Alpha and Omega - 20 November 2015

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]

What is happening in us, when we come to these regular times of silence and stillness?  We know very well, if we are paying attention, that we are in the presence of God.   But also we rapidly find out that we are very much in the presence of ourselves.  We have all sorts of issues that rise up in the silence and space.  So there is a tension.  But it is a perfectly proper encounter, between me with all my memories and fears and hopes – me as I normally am, in other words, not some religious version of me -- and the Spirit of God in Christ the Creator, Lover and Healer.  In this encounter, I have learned to be still and silent, as well as I can.   This is the rhythm of contemplative life and prayer, the diminishing of the ego – that is to say the Me which is the accretion of all the ways I usually try to be happy and secure -- and the emerging of the true self, original, recognised, known, probably much nicer, welcomed and unconditionally loved. 

Contemplatives have made a discovery.  Two contradictory things can be true together.  I am in the presence of God – I am in the presence of myself.  I am loving – but quite often I am unloving.  I am a person of faith – I am a person also of doubt.  Zen Buddhists know how to express this, in what they call koans, contradictory statements which sound like nonsense to our logical and analytical minds, but which invite us to consider that the truth may not be down that road.  I may interpose that Benedictines also seem typically to love unresolved issues.  A story from the earlier Desert spirituality tells us:  A novice brother asked an Elder, “Father, how do I overcome all these problems?”  The Elder asked, “Son, have you had your breakfast?”  “Yes, Father,” he replied.  “Then wash your plates.”  The sublime and the prosaic come together.  Any contemplative is happy with that.  It is not now a matter of whether God and the world meet with our agreement – merely with our consent.  Consent is what we bring to the silence and the stillness, and all the unresolved issues.

I learned the Greek alphabet in (I think) 1954 – age 19, Greek Stage I, at what was then Auckland University College.  Alpha is the first letter, Omega the last.  That became clear on Day One, rather as they teach pre-schoolers with the alphabet across the top of the blackboard, although not in our case with pictures of elephants and little furry forest creatures.  Then came Homer and Euripides, Plato and Paul the Apostle.  At the same time I embarked on Hebrew, and so ventured into the world of the Jews, and yet another alphabet, and yet other ways of talking about the invisible God whose name was unpronounceable.  It was back then, I now realise, that we began to learn a decent reticence in the ways we talk about a God we can’t even name.  Today in the lesson from the Book of Revelation we read some mystic of the early Christian church under extreme threat and stress and suffering, who describes God as the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.  It is not a description or a definition, it is not a name.  It is a statement of the ineffable and of hope.  It is a reminder of whom we encounter when we calm down, and stop fretting about whether we can believe or not.  It may indicate to us that unconditional love is first and last, whatever its cost, and its cost may be total.  At any rate, the Alpha and the Omega God is not available to be enlisted in our cause against other people.  We are best to be still and silent.