Describing the beginning of the Universe is always a problem, but even worse is trying to describe what came before that! In fact, it is beyond the reach of rigorous scientific investigation, although there are some interesting speculations.

Still, no other human endeavor does much better with this difficult question:

Left, from Sidney Harris, http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/originals2.html, see also http://astro.wsu.edu/worthey/astro/html/lec-cartoons.html; right from Jack Ziegler, the New Yorker, 7/6/1992

The origins of the Universe have fascinated man from our earliest records, since the question combines religious, philosophical, and scientific aspects:

There is a thing confusedly formed,

Born before Heaven and Earth.

Silent and void

It stands alone and does not change,

Goes round and does not weary.

It is capable of being the mother of the world.

I know not its name

So I style it 'The Way.'

I give it the makeshift name of 'The Great.'

Being great, it is further described as receding,

Receding, it is described as far away,

Being far away, it is described as turning back.

----- Lao-tse, Tao Te Ching (China, about 600 B.C.)

-or-

Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected. If God created the world, where was He before creation? ... How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say He made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression ... Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end.

----- The Mahapurana (The Great Legend), Jinasena (India, 9th century)

-or-

Its easier to suppose that
the universe has existed from
all eternity than to conceive a
Being beyond its limits capable of creating it.
---- Shelley, Queen Mab

-or-

It is difficult beyong desciption to conceive that space can have no end; but it is difficult to conceive an end. It is difficult beyond the power of man to conceive an eternal duration of what we call time; but it is more impossible to conceive a time when there shall be no time

--- Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

-or-

We could take the approach of the Irish theologan Bishop Ussher. After he had carefully added up all the time intervals in the Bible to determine that God began to create the heavens and the earth at 2:30 in the afternoon on Sunday, October 23, 4004 B. C., he was asked "And pray, what was God doing before that? "Creating a Hell for those who ask questions such as that," Ussher thundered back.