Time In The New World

“The Lord is king forever and ever; the nations perish from his land.” – Psalm 10:16

“In every critical event, there is an opportunity for God to act creatively and reveal a deeper truth than what we see on the surface of things.” – Henri Nouwen, Discernment

Many people have commented on how this pandemic has forced the clearing of calendars in an area where people are typically busy and overscheduled. Miraculously, nearly overnight, my own days have been wiped clean, all the daily and weekly markers simply vanished. I used to make five, six school and swim runs in a day: I haven’t started up the car in a week (Dave has driven during the times we’ve gone out to now-overcrowded parks). There will be more and more zoom events scheduled as schools and activities boot back up virtually, but in the meanwhile, we’re all forced to sit in this space where our sense of time has been warped. I am starting to understand how my six-year-old feels. Even pre-pandemic, he would ask us regularly, what day is it?

The Greeks had two words for time. Chronos is clock-time, time in compartments, in series of events. The other word for time is kairos, and I like how David Brooks writes about experiencing it in nature: “The wilderness lives at the pace of what the Greeks called kairos time, which can be slower but is always richer. Synchronous time is moment after moment, but kairos time is qualitative, opportune or not yet ripe, rich or spare, inspired or flat—the crowded hour or the empty moment… The soul communing with itself in the wilderness is at kairos time, too—slow and serene, but thick and strong, like the growing of the redwood.”

A deeper truth I’m seeing in this unscheduled space is how much our busyness forces us to live in chronos time: life as measured from segment to segment, activity to activity. Our view of time becomes so myopic that we’re less able to discern the movement of God, which so often occurs outside of our calibrations. Henri Nouwen writes in his book Discernment that kairos time is when “time becomes not just something to get through or manipulate or manage, but the arena of God’s good work in us… Time points beyond itself and begins to speak to us of God… To start seeing that the many events of our day, week, or year are not in the way of our search for a full life but rather the way to it is a real experience of conversion.”

I see that conversion in this Psalm. The point of conversion is verse 10, when the writer emerges from despair and lament to suddenly say: “The Lord is king forever and ever.” It’s as if he’s emerged from his myopia, put on his spectacles, and glimpsed God in kairos time: the God who outlasts nations. Can you imagine forever? Yet God is there, so far outside of our calendars. And it is from this truth about God that the writer then says: “you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strength their heart; you will incline your ear to do justice” (verses 17-18).

It’s disorienting when our routines are taken away. But these changes bring an invitation, to sink for a moment into a different view of time. To allow time, and the happenings of our lives in that very time, to speak to us of God, and to practice discerning Him in it.