A Chronos Zig and a Kairos Zag
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A Chronos Zig
and a Kairos Zag
Chronos, Χρόνος a Greek word which the Romans Latinised as Chronus,
we know as chronological time, is, at its simplest definition, the flowing of
existence from the past, which we record as history/memory, to the present – a
somewhat fleeting experience as the moment I typed ‘present’ it was already
passing! – to the future which, of
course to use the old cliché that tomorrow never comes, as the moment I am in
the future it is the present and the moment I blink, as it were, that future
present has become history!
Over the millennia, we have moved from experiencing, being
aware of, this flow of time from simply checking the movement of the sun, the
growth of plants, people, the maturing of the former to ‘harvest time’, of the
later through the stages of life into old age and death, to developing every
more complex instruments to track time.
Chronological time started being ever more carefully
recorded, from the observing of the lengthening and shortening of the shadows
cast by the sun, when a stick was planted in the ground to sundials, to hour
glasses, to clocks, to watches, to atomic clocks, to computers tracking time,
all along the way seeking to get international agreements on precise time and
splitting things from the macro of daylight and nighttime into eventually
precise – well as precise as we continue to strive to so divide time – flows of
millennia, centuries, decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes,
seconds and we keep chipping away at the latter.
Why?
None of these mathematical or philosophical or technological
efforts has added a milli-second, or a nano-second to existence, neither of the
cosmos nor of earth, nor of a single person.
Yet we bombard each other with questions such has: “How much
time do you, do we have?”; “What time is it?”; “Time is going so slow!”; “I’m
running out of time!”
I remember once in the tunnels under Niagara Falls being
irritated by a tour guide shouting over the noise how much water passes over
the falls per minute, or was it per second?
Who cares!
I just wanted time to be left alone to experience the
tremendous sight and sound of the water!
Another Greek word concerning time is καιρός which means the
right or opportune moment [as yes moment in time another parsing!] for
whatever, no need to go down that rabbit hole as it would ‘take’ too much time!
The Evangelists writing down the Gospel of Jesus Christ, used
καιρός – Kairos – to mean that precise and opportune time for God’s action
within chronological time: the Incarnation of Jesus, His Public Life, Passion,
Death, Resurrection, Ascension, the descent of the Holy Spirit and yes the
precise moment in history when breathing His life into us, creating us in His
image and likeness we are conceived, we become, we are a human person starting
our own journey down the river of time.
There is a point too when, in chronological time, but only
in such time, our journey will end.
That is when passing through the door of death we enter to
live within the real realm beyond time!
The very first words of Genesis and the very first words of
the Prologue of the Holy Gospel according to St. John, in the Latin Vulgate,
are: In principio= at/in the beginning.
Before the Divine act of creation there was nothing, nadda,
zilch vulnerable to movement or change, neither did time per se exist and there
was no one to experience it, let alone measure it.
There was no time, no history, no present, no future.
Once when, to use the hackneyed expression I had ‘some time
to kill’, I picked up the just published Hawking book: A Brief History of Time.
Eventually I read the whole thing but the basic concept
amused me.
Scientists, for all their palaver about their big bang
theories readily admit they cannot go back to the exact beginning moment, but
clearly there was a bang.
Any child can tell them to make a bang you need a thing to
go bang and a means of making the bang go bang.
That way kids love to pop balloons and bubble wrap: the
balloon, the bubble wrap and the explosive stuff within both, air under
pressure, is the ‘thing’. The trigger can be a little hand pricking the balloon
with a pin or feet stomping on the bubble wrap.
No scientist has yet, to my knowledge, pinpointed the stuff
that went bang, the trigger to make the bang, must less how the stuff to bang
became stuff!
Who can say where the
road goes
Where the day flows,
only time
And who can say if
your love grows….
…why your heart sighs
Your love flies….your
heart cries…..only time. [From: Only Time by Enya]
Some of our expressions we use about time are fascinating
for they betray a sense of time as if it were matter, a type of material that
we ‘save’, as in daylight saving time; or ‘waste’, ‘kill’, ‘take’, ‘spend’,
wish we had more or less of, saying that some-times or often-times it goes ‘too
fast’ or ‘too slow’ or we wish we ‘had’ the time to, or ask of one another
‘give me a minute’, ‘give me ‘some time’, as though time were something we
could actually portion out or withhold like a slice of pie!
Time, like the wind, can be experienced, in a sense felt,
but while the wind can fluctuate between the gentleness of a breeze or rage
like a hurricane, time’s movement is constant and the wind is discernable by
its brushing against our skin as a sensation of touch, our observing drifting
snow, a sensation of sight, and sometimes its howling can be an intense
experience of sound.
Time, in and of itself, is not accessible to the senses,
though we can transfer feelings onto time: “I’m in a rush, bored, languishing,
quiet”, that is I am experiencing time as IF it were rushing, stagnant,
immoveable, still.
We can harness the wind, but not time.
We can harness rivers of water, but not the river of time.
Granted people talk of “time-sharing”, for example, of
vacation homes, but this is deceptive because like hours of work or the time on
a parking meter it is not time itself which is being shared or paid for, rather
it is an accepted agreement between people that space rented, work done,
parking allotted shall be deemed to be equivalent to a unit of time.
It only works if there is a space to share, work to be done,
a spot to park the car.
While we cannot see the wind itself, rather we know it is
windy because snow swirls, there is no way time can be unmasked by any physical
or material movement or chunk of stuff.
Ultimately time, from a human perspective, is a series of
communal act[s] of acceptance and agreement that the commonly experienced
reality of life as an ongoing process of change shall be delineated by more
than just the movement of the sun and tides but by a process of calculating the
periods within which changes occur.
