“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” we hear God say in our epistle lesson today. Take time to sit with that phrase for a bit and think about what it means to you. Alpha is the first letter in the Greek alphabet, and omega is the last letter, symbolic of the beginning and the end. God utters the creating word in the beginning of the expanding universe and looks forward to all creation returning in love. We come forth into the world from the heart of God, “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), and as Nan Merrill puts it in her rendition of Ps.90 in Psalms for Praying, “When our days on earth have ended, You welcome us home to your Heart, to the City of Light, where time is eternal and days are not numbered.”

Nicholas of Cusa in the 15^(th) century sees “God as the enfolder and unfolder of all reality.” That is what quantum physicist, David Bohm, in his description of that same reality today calls “the implicate order” enfolding all creation and “the explicate order” unfolding in particularity. How delightful to recognize God’s continuing revelation throughout the centuries! To describe the enfolding aspect of God, in the 12^(th) century, Hildegard of Bingen says God embraces us, hugs us, while Julian of Norwich, also in the 15^(th) century, expresses it as being clothed with Goodness. God is the Inspiring One, breathing life into us and all creation—the Great Instigator working deep within to “unfold” our potentialities. We might experience that as a calling, a yearning, an urge to do something that seems to come out of the blue, or perhaps the deepest desire of our hearts. The Creator has provided a cycle of life in all creation to show us the natural order of unfolding: the phases of the moon, the seasons of the year, the growth cycle of plants from seed to fruition, the birth, growth and maturation, aging and death of all animals. So too, we and all our creative activity follow the same cycle, coming full circle as we surrender one phase to make room for the birth of the next.

God is in all our beginnings and in all our endings, whether large beyond our imagining as in the cosmos or small as in the quantum world, unfolding our lives as lovingly as the Creator unfurls the rose, the Alpha and the Omega.