In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
Genesis 1:2 (NIV)

A few months ago, a dear friend sent me the text of an autobiographical account about a young adolescent girl who coincidentally (or not) struck up a relationship with an old Frenchman she quite literally ran into while running. He told her to call him Mr. Tayer, and the two of them began walking together in the park two days a week. The quirky old man opened the eyes and the mind of this young girl to see the world in new and transformative ways. On the Thursday before Easter, at the end of their walk, he bid her good-bye. He stopped showing up for their walks.

Many years later, she read a book that had been given to her by a friend. The things she read in the book were so reminiscent of the things that Mr. Tayer would talk about on their walks. She searched to find a photo of the author of the book. Mr. Tayer’s real name was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a world-renowned paleontologist, scientist, philosopher, a Jesuit priest, and man whose ideas were so controversial that the Roman Catholic church forced him to stop publishing or speaking publicly.

I had heard of de Chardin, but I knew very little about him. The account of his impact on this girl’s life, the way he saw creation, and controversy he inspired made me think he was my kinda guy. I’ve been learning more about him ever since.

de Chardin’s most well-known for what he called “the Omega point.” The details get a bit thick, but the notion is that everything is connected and that everything will eventually unify and collapse into one point, just as physicists believe that everything began with one tiny point (“the Alpha point”) before the Big Bang.

As a follower of Jesus, of course, this reminds me that Jesus revealed Himself to John as “The Alpha and Omega.” In the divine dance of Father, Son, and Spirit, it is Jesus who is identified as the agent of creation in the Great Story. John writes in his own beautiful creation account at the beginning of his biography of Jesus:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

Today my chapter-a-day journey take me back to the beginning with the book of Genesis. It’s been eight years since my last journey through these parts, and as I read through the well-known account of creation, I found both my heart and mind struggling to distill my thoughts down to a simple, coherent thought. So, I began to explore with both heart and mind what it was that my heart and mind were struggling with.

First, there’s the reality that over 40 years of study I have observed so many teachers, preachers, and scholars who try to simplify the account of Creation into a box that serves their purpose. Instead, as I read it, I find it infinitely complex in beauty, form, and mystery.

And that reveals to me the next layer of my struggle. There is so much here that to try and condense it into a blog post on a Monday morning in September feels like a fool’s errand. I don’t want to be yet another reductionist of something so expansive in both significance and subtlety.

That’s what brought me back to Mr. Tayer and his young friend walking through park and stopping to consider the wonder of a caterpillar (just like Wendy and I were doing with our grandson Milo on a FaceTime call this past week) and metamorphosis, and time, and physics, and connectedness, and a giant, ever-expanding universe, and the notion of everything being contained in one small point, and of Jesus being the Alpha Point from which everything flows in the beginning, and Jesus being the Omega point to which everything flows in the end, and that same Jesus become flesh-and-blood and moving into the neighborhood.

And so it begins, this journey through Geneisis. In the quiet I find myself determined to enter this journey, not constrained by what I’ve been taught it is or is supposed to be, but with my mind and heart open to the possibilities that it is far more than I ever imagined.

If you’d like to read the story of “Mr. Tayer” by Jean Houston, you may download it here.

A new message (on Ecclesiastes 2) has been uploaded to the Messages page.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.