Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

Yea, through life, death, through sorrow and through sinning,
Christ shall suffice me, for he hath sufficed;
Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning,
Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.
                                                 F. W. H. Myers

It was the eve of the crucifixion, the last night of Jesus' earthly life. As he sat at the table with his disciples, he tried to reassure them that they would be together again.

"In my Fathers house are many rooms." He was going on ahead to make ready so that one day they could inhabit this house with him. "I will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way where I am going" John 14:2-4 RSV).

Thomas, a man with no patience for mysteries, objected. "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?"

And Jesus answered, "I am the way ... "

As John and I were retracing the ancient road to Santiago de Compostela, we'd encountered what we took to be a medieval stone carver's mistake. In the Spanish city of Estella, founded in 1090 to care for footsore pilgrims passing that way, I spotted some writing over the entrance to a church. In the weathered stone I could just make out the faint raised shapes of the Alpha-and-Omega, first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, and a common symbol of Jesus. "I am the Alpha and the Omega," he declares in the Book of Revelation, "the first and the last, the beginning and the end."

"Look," I said to John, "they've got them in the wrong order!"

The mason had turned them around, Omega-and-Alpha.

We chuckled at the error, though it was perfectly understandable; most people back then were illiterate even in their own language, let alone Greek.

Then in Santiago de Compostela ten days later, outside the splendid cathedral that marks the end of the long pilgrimage, I stood staring up at another door. Above the cathedral's ornate south portal the oddly ordered letters were unmistakable. Omega-and-Alpha. A mistake would never have been allowed to go uncorrected here!

The reverse order must be deliberate. Why?

At Compostela, the pilgrim had not only reached the end of his journey, he'd reached the end of the then-known world. A few miles beyond the town, a rocky promontory called Finisterre, "the end of the earth," juts into the gray Atlantic. John and I bought picnic makings from a stall near the cathedral and took them to some rocks overlooking the sea.

Vast, immeasurable, an ocean of unknowns. For most of human history, no one could say what, if anything, lay beyond that horizon. Was Omega-and-Alpha a message about reaching the end? The limits of our knowledge? The end of a life? Did it say that the end of one journey means the start of another?

"I say that the tomb which closes on the dead, opens to them the sky," wrote Victor Hugo a year to the day after the drowning death of his nineteen-year-old daughter. Crushed by his loss, for twelve months he'd written nothing at all, ending his silence on that anniversary day with his triumphant statement of faith: "What down here we take to be the end, is only the beginning."

The German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer agreed. "This is the end," he said on April 8, 1945, the night before he was taken from his prison cell and hanged for his opposition to the Nazis. "And for me it is the beginning."

Omega-and-Alpha. Jesus not only "the first and the last," but "the last and the first." Jesus the end of our earthly pilgrimage. But Jesus also the starting point of a larger journey.

Like the medieval pilgrim staring out across an uncharted sea, none of us can see beyond that horizon. But we can hear him say to us, as he said to Thomas, "You know the way."

Remember all who have died in the peace of Christ, and those whose faith is known to you alone; bring them into the place of eternal joy and light.
                                 Book of Common Prayer

I stood on the shore of that uncharted sea as the end neared for my earliest friend, Mea Ivimey.

By then, Mea had been in the county home for the aged more than three years, unable to speak, increasingly unresponsive. Sitting by her bed on my visits, I would wonder about her faith. What did she feel, life ending as it began, in a public institution? Did she think about the orphanage in England? Did she still dream of a pied a terre - even, perhaps, of heaven as the place where it had been waiting for her all along?

Mea had resisted all my attempts to talk about the Way that I had found. It seemed unfair, now when she could not protest, to force my viewpoint on her. Still, sitting at her bedside, caressing a blue-veined hand, I would struggle for a way to put the truth so she could hear it. I told her that God wanted to be the father and mother she had lost, a husband who would not desert her. Whether she understood, whether she even heard, I could never tell.