KAIROS is a time of opportunity, a time to do somethig, a time of coming, a time of visitation; it is the coming (advent) of unique and unrepeatable moments whose meaning must be understood, whose challenges must be risen to and fulfilled; it is a time to decide, a decisive moment not to be missed or wasted.
“There is a season for everything, a time for every occupation under heaven: A time for giving birth, a time for dying; a time for planting, a time for uprooting what has been planted …….a time for tears, a time for laughter,” we read in the Bible in the book of Ecclesiastics 3:1-8.
Jesus begins his public ministry with the words:”The time has come!” He reproaches his contemporaries for being able to predict the next day’s weather but not understanding and not wanting to understand the signs of the times.
from “The Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage to Change”
Tomáš Halík is a Czech Roman Catholic priest, philosopher, theologian, and scholar. He is a professor of sociology at Charles University in Prague.
Taking a Long View of Time, and Becoming “Critical Yeast”
We inhabit a liminal time between what we thought we knew and what we can’t quite yet see. But time is more spacious than we imagine it to be, and it is more of a friend than we always know. Cracking time open, seeing its true manifold nature, expands a sense of the possible in the here and the now. It sends us back to work with the raw materials of our lives, understanding that these are always the materials even of change at a cosmic or a societal level.
There is geological time, deep time, cosmic time, evolutionary time. And all of those are interestingly akin to a religious, prophetic imagination — the long arc of the moral universe that Martin Luther King Jr. invoked.
The ancient Greek had two very different words for time. One is Kronos, and that is time as we feel it in our bodies and in our lives, and have tried to organize our world around. That is the stuff of clocks and calendars, time as we can measure and plan and really want to rely on as kind of an arrow that’s always moving forward.
And then there is Kairos time. This is an inbreaking — a moment that disrupts everything that came before, everything you thought you knew. It can be the telephone ringing, and hearing something that will change it all. Kairos moments are these pivot points when the questions you are asking, holding, living, utterly change. Life is suddenly, unalterably defined, separated into a Before and an After. When we speak of a Kairos moment, it’s a “moment” with a capital “m” — it can be a minute; it can be a century. And I’ve come to feel increasingly that this is a way to speak of this young century we inhabit, this post-2020 world: we are in a Kairos moment as a species.
So this is all a very grand way to speak of reality. But the beautiful and mysterious thing I’ve experienced in all of this way of thinking and imagining, this way of cracking time open and seeing its true, manifold nature, is that this actually expands my sense of the possible in the here and the now. It actually sends us right back to work with the raw materials of our lives, understanding that these are always the materials even of change at a cosmic or a societal level.
So as I investigate time, I have also been gathering intelligence and understanding of how generative transformation happens in human life and in society. I’ve come across many teachers and gifts of practice and of language. I’ll just name a few for you here. The great 20th century sociologist Margaret Mead gave me this image that there are in human society, in many times and places, what she called “evolutionary clusters.” These are small groups of people who become more — and these were her words — “more purposive, conscious, and responsible.” She is also known to have made the statement: never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. In fact, that’s the only way it’s ever happened.
from Taking a Long View of Time, and Becoming “Critical Yeast”
Krista Tippett is an American journalist, author, and public radio host, best known for creating and hosting radio show and podcast “On Being”. the program exploeres questios of faith, ethics, and human experience, often through interviews with a diverse range of thinkers, writers, and religious leaders. Tippett’s work is noted for its depth, thoughfulness, and the ability to delve into complex topics with nuance and empathy.
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PSG @ Edmund Rice 