While browsing for books that might be appropriate for my
two preteen granddaughters, Sarah and Clair, I came across L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. "Uncanny" is
a word I seldom use but thought the book was exactly that—uncanny,
peculiar, and uncomfortably strange. Yet it has stayed with me for a month or
so—the story of a quirky girl named Meg, her overly-intelligent little brother,
and their time-transcending journey to save their physicist father with the
help of three mysterious beings. Madeleine L'Engle, the writer whose books
invite readers to see time itself differently, passed away some years ago. But I
imagine, from the reviews of fans, her stories will continue to perplex middle
schoolers, and stay with them long after her books have been set aside.
L'Engle is someone who has reminded me of something I had
forgotten over time. That being the incredible difference between two words in
Greek, which I have unfortunately translated identically for many years. And I
think to most English readers, chronos
and kairos both appear as "time." But in Greek, these words are
vastly different. Chronos is the time on my iPhone, wood shop, or now
absent, wristwatch. It’s time on the move, passing from present to future and
so becoming past. Kairos, on the other hand, is qualitative rather than
quantitative. Sleeping, sky diving, a kiss, a birth, or death. It is time as a moment, a significant occasion, an immeasurable
quality. The New Testament writers use the word kairos to communicate God's
time, it is real time—it is the eternal now.
So I think it is said to me, a believer in Christ, that
when He, as Jesus, stepped into time to proclaim the kingdom of God, he came to
show me in chronos the reality of kairos. "Jesus took John and James and
Peter up the mountain in ordinary, daily chronos," writes L'Engle.
"Yet during the glory of the Transfiguration they were dwelling in
kairos." With this story in mind, L'Engle describes kairos as that time
which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy, time where I am completely
unselfconscious and yet paradoxically far more real than I can ever be when I
am continually checking my next appointment on my iPhone.
Ruminating on this, I have discovered it being an experience I
can recount; a moment so sweet or magnified it seems to stop time, an ordinary
or extraordinary moment wrinkled with something other than time. But L'Engle
presses my spiritual eyes to see this as something to be expected. "Am I
willing and able to be surprised?" L'Engle asks. "If we are to be
aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish
our hard-earned control of ourselves." If I have the courage to see it, at
seventy, the kingdom of God is close at hand; kairos breaking through like
Christ into the world.
I imagine Jacob, too, discovered the difference between
chronos and kairos when he set aside the past which was about to catch up with
him, along with his paralyzing fear of the future, and found himself living in
"none other than the house of God." The prophets and poets describe
similar moments of waking to the present and finding the eternal dimensions of
time. The shepherds in Bethlehem were going about their ordinary work when the
glory of the Lord captured the moment. "Do not be afraid," the angel
announced. "I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the
people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you" Luke 2:13-14. At this invasion of kairos
into the routine of chronos, the shepherds chose to respond with action:
"Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the
Lord has told us about" 2:15.
I believe with all my heart that uncanny encounters with
time are a part of, not just me, but a human experience. I, as a believer, have been given a language
to explain these encounters. I live somewhere between the already and the not
yet, caught by the eternal now and the one who dwells within it. The implications
are both temporal and unending. The question is: will I have the courage to
look for glory in the ordinary? To release control of my calendar and clock and
note the eternal in my midst? The apostle joins every prophet and poet who
proclaims the mysteries of time, "Behold, now is the time (kairos) of
God's favor, now is the day of salvation" 2 Corinthians 6:2.
Like Christ, glimpses of the eternal come quietly and
unexpectedly; they come and upset my very notion of time and all I discover
within it. Why should I be so unreconciled to time if the temporal were my only
concern? Or could it be that the eternal Word stepped into flesh, into my
bounded realm of time, and literally embodied the reality that time is
meaningful because of the eternal one in my midst.
Father, God, I have been shown, reminded and hopefully, will
never forget again that kairos is breaking into chronos and transforming
it. With Christ’s proclamation, "The kingdom of God is close at
hand"—and the temporal world invited to break in along with it. In
ordinary moments that hint at such a radical invasion, help me to have the
courage to be surprised by one who comes so near.
