On The Blessedness Of Time

As I have said in my philosophical work, time is weird. And the ancient Greeks knew it was weird. They made a distinction—of which I have spoken before—between two types of coexisting time: chronos (χρόνος) and kairos (καιρός).

Chronos is the time of the “mundane” world, the world of clocks and calendars. It is the time that matters when we need to go to a doctor’s appointment or know how long we have for a test. Chronos moves ever forward in a straight line, never slowing, halting, or hurrying for any of us.

Kairos is the right time, the meaningful moment. It is sacred time, the time chosen by the Fates for a particular event to occur, the time in which the most meaningful moments of our life occur. When we talk about the “Wheel Of The Year” in modern Neopaganism, we are talking about moments of kairos. The sabbats are a type of alignment between physical, metaphysical, and spiritual meaningfulness that resonate through those who wish to connect with those moments (and sometimes even those who do not so wish). That means that they are moments of power. We can do Big Magick at these moments, the sort of Big Magick that weaves together with the natural meaningfulness of these moment of kairos time.

I have often said that what it means to me to be pagan is that I believe in a naturalized theology. I believe that the physical world is simply the visible and tangible part of the spiritual world, which means I don’t believe there is a meaningful distinction between “natural” and “supernatural”. The world—by which I mean all that which exists—is holistic, or at least how we experience it is holistic.

So if we want to know about the gods, if we want to know about the Divine, I believe that the place we have to begin is right here at home, in nature. When we want to meet Demeter, we meet Her first in the movement of the Earth Herself from cold to warm to cold again. When we want to meet Persephone, we meet Her first in the growing grain, the fruits of grove and field, and in the mystery of death and rebirth. These deities are deeply and intimately bound to the seasons, to the life and death of the food we eat, and thus They are deeply and intimately bound up with kairos.

As mages and mystics we are often most concerned with kairos. But chronos is still meaningful, still important. Chronos is also where we live, right alongside our lives in kairos. In kairos we find the right time, the sacred moment, whether for action or an encounter with the gods. But in chronos we live with our families and communities, we go to work, we run errands, we eat, we sleep…chronos is where most of the changes that get instituted in kairos come into manifestation.

In kairos we both recur and transform, go back and forward, sideways and beyond. Kairos is a spiral, the heartbeat of time, and we dance with that spiral every moment, as the Moon waxes and wanes and the planets move through their orbits. It is in kairos that holy inspiration comes. But chronos is a line, a march forward into the future, and it is on that line that we can, if we so choose, act upon that inspiration.

Now I want to ask you a question: how do you relate to time? Are you careful to be punctual and never keep anyone waiting? Do you put things off until they get overwhelming and all seem to pile up onto you at once? Do you find yourself aching and feeling strange when there is empty time, time when you find yourself with nothing to do? Or do you whoop with joy when you find a spare hour for yourself and luxuriate in every last second? When does time pass quickly for you? When does it pass slowly? How does it feel when you experience kairos, the time of the sacred and magickal? How do you experience chronos, the linear time of this aching world? Most of all, how does it make you feel that chronos time runs one way, that when you make a choice and act upon it, we are all stuck with that choice forever?

It is this final fact, this terrible and terrifying one-way trip through time, that has made me say that time is a monster. But time is also how anything gets done. Time is bound up with causality, which means that to escape time, to become free of its endless motion and its forced choices, would also bind us forever in our current state. That would mean the game is over. That would mean we are done

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not done yet. I want to play the game some more. I have choices to make and Work to do, even if the weight of those choices sometimes feels unbearable and that Work seems daunting. This aching world needs me.

This aching world needs us all.

Like free will itself, time is our burden and our opportunity. To feel the weight of our choices, to feel time weighing down upon us, is to feel what it means to be a person in the world. We do things. We cause changes. We make the world—and ourselves—different through the choices we make. And frankly, I feel like that is amazing. That is a gift. Admittedly, it is a gift that has a price, because that ability to make meaningful choices can be misused. Mistakes happen. Free will can be abused and used in malice. People sometimes do bad things, and those bad things add up. We live with the weight of all that history on our backs, and that weight can be heavy. But it is still a precious gift, a divine gift, for in making our choices in time we help create the reality in which we all live. It is a profound honor. We work together with the gods to create the world every day.

So let’s create a good one.

Blessed Lammas, dear ones. I pray devoutly that time does not weigh upon you too heavily in the coming months as the harvest of this year—which promises to be bitter indeed—comes home to each of us. I pray that we can all gain comfort and hope from this holy moment in kairos so that we can go forward into our lives and cause good changes in chronos.

Be well.

In love,

Soror Alice

Art: Carlos Schwabe, “Death and the Grave Digger (La Mort et le Fossoyeur)”, (1895)