Sunday, March 30, 2014

Kairos Time and Chronos Time...

"Teach us to make the most of our time that we may grow in wisdom..."  Psalm 90:12 

As I was running today on the Burke Gilman Trail, which is a paved multi-use recreational trail that connects many beautiful parts of the city from Puget Sound east on around Lake Washington, I came upon this scene.  





Doesn't it look like I was transported to another time and place like the Shire in the Hobbit? As I passed by this, I was also listening to a lecture given by a friend of mine (Julie Canlis) about time and about the church calendar. She contrasted chronos to kairos time.   
Here is part of what she said: 

The Greeks had two words for time – chronos time comes from the god Chronos who devours his children. This is linear time, and from this word we get chronology, chronometers, chronicle. It is 7:40pm, I wrote my lecture at 2:17pm on Friday March 21, etc. This is the time that we believe is real, in fact – so real it is like a god to us. We don’t even question it. We also value things according to this time – have I connected with my children? Well, I gave them 23 undivided minutes today. Or worse, when we get behind, we feel devoured by time. (It was quite an insightful myth). It feels like chronos-time has the upper hand, and we, poor mortals, must submit to its judgments of us. Perhaps feeling devoured by it.

But there was another Greek word for time that the church grabbed, and that was called ‘kairos.’  Kairos time does not devour us; it frees us to be present to the real life that we are living right now. Kairos is when Jen Devries’ water breaks, and she wakes Eric in the night and says, ‘it’s time!’ Or it is from the book of Galatians, ‘when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son …’ That is not speaking of the fullness of chronos time. It is kairos: high time. Chronos is about minutes and hours; Kairos is pregnant with importance. Chronos asks (breathlessly) ‘what time is it?’ Kairos asks, ‘what is this time for?’

Here is the primary difference: Chronos time is abstract, totally impersonal, having nothing to do with our ‘real’ life and what is going on. Kairos is concrete, having to do with the people in front of us, the real place that we live, the real neighbours next door, the real God who is constantly making an effort to wake us up. So, in the words of the priest Robert Capon, ‘Kairos, therefore, is the real thing, and chronos is only a kind of game that a relative world is content to play. Kairos is the time of human beings, of events, of history; and kairos, not chronos, is the time I enter when I step out of my doorway at 8:45AM.’[1]

We can step out of our doorway first thing in the morning into chronological time, cursing ourselves for being late, rushing our children into the car, speeding past our neighbours. But for this reason, during Lent, we hang in our kitchen a giant cross in the place where our normally giant clock hangs. The clock is still there, snubbed and pouting, set on a wall which isn’t front and centre. The cross reminds me to try, to try, to step out of my doorway into kairos time: the world of children, of their little anxieties before school, of the neighbour who is stressing over his job. Every day I have the choice when I walk out the door: will I be marching to chronos or kairos time?

Lent can beckon us into kairos time.  I want the kids in Sunday School to grasp that Lent is not even about 40 chronological days. What counts is not how many days it is, but what it is time for. It is about a time to wake up. A time to get ready for something BIG.


[1] Capon, Offering of Uncles, p.49

So, my prayer today is that the next couple of months would beckon you into kairos time. As Julie said above, "What counts is not how many days it is, but what it is time for." May this season in your journey be a time to get ready for something BIG. 
holding out hope for you and with you-- 






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