In the end …

If beginnings are important to us, endings are even more so.  If we are reading a gripping mystery novel, the beginning sets the scene, but we keep on reading now because we want to see how it turns out.  The beginning and end are related and shape the story.

While the second poem of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets opens with “In my beginning is my end,” it closes with “In my end is my beginning.”  Eliot gives us a wonderful insight.  How we live now depends crucially on what we understand about our beginning and our end.  The end differs from the beginning, for it remains to be shaped.  The Theology of the Body, like Scripture, is concerned with our end as well as our beginning.  These have to do with our origin from God, or destiny in God, and how we live now for God.

 

God made us to have bodies, we live now in our bodies, and we will have resurrection bodies in the new heavens and new earth.   Scripture uses richly symbolic language in describing our end, speaking of things like seeing “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband.” (Rev. 21:2). Perhaps it is better simply to take a stance of humility and expectation about what God holds for his people, holding on in faith and hope to what Saint Paul says, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.”

The Kingdom of Heaven always lies ahead, a beacon of hope for our future.  Yet it is also near in the present moment—at least in potentiality, ready to break out in our midst.  God comes to us out of the future, beckoning us on.  He gives us a solid basis of hope, grounded in His basic character of steadfast love and faithfulness.  Each day for each of us offers a new beginning, lived in the light of the kingdom to come.  We can choose each day to live in the light of our end, and make a new beginning right now.  Don’t delay, lest as in the story of the foolish virgins with no oil in their lamps (Matt. 25:1-13), the Bridegroom should come and catch us unaware.