Some of those changes, such as the movement of tides, of the
seasons, we can observe but not control; likewise, that of the sun and the
rotation of the earth so, we compromise, perhaps to temper our common
expectations or anxieties, and set arbitrary dates such as the date of when
winter begins. However, where I live in the north by December 21st
we usually have already experienced close to two months of winter weather!
Time, like our very existence, is a gift given by the One
who creates us: is a grace given by the same loving Father, sanctified by His
Son, Jesus Christ, who enters time to redeem us, and is also a chalice of
grace, offered to us by the Holy Spirit who leads us into the depth of each
moment wherein if we dwell more in kairos than chronos we will experience time
as a deepening of communion of love with the Most Holy Trinity.
There is a sense in which time is an opportunity, a means to
accomplish acts of love of one another, of acceptance of strangers, or serving
the poor, in a word time offers constant opportunity to be truly alive as sons
and daughters of God, as fellow persons with every other person on earth, to
build family and society, achieve Gospel rooted social justice and peace.
Of course, we have free will and therefore can squander the
grace-gift of time by choosing to be self-centred, hurtful, greedy, angry,
unloving, warmongering.
In the film The Lord of the Rings, Frodo at one point tells
Gandalf how he wishes, this burden of the ring and the journey, had never
happened.
Gandalf’s reply points out that we must choose what to do
with the time that has been given to us.
In Christianity time has a fundamental importance. Within the dimension of time the world was
created; within it the history of salvation unfolds, finding its culmination in
the "fullness of time" of the Incarnation, and its goal in the
glorious return of the Son of God at the end of time. In Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, time becomes a dimension of God,
who is himself eternal. With the coming of Christ there begin "the last
days" (cf. Heb. 1:2), the "last hour" (cf. 1 Jn. 2:18), and the
time of the Church, which will last until the Parousia.
From this relationship
of God with time there arises the duty
to sanctify time. This is done, for example, when individual times, days or
weeks, are dedicated to God, as once happened in the religion of the Old
Covenant, and as happens still, though in a new way, in Christianity. In the
liturgy of the Easter Vigil the celebrant, as he blesses the candle which
symbolizes the Risen Christ, proclaims: "Christ yesterday and today, the
beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega, all time belongs to him, and all the
ages, to him be glory and power through every age for ever". He says these
words as he inscribes on the candle the numerals of the current year. The
meaning of this rite is clear: it emphasizes the fact that Christ is the Lord of time; he is its beginning and its end; every
year, every day and every moment are embraced by his Incarnation and
Resurrection, and thus become part of the "fullness of time". For
this reason, the Church too lives and celebrates the liturgy in the span of a
year. The solar year is thus permeated by the liturgical year, which
in a certain way reproduces the whole mystery of the Incarnation and
Redemption, beginning from the First Sunday of Advent and ending on the
Solemnity of Christ the King, Lord of the Universe and Lord of History. Every
Sunday commemorates the day of the Lord's Resurrection. [St. John Paul II:
Toward the Third Millennium]
When I was a small boy you would hear parish church bells
ring at six in the morning, at noon and at six in the evening.
These were the Angelus bells, the Angelus being a prayer
witnessing the announcement of the Incarnation. The noon bells, where I lived,
would also be the time when a canon would be fired off from the Citadel, an old
garrison tradition dating back to 1857 when the city was a British military outpost.
Such were my earliest experiences and indicators of time.
As we grow older we learn about set times for meals, for
bed, for school, university class times, later for work and numerous other
events in life.
Some of us are old enough to remember the time when WWII
ended, or when the Cuban missile crisis began and ended – those were ‘tough’
times – when 9/11 happened or Paris, London, Ottawa or the latest terrorist
events in Manchester and London England – likewise very tough times.
Now it is what we call ‘Easter’ time, but within the liturgy
of the Church, within kairos, in the preface of the Mass for the Easter Vigil
and for eight days we pray: “This IS the night” …... “This IS the day…”
Well written biographies are researched through relevant
documents, letters, journals, critical events in history which either the
subject of the biography participated in or were impacted by, hence they
usually follow a timeline from birth to death, much like works about historical
events.
Biographies are written by someone other than the subject
and, if well done, are objective accounts of a lived life.
Autobiographies are by their nature subjective, even if the
writer draws upon personal journals, letters, etc., and there is also the
tricky part of either self-adulation or, as often happens these days, they can
be raw to the point of titillation to increase sales!
In a novel from early in the last century MR. BLUE, there is
a powerful scene in which a priest struggles to celebrate possibly the last
Holy Mass on earth. In the film version of MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE Sir Alec Guinness
in the final scenes powerfully portrays the priest celebrating Holy Mass at an
altar devoid of linens, candles, chalice, paten, host, wine, and vestments.
There will come a day when I will celebrate my last Holy
Mass here on earth and there may also come a day when like Monsignor Quixote,
my memory, or most of it may be gone.
We speak of the ‘ravages’ of time, which for we humans is
the aging process.
I mention all the above about time as I don’t intend to
write a strict timeline from birth to whenever my heart shall say enough and I
will strike the last period at the end of the last sentence.
As the dying priest in Bernanos’ DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST
says: “All is grace.”
My zig zag life truly has been, is, will be all grace.
That often I have refused the gift of grace is on me and
never an indication grace has been lacking.
Another way of stating it is that all is Love’s gift.
Even when the gift is refused the love is never withdrawn by
Him for His love for us is enduring and everlasting.
So, the times within this telling will not be sequential but
certainly all connected.
Like three times when I stood in moments of death.
Only now, in my old age, do I see clearly each of those
moments were, indeed in memory, are grace.
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