Erika Kirk: 'I Forgive Him'
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What do the following films have in common: A Wrinkle in Time, Back to the Future, Terminator, Interstellar, and Avengers End Game? They all tap into our innate fascination with time-travel. If you could travel through time, where in history would you go? Who would you visit? As Catholics we actually do engage in time-travel (sort-of).
In Greek, there are two words for time…
Chronos is time quantified and measurable. It is passing on a track from past to future. Like a train that can never de-rail. It is time in motion. It is where we derive the English words chronic, chronicle and chronology. Chronos is the time we mean when we ask, ‘When?’ or ‘What time is it?’ Chronos time is time that we can measure and keep track of with calendars and clocks.
Kairos is God’s time. It is not stuck in the present but is eternal now: Past, present, future in one unending moment. It is always now, no before or after. Kairos time is time from God’s point of view, which we typically call eternity.
We also have two ways of looking at time based on where your culture is from….
The Eastern concept of time is cyclical. This is why beliefs such as karma and reincarnation emerged.
The Western concept of time is simultaneously cyclical and linear or advancing toward an end. Time is created by God with a beginning and an end. This is the Catholic way of thinking about time..
The four-fold event of Jesus’ suffering, death, resurrection and ascension was so impactful and powerful that it reverberates through time in every direction. It hit history so hard that it broke it in two; that which came before Christ (B.C.) and that which began with Christ (A.D.). In the Old Testament, the Paschal Mystery is prefigured through typology and prophecy. Now, it is made present in the sacramental moments of our lives.
The Catechism describes beautifully this timelessness of Christ in the Paschal Mystery. "When the Church celebrates the mystery of Christ, there is a word that marks her prayer: Today! -a word echoing the prayer her Lord taught her and the call of the Holy Spirit.”
This "today" of the living God which man is called to enter is "the hour" of Jesus' Passover, which reaches across and underlies all history: Life extends over all beings and fills them with unlimited light; the Orient of orients pervades the universe, and he who was "before the daystar" and before the heavenly bodies, immortal and vast, the great Christ, shines over all beings more brightly than the sun.
Therefore a day of long, eternal light is ushered in for us who believe in him, a day which is never blotted out: the mystical Passover" (CCC 1165).
In the sacraments, the Paschal Mystery transcends time. The sacraments are, in a way, the only known means of time travel. When we remember our story and enter into it in the sacraments, we are entering into a dimension of time which is not stuck in the past, present or future but envelopes all of it. This is because unlike any other religious figure, Jesus is not just a person of history. He is alive and actively encountering his people with his life-giving, saving love.
What Jesus pre-presented at the Last Supper (the holy sacrifice of his Body and Blood) he presented in Chronos time on Good Friday. Today and in the future, Jesus re-presents the same holy sacrifice on each and every Catholic altar during the liturgy of the Eucharist. This is why we can say we are at the Last Supper, we are at Calvary, and we are already experiencing the foretaste of the heavenly banquet as we worship the Eternal Word at Mass.
Additionally, at every moment, we can be sure that somewhere on earth the sacrifice of Holy Mass is being celebrated, “…you never cease to gather a people to yourself, so that, from the rising of the sun to its setting, a pure sacrifice may be offered to your name.”—every moment of every day, the sun is either rising or setting somewhere on this earth. The image is meant to be not geographical, but temporal. In other words, the Paschal Mystery never ceases.
During the natural yearly cycle the slow fall into dormancy in fall and winter and the re-birth in spring and summer hints at the Paschal Mystery. We experience nature as it courses through cycles of life, suffering, death, and resurrection. Grace not only perfects nature, it corresponds to it. This is why the Church’s liturgical focus on death, dying, judgment, heaven and hell occurs in late autumn when clinging, dying leaves in late autumn transition into the barrenness of empty trees in winter.
The liturgical calendar is not a perpetual loop. Rather it is a spiral, combining the cyclical and the linear concepts of time. In the liturgical calendar, seasons, feasts and solemnities spiral upward through the Paschal Mystery time machine. As we re-live the life of Christ each year from Advent to Christmas, to Lent and Easter, the faithful journey brings us closer to our ontological end. This happens through a series of deaths and rebirths in our moral and spiritual lives.
Along the way, we have the company and model of the Saints. When the liturgical calendar highlights them, we remember the holy person and venerate their holy relics. The relics are a pledge of future glory. They are like pieces of heaven that linger in chronos time. When we reach the telos, fully alive in Christ, we will be side by side with them, body and soul, in unending worship.
Outside of the liturgy, our lives are punctuated with a series of kairos moments. It is our free choice to act or to miss the moment by fear or idleness. Great men and women seized the kairos moments of their lives. Have you ever experienced a time in your life when you felt as though you crossed the veil into the supernatural? Maybe the passing of time seemed to be slower or faster. Maybe you had a premonition of the event. Maybe you experienced something so coincidental that it must have been preordained by God. How was God present to you at that moment?
I am a life-long Catholic, husband, dad, teacher and former football coach. I've been teaching the Catholic Faith to young men, religious educators and catechists since 1998. My academic background, MA is in Theology and Catechetics. Email: gary@apexcatechetics.com
