UUPS Newsletter 2000

President's Column

Kairos, Chronos and the New Millennium

Now that the so-called 2nd millennium has ended and a new millennium has begun, what does it all mean and why was there such a big deal about it? The Second Coming did not come as some millennial Christians expected, and the Y2K computer change took place with little to no disruption in our lives. What was the fuss all about? Of course, we all know that the making and keeping of calendars, is a human invention. Nature keeps no calendar and God, however you conceive that power of being that brought us all into existence, lives in the dimension of the eternal, except for a brief incarnational interlude if the Christian myth be taken literally.

The ancient Greeks had two concepts of time and history. One was chronos, or chronological time, the time that can be measured on a clock, marked on a calendar, projected on a linear time line. This is the time of learned history, dates, and events, which can be accounted for and even planned. Jesus was born in 6 B.C.E. The stock market crashed in October 1929. World War II ended in 1945. I turned 63 on the 11th of December. This is the first issue of the Psi Symposium Newsletter in the year 2000. Let' s do lunch together next Wednesday. This is the time of chronos, and we wear it on our wrists, read about it in the newspaper, watch it on television, write it in our checkbooks.

But the Greeks had a second concept of time, which they called kairos, which means the right time, or a time of opportunity, a time of great meaning and significance or challenge. A birthday, an anniversary, a memorial, graduation, marriage, sexual intimacy, giving birth, a job change or a promotion, climbing a mountain, planting roses, being caught up in the beauty of art or music, feeling a connection with God and others in church or in nature--such events and experiences can be kairotic, fraught with meaning, filled with wonder and purpose, turning ordinary time into extraordinary time, transforming chronos into kairos. I shared such a moment with a family recently as I Christened their infant son. Tears of joy came into the eyes of the parents as they spoke about how their connection with this new life and new person had utterly changed and transformed them. It was a truly kairotic moment.

The birth of Jesus of Nazareth was a kairotic moment for his parents, Joseph and Mary, and eventually for the course of western civilization which was changed and transformed by the impact of his life and teachings. How can we become the instruments of kairotic change in our world as Jesus was for his world? How can we turn our chronos into kairos?

That's what I think the hoopla and concern about the year 2000 and the millennium was really all about. We are seeking an ultimate meaning to our existence behind the changing and transitory nature of our time and history. We are creatures of chronos who hunger for kairos. Now that we have crossed the threshold of the greatest chronological change since the beginning of the first millennium in the year 1000, we ask ourselves, what is the meaning of the human venture on this planet among the stars? What can we do with the time God has given us to make this global village of ours into a haven of love and peace and friendship? This is the challenge that awaits us in the new millennium and in all the days and years yet to come.

O Eternal, take the moments of our lives, the good and the bad, the happy and the sad, and turn them into timeless memoria in the making of our souls, that we may reach beyond things temporal to truths eternal, wherein the holiness and wholeness of life is known and celebrated in all its pain and glory, and whence all beginnings and endings begin and end in thee.

(Richard M. Fewkes – President, UU Psi Symposium)