Kairos Time

But even though we now have a moderately consistent chronology according to our clocks, there is considerable variation in our interior clocks. How long is a toothache? How long is a wonderful time? Lewis Carroll expressed a profound truth when he had the Mad Hatter say, ‘If you knew time as well as I do, you wouldn’t be talking about wasting it. It’s him… We quarrelled last March… and ever since that… he won’t do a thing I ask.’
- Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

Henri Nouwen writes, “In every critical event, there is an opportunity for God to act creatively and reveal a deeper truth than what we see on the surface of things.” I remember feeling this way about what the pandemic did to our sense of time. I wrote in the spring of 2020:

Miraculously, nearly overnight, my days have been wiped clean, all the daily and weekly markers simply vanished. I used to make five, six school and swim runs in a day: I haven’t started up the car in a week (D has driven during the times we’ve gone out to now-overcrowded parks). There will be more and more zoom events scheduled as schools and activities boot back up virtually, but in the meanwhile, we’re all forced to sit in this space where our sense of time has been warped. I am starting to understand how my six-year-old feels. Even pre-pandemic, he would ask us regularly, what day is it?

The Greeks had two words for time. Chronos is clock-time, time in compartments, in series of events. The other word for time is kairos, and I like how David Brooks writes about experiencing it in nature: “The wilderness lives at the pace of what the Greeks called kairos time, which can be slower but is always richer. Synchronous time is moment after moment, but kairos time is qualitative, opportune or not yet ripe, rich or spare, inspired or flat—the crowded hour or the empty moment… The soul communing with itself in the wilderness is at kairos time, too—slow and serene, but thick and strong, like the growing of the redwood.”

Part of the gift of the pandemic was this realization that there is another kind of time. Too often, we see time as a commodity, a resource to be managed. Something to be taken and done as much with as possible. We live under the tyranny of our own schedules, and whether we wish it or not, we begin to think of time as entirely regulated by the clock.

But that is not kairos time. Kairos time is qualitative, not quantitative. It is a setting, not a commodity. It is the place in which God does his work, the space in which we experience what he has for us. Nouwen describes it this way in his book Discernment: “time becomes not just something to get through or manipulate or manage, but the arena of God’s good work in us… Time points beyond itself and begins to speak to us of God… To start seeing that the many events of our day, week, or year are not in the way of our search for a full life but rather the way to it is a real experience of conversion.”

That’s the question: how do we find a full life, a kairos-time kind of life, in the world that we live in? Because things have rebooted now for sure. Our schedules are busier than they ever were. Our kids have stopped asking about the day of the week. They’ve learned to read the calendar, to strap on watches, to always be preparing for the next thing on the schedule.

Sometimes, we have to take a break from chronos time. I came across this little nugget on the Sabbath today, inserted almost randomly into a chapter in Exodus:

Six days you shall work, but on the seventh day you shall rest. In plowing time and in harvest you shall rest (Exodus 34:21, ESV).

Some translations insert the word even: “even in plowing time and in harvest.” Even when your schedule is crammed and you have all kinds of pressure to produce, even when time is a commodity you have to use—even, and especially, then, you will take a day for rest. That day would have given them something of what the pandemic gave us: unclocked time.

We need to stop our schedules too. To do things slowly: a walk, preparing for a meal, reading a good book, watching a good movie (movies are kairos-like, right? You only look at your watch during bad ones). Any moment that is lived in without hurry can become a kairos moment.  

But we don’t always have to stop the clocks. In the Bible, kairos is associated with discernment and action, with recognizing a meaningful moment and responding to it. Kairos times are appointed times, when we see the kingdom of God breaking through, when there is salvation, God moving and working—and that happens, of course, right in the middle of our schedules. It happens through our schedules. We just have to be able to see it and to respond.

Sometimes the Bible translates kairos not as “time” but as “opportunity”—the thing we must be open to, and even looking for, while we live through our schedules. This is not so much about a way of doing as a way of seeing—seeing, as Nouwen puts it, that “the many events of our day, week, or year are not in the way of our search for a full life but rather the way to it.”