Kairos. Brian Regan I walked on the moon. The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos and kairos.

Transcription

1 Kairos (Source for much of this stuff: ) Brian Regan I walked on the moon The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos and kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential or linear time, the latter signifies a time in between, a moment of indeterminate time in which something special happens. Kairos is an ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune time or the supreme moment. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative nature. Chronos is measured/chronicled, kairos is immeasurable.

2 You can measure chronos by looking at your watch (a.k.a. chronograph/chronometer). You measure kairos by sensing the opportune time through psychological attentiveness to situation and meaning. In the midst of ordinary time (chronos), extraordinary time (kairos) happens. Kairos brings transcending value to chronos. To miscalculate chronos is inconvenient; to miscalculate kairos is lamentable it can t be easily recovered.

3 In Greek mythology, the god Chronos, pictured as elderly, gray-haired and bearded, was the personification of time. Kairos is impossible to define in English, yet powerful in what it represents. S.H. Butcher, who translated much of Aristotle, noted that kairos is a Greek word with no single precise equivalent in any other language... [yet the] spirit of kairos is essential to the practice of rhetoric. Even though kairos is a bit illusive, it is at the same time, alluring. The Greeks knew kairos intersected chronos. Brugger s helpful hint: think of kairos like you would carpe diem. Carpe diem, you ll recall, is a phrase from a Latin poem by Horace that has become an aphorism. It s popularly translated as seize the day. Carpe literally means to pick, pluck, pluck off, cull, crop, gather but Ovid used the word in the sense of to enjoy, seize, use, make use of. Kairos, then, is like seize the moment. DPS Seize the Day!

4 [A] sacrament could be any one of a number of gestures or acts or ordinances that unite us with God and his limitless powers. We are imperfect and mortal; he is perfect and immortal. But from time to time indeed, as often as is possible and appropriate we find ways and go to places and create circumstances where we can unite symbolically with him, and in so doing gain access to his power. Those special moments of union with God are sacramental moments such as kneeling at a marriage altar, or blessing a newborn baby, or partaking of the emblems of the Lord s supper. This latter ordinance is the one we in the Church have come to associate most traditionally with the word sacrament, though it is technically only one of many such moments when we formally take the hand of God and feel his divine power. These are moments when we quite literally unite our will with God s will, our spirit with his spirit, where communion through the veil becomes very real. At such moments we not only acknowledge his divinity, but we quite literally take something of that divinity to ourselves. Such are the holy sacraments. Jeffrey R. Holland, Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments To increase an argument s effectiveness, one needs to consider not only appeals to logos, ethos and pathos, but also kairos that is, its timing, its propriety for the occasion. To think kairotically is to be attuned to the total context of a situation in order to act in the right way at the right moment. By analogy, consider a skilled base runner who senses the right moment to steal second a wise teacher who senses the right moment to praise (or critique) a student s performance, or a successful psychotherapist who senses the right moment to talk rather than listen in a counseling session. Kairos reminds us that a rhetorical situation is not stable and fixed nor predictable but evolves as events unfold or as audiences experience the psychological ebbs and flows of the message and environment. Kairos as the ability to understand the subtleties of a rhetorical situation, is the ability to adapt to, and take advantage of, contingent circumstances. It calls for action and transformation. Kairos is not only dependent upon appropriate timing and purpose, but also the appropriate nature of the situation, the approach, and the implications of what is being presented. When we lose our sense of time passing, we are in kairos; here we are totally absorbed in the present moment, which may actually stretch out over hours.

5 Abraham Lincoln, the once uneducated country-boy, delivered one of the shortest, yet most memorable addresses in American history on the Gettysburg battlefield. As a determined leader of a war-torn country he concluded with this kairotic challenge: It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Winston Churchill, on June 18, 1940, gave a fiery, impassioned speech to the House of Commons that historians believe turned the tide of the war. Seemingly defeated on every front, Churchill knew that he was the one to make the clarion call: Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

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