Sequestering at home, I was sitting with my wife under the gazebo in our backyard just the other morning as the sun was coming through the trees. The sweet smell of burning piñon wood from our chiminea and birdsong in the tree overhead made for an enchanted experience. There were other things we could be doing, like cleaning up the kitchen or straightening a closet, but those could wait. This would only be here a few moments longer.
In Greek there are two very different concepts of time. Kronos is the measured time of our clocks. It is the “again and again” of cycles by which we measure time’s elapse: clock hands, moon phases, Earth’s rotation and orbit around the sun. Inside these smaller and larger cycles we track the sequence of events that make up a recipe, a work project, the history of anything, including a human lifetime.
I can schedule a time to clean up the kitchen by placing the appointment somewhere in these nested cycles of chronic time. If I miss the appointment, I’ll just reschedule it. No big deal.
Another Greek word, kairos, carries a very different concept of time. Its meaning is something like “the opportune moment,” or as we commonly say, when the time is right or at the right time. Even though the sun rises at a certain hour and minute according to the clock, we don’t normally say that the sun is rising “on time” – as if we have the earth and Sun on a schedule.
The sun rising through trees provides a fascinating intersection among physical events happening, including not just astronomical events but me getting out to the gazebo at precisely the right time.
But there’s more. I could be sitting out there with all that going on, totally absorbed in my thoughts, futzing with my chair, or still just waking up and not yet paying attention. The sunrise could happen without me even noticing. A kairotic event is actually a conspiracy of things coming together all at once: the earth turning, the sky and clouds just so, the temperature and breeze as they are, birds singing in the tree standing there, wood smoke from my chiminea – and me here, a quiet and observant witness to the wonder of it all.
If I don’t show up or pay attention as it’s happening, this conspiracy fails to fully come together.
When Jesus called out to anyone who would listen, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news,” he was talking about kairos. The kingdom of God coming near was his chosen metaphor of a power that lurks just below the threshold of ordinary awareness, but which, if really seen and taken in by the fully observant mind, will change everything. To repent literally means to turn around and go in the opposite direction, out of the trance of conventional life and into what he also called “abundant life” – liberated, authentic, and fully awake.
While Jesus’ metaphors reflect his heritage and worldview, the invitation to wake up and break free from the mental enclosures of tradition, habit, and belief in order that we can really see the present mystery of reality, has been essential to “true religion” ever since the Axial Age (beginning in the 8th century BCE). This critical insight has frequently put those who are waking up at odds with the belief systems and departure narratives that characterize most forms of theism. To identify it with true religion, then, is admittedly a value judgment on my part.
We shouldn’t forget that orthodox theism was one of the social forces that collaborated in Jesus’ death, along with colonial politics and neurotic egoism.
But this is the essential truth: right now is the only opportunity any of us has to be fully present and awake to what’s really going on. In Jesus’ words, time is fulfilled in every Now, but if we don’t wake up and open ourselves to what has “come near,” we might end up sleeping as the mystery passes us by, and keep missing it – again and again. We might say that ordinary consciousness (or the trance state) is a condition where “again and again” (or more of the same) conceals the ever-present mystery of “here and now.”
The real tragedy is that, over time, our capacity for mindful awareness and creative response can become so buried under the habits and demands of daily life (chronos), that we may never wake up to Life in its fullness. The time is always now and we are always here, but how much of our life is deeply engaged in conscious living?
So I realized that the morning sun through trees – as an experience and not merely a physical event – is exquisitely for me in the sense that it won’t happen if I’m not here, not paying attention, or distracted with other things. I don’t mean this to sound self-centered, but if I’m not centered in myself and present to what’s going on, the morning sun through trees won’t happen either.
If I come out again tomorrow morning, the kingdom of God will once again be present at the threshold of my awareness, but only because it is always there, waiting on me to show up and be a witness. If the spiritual life is anything, it is the devoted practice of showing up and learning to be fully present.
Tracts of Revolution 