Minilogue - December 2007
Meaningful Time
By the Rev. Bruce Johnson
One of the customs of this season that I’ve always enjoyed is the tradition of the advent calendar. Something about carefully opening those little cardboard cut-out windows to reveal a surprising image or message “behind the scenes” of a colorful holiday picture has always appealed to me. Perhaps this practice can teach us something about looking beneath the surface of things, and of being open to the surprises of life. Advent calendars also encourage us to approach life “one day at a time,” even - or perhaps especially - in an atmosphere of eager expectation and anxious planning. The little ritual of opening just one of those cardboard flaps each day is a way of learning to “be here now” in the present moment, which is a teaching held in common by many of the world’s religious traditions. As the Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, expresses it, “present moment, wonderful moment!”
Advent is an invitation to an entirely different experience of time. The ancient Greeks spoke of two very different qualities of timeconsciousness, which they called chronos and kairos. “Chronos,” of course, is the root of words like “chronic,” “chronicle,” and “chronological;” it denotes a kind of objective, measurable, and detached experience of time. There is nothing particularly “human” about chronos; it simply goes on “signifying nothing” as “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day.” Chronos is simply what we call “clock time.” Kairos, on the other hand, is humanly significant time, the “right” time and the “ripe” time. It is an elusive but deeply felt dimension of time, more akin to rhythm and a sense of timing than to the mere ticking of a clock. From a strictly chronological point of view, all time is the same, but we all recognize from our own experience that time seems to flow differently depending upon our consciousness. Supposedly, Albert Einstein used a simple story to describe his abstract theories of physics in non-mathematical terms: “When a man sits with a pretty girl (sic) for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for an minute, and it’s longer than an hour. That’s relativity.” Whatever may be the subtleties of relativity theory, it remains true that our human experience of time can be radically different, depending upon whether we approach the future with fear or with hope, anxiety or openness.
Kairos is, above all, meaningful time, the moment suffused with depth and value and significance. In the Bible, the word, kairos, is often translated as “the fullness of time.” History is not just “one damn thing afteranother.” Human time is perpetually pregnant with meaning, and the advent season is a good time to meditate on that potential, one day at a time. One thing is certain: the “fullness of time” does not mean having an especially busy and crowded schedule, with all the spaces filled in your appointment book! We cannot escape chronological time, of course; we need to pay attention to our clocks and datebooks. But as the circling year comes back round again, and the layers of meaning deepen in our lives, may we also learn to enter the time of kairos, to step back from the busy-ness and stress of this season in order to feel how each moment - like the little paper door on the advent calendar - opens to reveal hidden treasures beneath the surface of our lives.
Bruce