BitterSweetLife

No, But It's Not Absolute Either:
Chronos Time vs. Kairos Time, Doing vs. Being

The mythical/biblical categories of chronos time and kairos time stare at us out of scripture, splintery fence slats next to an open door, but we usually miss them. We learn of these created elements through the medium of the Greek language—which adds an ironic, exotic tang to these ever present realities. We mistake them for an elixir, decanted on rare occasions; they were intended more as water.

In their commonsense meanings, the two words vary enough to be at least mildly interesting: Chronos is chronological, or elapsed time—the sequence of moments inevitably slipping by. Kairos is an appointed time, a specified season—time with particularity. So chronos is your life; kairos is your birthday. But there’s more to these types than that.

Living out chronos is the inevitable result of being human and being alive at the same time, but it takes divinity for kairos to occur. Chronos (I’m dropping the italics now) we understand with dizzying clarity. It’s seven days a week, 24 hours a day, a hive of methodically buzzing hornets that drives us to distraction. Chronos is often tedious, an unremarkable fence that runs beside the road no matter where we go.

Kairos has less to do with activity and more to do with being. When kairos enters, the lines of chronos blur. When kairos breaks into our existence, by the grace of God, we taste the sweet flavor of concentrated life. We breathe the pure air of self-forgetfulness and remember what we’ve forgotten: that we are creatures in relation to a Creator, that we have eternal names, and that God did not make our souls on a conveyor belt. We step into the shadow of Christ himself, whose arrival and life is the ultimate expression of kairos. Kairos is an opening door.

The alignment of chronos with spatial, sequential action is not absolute, but it becomes more so, I think, as we grow older. For a child, to act is often to forget oneself, and enter kairos. The baby who plays is not carrying out a cold march of the hours. Aidan bounces up and down on my knee, laughing, and I see a human who is freely enjoying the grace of his creation. For children, to run and jump and perform “serious” tasks is often a far cry from the rigid functionality that sets in later, and takes the happy levity out of doing.

One part of growing older—and surely not the best part—is learning to discover sweet moments of kairos in quieter settings. Playing is not as easy as it was; self-forgetfulness is harder to come by. Often it takes a concerted effort to simply be still, stop moving, and embrace the mysterious reality of being a child of God. Kairos, when it comes, is mysterious, like the incarnation; we do not always know how and why it got here—but I think it is hard to miss when it does come. Kairos brings blessing and renewal without full diagnostic specs and we do not complain.

I think it is a worthy goal, if an unattainable one, to aim for a correspondence of chronos and kairos, to act with the brave freedom of a confirmed servant, and make this condition persist over time. This is what it means, at heart, to “be” a poet or to “be” a saint. I look at Jesus, and see the marks of miraculous synthesis everywhere. His actions are at once unrestrained and calm. He possesses full self-knowledge but is not ill at ease. He is omnipotent but remains a child—and these qualities mark all 33 years; they do not emerge on just his good days.

Others have their moments: Peter walks on water, then forgets who and where he is, and falters. David dances before the ark of God, but the cordons of self-focus direct him to Bathsheba. Paul exchanges a visionary experience of undiluted kairos for a thousand miles of dusty roads and beatings, chronos tugging at his heart like gravity. And me? I find kairos in a morning of rare quiet and lose it on the drive to work. Or I catch kairos in the wind on a clear, bright day and forget it is still there when my hike is over.

I wish my life was punctuated with kairos more frequently, and with greater duration. I long to grasp these moments of high reality, and hold on.

Chronos is necessary to this world. A frame is necessary to a painting. But one day chronos will crumble into dust, and kairos will billow to fill all of existence. Then I suspect that we will sympathize with C.S. Lewis’s character Ransom, in Perelandra, who enters the reaches of deep space braced for a cold, bleak wasteland—and finds instead a rich suffusion of beauty and power beyond the limits of earth-bound expectations.

When Christ says, “Well done…enter the joy of your Master,” then chronos will fizzle like a Salvador Dali clock. We will still do things in heaven. We will still have time. But it will be the limitless, malleable, renewing expanse of pure kairos. Decay and loss and dry repetition will give way to mysterious life, the night sky melted by morning.