About a year ago, Pastor Linda Daniel-Block coined the term “Chaortic” to describe the events of her life at that moment. It wasn’t utter chaos she said. There was beauty to it and a sense of order—somewhere—but it never felt completely within her control. I can think of no better way to explain our life right now. From my husband switching jobs in mid-December to Tristan leaving preschool and becoming obsessed with climbing everything but playground equipment (why do kids always want to climb what they shouldn’t and avoid things that we tell them they can climb on?) to this whole dissertation journey, online teaching and responsibilities within my house and the church, everything has been in a state of chaorticness.
We keep moving forward with some amount of progress, but I think I feel the anxiety and frustration of chronological time and progress more than my other family members right now. For me, hours drag by as I constantly remove my son from his climbing places and try to redirect him to less destructive activities, and as I try to connect with students in my online classes. Meanwhile, my dissertation work, seems to move forward at a snail’s pace as the months fly by. My advisor kept telling me on Monday that I’m doing well, making deadlines and meeting them each month for the most part, assuring me that not every day or week or even month can be productive, “it comes in fits and starts, with highs and lows,” she says, and you have to take breaks for your sanity. In essence, though, I do not want to be in Chaos. I do not even want to be in Chaortic-ness (where there is method in the madness). I just want to feel as if I’m making the best use of time, energy, and talents as possible. I do start mulling over her words though.
That’s really when the word started flitting around in my brain—Kairos. Kairos. Kairos, in greek, means “the right or exact moment.” But I also grew up reading Madeline L’Engle’s Time series, or as it’s sometimes called “the Kairos series,” and her words on time are the ones I turn to so often to make sense of the nature of God, his time and how it contrasts with the way we so often view time.
From Walking on Water, by Madeleine L’Engle:
Kairos. Real time. God’s time.
That time which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy, that time we do not recognize while we are experiencing it, but only afterwards, because kairos has nothing to do with chronological time. In kairos we are completely unselfconscious, and yet paradoxically far more real than we can ever be when we’re constantly checking our watches for chronological time.
The saint in contemplation, lost to self in the mind of God is in kairos. The artist at work is in kairos. The child at play, totally thrown outside herself in the game, be it building a sand castle or making a daisy chain, is in kairos. In kairos we become what we are called to be as human beings, co-creators with God, touching on the wonder of creation.
This calling should not be limited to artists, or saints, but it is a fearful calling. It is both Mana and taboo. It can destroy as well as bring into being.
In Our Town, after Emily has died in childbirth, Thornton Wilder has her ask the Stage Manager if she can return home to relive just one day. Reluctantly he allows her to do so. And she is torn by the beauty of the ordinary, and by our lack of awareness of it. She cries out to her mother, “Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me… it goes so fast we don’t have time to look at one another.”
And she goes back to the graveyard and the quiet company of the others lying there, and she asks the Stage Manager “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?” And he sighs and says, “No. The saints and poets, maybe. They do some.”
Reading this passage reminds me that lent calls us into kairos time, as we follow the journey to the cross. It is in this moment that I realize that this academic endeavor is more than writing about faith and sharing about two faiths that have so much in common. The writing of this itself is happening within kairos time. This is not to say that I do not feel the need to write or push it. I’m a self described “TYPE A” personality and I will always push myself harder, to work faster and more articulately. The funny thing is that this doesn’t always work, even with my own dissertation. I rely so heavily on others for feedback and interviews and even some of my transcription. My son gets sick for a week and a half and then starts climbing the walls and I don’t have time during the day to do much other than care for him and am too tired when he finally goes to bed at night to do much other than get lost in a book. I get pulled into a fiction series…and find myself living in kairos time there as well.
I have to trust that kairos time, in all of the chaortic-ness that I feel, is at work in my work, my life and my words. I just have to embrace it and tell chronos time to stop making me feel like such a loser—that it does not have that sort of power over me anymore. Really, truly doing God’s work takes time. Kairos time. Embrace the chaortic-ness of it all.
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