Kairos Time
“Music helps us to “keep time” in the sense of keeping us in touch with time, not just time as an ever-flowing stream that bears all of us away at last, but time also as a stream that every once in a while slows down and becomes transparent enough for us to see down to the streambed the way, at a wedding, say, or watching the sunrise, past, present, and future are so caught up in a single moment that we catch a glimpse of the mystery that, at its deepest place, time is timeless.”—Frederic Buechner in Beyond Words.
Buechner writes that artists who paint work with space, while time is the medium for musicians, the changing sound of one note following another in different time intervals. I hear each bird singing outside my window with an identifying rhythm. Even the silent wind makes a variable sound as it moves through nearby trees. The rain as well sounds at regular and irregular beats on our bedroom roof, often like an alarm clock in the early morning. Our grandchildren once loved to lie in our bed and hear the beating of rain on our roof as we watched movies together.
Each day, we awaken to a new gift of time. Buechner goes further to say that the movements of a symphony teach us about the movements of our daily lives, streaming from one sound, one instrument to another, often in repetition. Our favorite musicians and nature’s constant sounds help us keep time for these movements to flow through our lives. Sometimes, this stream of music in our lives slows down just enough for us to see clearly the bottom of the stream and live in the present moment at sunsets, graduations, births of our children, weddings, funerals, and sacred liturgies, and realize the mystery of how time is timeless. This is living is Kairos time, God’s time, eternity.
I had this experience in writing my last book, Letters from my Grandfather, as I responded to letters to me from my grandfather written fifty and sixty years ago. I experienced an absence of linear time between us. Here, it was not music, but writing where time became timeless.
Joanna joannaseibert.com https://www.joannaseibert.com/