding story of providence.

Belief in divine providence says the present is somehow shored up at every moment by divine care. The present is the sum of all past beginnings and the starting point of a redeemable future, authored by a Creator and bathed in hope. It trusts in God's creation. It recommits to the work of furthering God's purposes. The adventure is present-oriented, not shipwrecked on minute speculations of distant past and future. The providential God sows and harvests the fruits of the present, even the heartbreak.

The Bible tell this story a hundred different ways — the story of beginnings, failure and rebirth, delivering codes of conduct that dignify and renew the present, everybody's present. Psalm 54 declares: "But surely, God is my helper; the Lord is the upholder of my life."

The Psalmist writes not in past or future but in present tense.

Beginnings and endings and beginnings again …

Jane Hines, editor of the Voice the past 25 years, has made a vocation of caring about Presbyterian life and the work of the Synod of Living Waters — the big debates, little details and countless examples of faithfulness and integrity she has found. She built a model publication by crisscrossing the length of the synod, meeting people, hearing stories, witnessing things for herself and writing with clarity. She seems to know everybody. Her faith in the church is a faith in the possibility of new beginnings.

Now she is marking an ending by retiring as editor, and making a new beginning in life, taking her gifts, knowledge and wisdom with her wherever she goes. She is a great and generous editor, with a reader's eye for news, facts and truth, and always will be. I look forward to the next chapters in the book of Jane.

(Ray Waddle, based in Nashville, is author of Against the Grain: Unconventional Wisdom from Ecclesiastes.)