“What if beginning–this beginning, any beginning, The Beginning–does not lie
back, like an origin, but rather opens out? “To begin” derives from the old Teutonic
be-ginnan, “to cut open, to open up,” cognate with the Old English ginan, meaning
“to gape, to yawn,” as a mouth or an abyss (OED).
We gape back. We make brilliant machines for gaping. They inscribe a universe
that appears to open endlessly. Indeed, its speed of expansion now seems, stunningly,
to be accelerating–as though replaying the initial surge into materialization called the
Big Bang. Or more suitably: the Big Birth. A strange “dark energy” pushes the
universe infinitely out. In a centrifugal expansion that is paradoxically without
center, glamorous conflagrations of star death glide along on the same momentum
with nurseries of nebulae incubating fetal stars. The galaxies interlace like a
circulatory system: the nonlinear geometry of chaos is figured everywhere.
Astronomers, who had once focussed upon “jewel-like lights that moved in eternally
recurring patterns,” must confront the possibility that the starry galaxies and their
creatures are “barely more than flecks of froth on a stormy sea of dark matter.”
Darkness upon the deep.”
Catherine Keller
Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming
From where i am, creation unfolds minute by minute, millisecond by millisecond, because Someone beholds you and me by infinite self-giving, by “opening out,” radically available yet free as a wind. I am enclosed in this “yawn,” sustained by this “gaping”. S/he beholds that i may be born beautifully (freedom from anxieties and fear of death) every millisecond. I can only give birth in return by beholding this generous gape that passes from constellations to the human cells. Immeasurable silent, big, dark, luminous, fiery, beholding yawn!
