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"I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. -Revelation 1:8
The first and the last, the beginning and the end, who was and is and is to come. There is nothing more encompassing than God. If you think about the biggest thing you can imagine, God, as its creator, is bigger. If you think back as far as you can imagine, God was there before that. If you look forward into the future beyond anything you can imagine, God is already there waiting for us.
That’s pretty vast. That’s real big picture thinking. It’s so big, it’s beyond our comprehension. That’s why we must have faith to trust in God. It is a real leap of faith to trust in something you have no way of fully grasping, let along fully describing.
However, that doesn’t stop us from trying. There are some really gorgeous words, images and sounds humans have put together to talk about God in Scripture, in poetry, in art, in music. Each only describes one tiny section of the whole elephant, but it can nonetheless be a beautiful piece. We just have to remember that no one person, or even one religion, has ever been able to capture the full reality of God. We just can’t know something so vast.
I love the Breton Fisherman’s prayer that begins, ‘O God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.’ There is something both terrifying and very comforting about how small we are compared with the alpha and omega of all there is and ever will be. It’s scary to be so small in a reality that is so vast. And yet it’s comforting to know that something so much, much, much bigger than we are is in control of the entire time/space continuum. How great to know we don’t have to manage all that! You can listen to our Eucharistic prayer during the Easter season, which reflects this both/and feeling when it says: “At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.”
As we move through the season of Easter, we’ll be reminded that there are mysteries that we cannot ever solve and wonders that barely have words to describe, and yet, they are shown to us in the most everyday ways - through people, through bread and wine, through Jesus.
Easter is a season of awesomeness that visits us personally. May this season bring us many blessings and unexpected joys!
