The Slow Way Newsletter: Kairos Time, Where the Love of God is the Realest Thing
a weekly newsletter for all the frantic strivers, serial doers & weary achievers
unhurried thoughts
Time Outside of Time
We got a kitten one week ago. In fact, as you’re receiving this on Saturday morning it is our one-week anniversary of bringing home “Sir Givret the Short” (I KNOW, his name) from the shelter. He is a spunky little guy, full of purrs and playfulness, and completely unfazed by my son Ace, who makes loud and constant noises all day long. Givret the Short is made for our family. He’s here for it.
This past Wednesday the boys and I drove down to Pennsylvania to my mother in law’s house for a few days to get our last summer swims in before school starts this Monday, and we brought the kitten with us. He was doing great, literally bouncing in and out of rooms at grandma’s house, until he found one of those super sticky mouse traps in a dark corner, got caught in it, and eventually had to be oiled and washed to get all the glue out of his fur. He was pretty sad about this, and sleepy, so he crawled into a tiny hole behind the TV that NO HUMAN COULD EVER FIND, and went fast asleep.
Twenty minutes later my boys wondered if I had seen him. Soon we were all shuffling around the house shaking cat food and calling “Givreeeet, Givreeet!” He didn’t show. We searched the cobwebby crawl space in the laundry room. We got on our knees in the garage. We opened closets that haven’t been opened in months. He was nowhere. We checked the yard, the bushes, the neighbors' yards. Finally, after forty minutes of searching, we submitted a missing kitten report to the microchip registry. One of my sons shut himself in a room to cry.
I was still in search mode, turning toys bins in the family room upside down, when I looked behind the TV console and saw a two inch high opening that had no matching opening in the front. It was a last ditch possibility. I moved the bulky wooden cabinet and out came a very confused and sleepy kitten.
Just like that the world changes. First, the kids are playing Legend of Zelda on their grandmother’s couch, and then they’re tearing the house upside down, crying, and imagining every dream they had for this new kitten crushed in some horrible accident.
Those moments show up more and more as we grow, those moments when time narrows or expands, when the world slows down, when the thing in front of us becomes the only thing: The phone call from my mom in January that my dad had suffered a seizure. And two hours later, the result of his MRI: a brain tumor. Those moments we step outside of time, where everything becomes laser-focused, sometimes terrifying, sometimes clarifying. Sometimes both.
The ancient Greeks had two words for time, Chronos and Kairos. Chronos is time as we most often understand it: sequential, chronological time, in which life moves along a line and we grow and change and age along that line. The sun rises and it sets along that line. Kairos is something deeper, something beyond seconds and minutes. Bromleigh McCleneghan, in her book Good Christian Sex describes it as “time outside of time, time in which everything happens, in which all reality is held together.” Kairos is eternity. Kairos is the recognition of what matters. It’s reality beyond what our eyes can take in.
It’s what Richard Rohr calls The Really Real, where we see the world as it truly is, in all its beauty, in all its truth. He believes that when Jesus taught about the Kingdom of God, this is what he was getting at. “The Kingdom is the experience of the love of God, the ultimate and real truth,” he says in his book Jesus’ Plan for a New World. “No one possesses the Kingdom; it possesses you. You know you are merely a participant in a much larger mystery.”
That’s what Kairos time does to us. It reveals the much larger mystery. It possesses us in a moment. It takes us into the space where the love of God is the realest thing.
Now, there’s a reason Kairos time is special. We can’t live in it all the time. There are bills to pay and kids to drop off at soccer practice. There are bathrooms to scrub and dogs to take on walks. But I truly believe that this is the secret to cultivating our lives in the Spirit: Learning to step into Kairos. Giving ourselves time in every day to release Chronos, and choose the Really Real, to remind ourselves that the love of God is truer than the list of to-dos, reminding ourselves that the “much larger mystery” is holding us and the lives we love.
When I talk about The Slow Way, that’s what I mean. You can’t move efficiently through Kairos time. You can’t check off to-dos in Kairos. It’s a slower, deeper space. And, of course, it's not a space where we can live all day. We have jobs and responsibilities. But when we dip into the Really Real each day, when we allow the truth of goodness and hope to remind us that God’s love is here, transforming everything, even in the suffering around us, we can live in Chronos time with an eye on Kairos, knowing that the calendar isn’t all there is. The more we learn to dip in and out of Kairos, the more The Really Real is in charge and not the machine of efficiency.
And then when the moments of clarity or fear or depth of love arrive, we will already be familiar with that space, with that Mystery. The Really Real will already be a friend, and we will know how to sit in Kairos, how to welcome time outside of time, how to hold the love of God for ourselves, and also for the beautiful, fragile humans in our orbit.
a slow practice
Let’s practice dipping in and out of Kairos. When I say that what I really mean is, let’s pray. Because I really believe that prayer is the practice of entering a deeper reality, an expanded vision of life.
Spend some time today reflecting on what Jesus meant when he preached about the Kingdom of God, sometimes translated the Reign of God, and how that Reign of God has played out in your individual and beautiful life.
Pull out a big piece of paper or a journal and make a timeline of your life. If you’re like me and not super artistic, it’s okay to just make a straight line going from the day you were born to today. If you have a mind for drawing or creating and want this to be beautiful, make a project of it! Start by marking moments of importance according to Chronos time, maybe important events in childhood, graduations, weddings, funerals, new jobs, moves, births. Now mark moments of Kairos. (It’s okay if they overlap with Chronos time! A birth can be both things, can’t it?)
What are the significant spiritual moments in your timeline? When did time stand still? When did the meaning of your life clarify? Mark those moments, and spend some time reflecting on them. What did those moments feel like? What did you experience? How did they change your trajectory, your character?
This might be an all-week practice, remembering and reflecting on your moments of Kairos. Once you’ve gotten it all down, take some time to pray with your timeline in hand, to let yourself sit with the memories and the moments. Let yourself, in a way, hover above the story you’ve written and drawn along that timeline, both the Chronos story and the Kairos story. Where has God met you? Where has life been a reminder of divine love? What does the Really Real mean to you?
Ask God to give you courage to live in the Really Real. Pray that you would look for it, and seek it with all your heart.