The dawn of a new year and close of the previous year are cause for reflection.
What highs, lows, joys, sorrows, celebrations and surprises did I experience? What did I hope to do, but didn’t quite? What am I looking forward to this next year? What surprises are in store? What do I hope to feel this next time year, as I look back on this year?
This practice is not just for the transition into a new year. Any kind of life transition or life event causes us to look back on our lives and experience nostalgia and longing, sadness and regret, gratitude and joy. Births, graduations, marriages, bucket list vacations mark the good times. Illnesses, unemployment, death, any struggle in body, mind, and spirit, mark the sad times. Sometimes, we look back on the sad times and we see anew a grace that we didn’t see before. We long for the days of old. We eagerly anticipate the days to pass for an uplift in life circumstances. We look ahead and have ideas of how we want to spend our time in the year to come. We wait — for test results, for healing, for an answer, for peace in body, mind, and spirit. We wait.
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Time has taken on a new shape during the two years of this global pandemic. Two years, or put another way, 104 weeks, 728 days. We speak of “pre-Covid” times or “before this all began.” We anticipate when this current way of life will no longer be, or at least no longer be as intense as it is now.
The ancient Greeks had two words for time. The first was chronos, and refers to quantitative time – time that can be measured and defined. Seconds, minutes, hours, years, are examples of chronos time. When we are told we have to isolate for ten days, or that we will get test results in a few days, which is chronos time.
The second word the ancient Greeks had for time was kairos. Where chronos time can be defined, kairos time, by its very nature, is difficult to define. It is in some ways easier to define what it is not, rather than what it is. Kairos is time that cannot be measured and that cannot be quantified. Kairos is more like a moment, the right moment, the perfect moment. Kairos is qualitative time. One writer describes it as “The moment the world takes a breath.”
Kairos takes on even deeper meaning in Christian theology. Over 80 times in the New Testament, kairos is used for time. In the Gospel According to St. Mark, Jesus proclaims “The time (kairos) is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” Twice in the Gospel According to St. John, Jesus says, “My time (kairos) has not yet come.” There is a sense of ripeness to kairos time, which we see in this passage from Ecclesiastes, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted.” In the early Greek translations of this passage, each time kairos is the word used for time, not chronos.
Kairos takes on the shape of God’s time. In the Eastern Orthodox Churches and Eastern Catholic Churches, the Divine Liturgy begins with the Deacon saying to the Priest, “It is time (kairos) for the Lord to act.” When we worship, when we pray, chronos time is overtaken by kairos time. God’s time comes into human time, and we take a breath. The next time we hope that a worship service wraps up before kick-off or before the wait at our favorite restaurant is too long, remember that in worship, time stops, and we encounter eternity.
Kairos also meets our chronos lives in ways mysterious, surprising, and unexpected.
Sometimes the kairos moments are so evident that we can see them plainly, and sometimes we have to dust for fingerprints or walk through a time of chronos and then look back with kairos-colored glasses to see graces that were hidden at the time.
Holding the hand of a loved one as last breaths are taken, peace that comes in the midst of distressing circumstances, hope that comes in the midst of despair, healing that comes to us in body, mind and spirit in ways beyond what we hope or imagine, are all kairos moments.
A wise person recently said to me that it takes time to understand our journeys. Yes, I thought, it takes time – months, years, decades – to understand our journeys. It does. But it also takes kairos — ripe times, times when we see more fully and feel more deeply, moments of revelation and clarity when we encounter the eternal — to appreciate the beauty of our journeys.
Perhaps one of the most difficult concepts of kairos is that we don’t get to create it. That’s God’s job. We cannot make kairos subject to chronos. To say, “After dinner, I am going to experience kairos” is to miss the kairos boat. We can, however, make ourselves more open to kairos through prayer, meditation, quiet, and seeking out thin places where the distance between heaven and earth collapse and where we can be still in the presence of God. And in times of waiting for answers, waiting for healing, waiting for peace, waiting for we are not sure what — we can remember that God is with us in all the chronos of our lives and comes to us in kairos.
During this next year, may we have eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts that are open, to kairos, the presence of God with us, for all times, in all times, and through all times.
Kimberly Pepper is a board-certified chaplain at St. Peter’s Health.
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