Why do things begin?  The obvious answer is, of course, that if things never begin, things that are here, us included, would not be here.  Things had to begin in order that things could be.  Conversely, however, if things did not begin, things would not end.
     Yet why must things end?  Why can not things begin and never end?  Maybe the seeming impossibility of this possibility accounts for in part why we finite beings have so much trouble grasping the notion of eternity.  We expect beginnings, we expect endings.  But we do not expect beginnings without endings.  Nor do we expect endings without beginnings.  Comprehending a condition with neither beginning nor end leaves us gasping for breath:  how can such a thing be?
     "Abandon all hope those who enter," reads, according to the narrator of Dante's Inferno portion of his Divine Comedy, a sign above Hell.  Though we may recoil at the horror of a juncture totally devoid of hope, we may recoil even more at the deeper truth that it implies:  a beginning without an end.  We of course wish for the brightest moments in our lives to continue indefinitely, but the darkest, well, we would wish that their time is short.  Yet we cannot have it both ways.  If the best has no end, the worst must, too.  If an eternity exists, it must exist in every way.
     Perhaps some find this frightening, perhaps some find it ludicrous.  As we draw ever closer to the final denouement of Lent, however, it makes perfect sense.  Why else would an eternal God have spoken, in the person of Jesus, to finite beings if eternity did not exist in every way?  Time cannot pop out of nothing, and space cannot emerge from emptiness.
     In the hourglass of eternity, things not eternal must begin.  They also must end.  Yet eternity must always remain, moral structure and all, boggling our senses and imaginations, yet underscoring for us that without it, nothing else can really begin.  Why else are we here?