English word for it, but it might be translated as “the time of opportunity” or “the right time.” It is the time, which, for good or ill, is either seized or lost; in either case, it will never come again.
Suppose two people work high above on a flying trapeze without a net below. The one person swings, then lets go of the bar and flies through the air, meeting the other in perfect timing and, in a split second, is caught and is safe. There are no second chances for that connection. Or recall when the first astronauts would ride the huge Saturn V booster rockets that would put their capsules in orbit around the earth, enabling them to go on to the moon. At the moment of blast-off, if something went wrong and the alarm sounded, they had three and one-half seconds to push the button that would eject them clear of the impending explosion—that and no more. There would still be plenty of time, in the sense of chronos, but not for that “life or death” decision; that little slice of time would be crucial time: kairos.
It is indeed true that not all time is weighted the same. In the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 3 is a section that is often read at funerals, weddings, and many other occasions, because it speaks of the right time for various events and emotions. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance . . . a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.” (Eccl 3:1–4, 6–8. Revised Standard Version)
There have been at least three quite different perspectives by human beings toward the passage of time, three different ways of orienting oneself in relationship to it.
In the first place, it may be that truly ancient peoples lived in a kind of timeless realm. As the snows came and went, wandering peoples drifted with the seasons. There was no calendar and the only record left behind may have been flint tools from a campsite. Perhaps myths developed about the “the old ones” or “the dream time,” but almost everything was lost in the course of passing millennia. People lived largely in the present. Only in a few places can one find anything resembling that today. Peter Mathiessen stayed with many of the tribal peoples of East Africa prior to recounting his travels in his book, The Tree Where Man Was Born. He described the Hadza hunter-gatherers, thus: “For people who must live from day to day, past and future have small relevance, and their grasp of it is fleeting; they live in the moment, a precious gift that we have lost.”
Secondly, there is the cyclical conception of time, the idea that it is moving in vast circles. The ancient Maya had an accurate calendar some 1400 years ago, with much of their ceremonial and social life revolving around the mystery of time’s passage and their attempt to predict the huge cycles of their imagination. The Hindus, still today, see the universe as moving in vast arcs of hundreds of millions of years. In that system of belief, an individual goes through one incarnation after another, so time is likened to a wheel. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed the universe itself was eternal; they had a circular or, at least, a “spiral” conception of time. Their saying, “History repeats itself,” is old, indeed, and expresses the idea that there were whirlpools in the stream, where things came to be, then passed on, perhaps only to come again.
Such a concept of time, while it may seem remote and abstract, might have great practical significance in one’s daily life, should one adopt it, for it is, ultimately, a pessimistic view: history is going nowhere and humanity is tramping about on a kind of eternal treadmill. Historian Will Durant has written of what he calls the “indispersible gloom which broods over so much of Greek literature.”
Ecclesiastes is one of the most heavily Greek-influenced books of the Bible, and it has this tone. The book is included in Scripture, some say, to illustrate the consequences of such a point a view. Thus, in addition to those beautiful verses about there being “a time for every matter under heaven,” there are passages like these: “What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever . . . What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun . . . all is vanity.” (Eccl 1:4, 9, 12:8b)
The third conception of time is linear, i.e., there is an arrow, a direction to time’s passage: time is going somewhere. In this perspective, the universe, everything we know, has not always been. It had a beginning. Time moves “forward” and each moment in the present and the future is different from the past, unique. The universe, thus, is evolving.
This is the dominant time frame found in the Bible. There, time is the medium of the divine drama, wherein God is moving creation from a beginning toward the goal of fulfillment or consummation. Many have noticed that such a view is compatible with that of modern physics and astronomy, which speak of the universe beginning in a single instant: the primordial explosion that has come to be known by the trivial name of the Big Bang, then developing onward and outward from there over the course of nearly 14 billion years. Robert Jastrow, the founder and past director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote of the scientist searching for answers who follows his data back to that initial event, but who is stymied by the fact that every bit of the evidence needed for studying the cause of it has been obliterated in the explosion. All the fingerprints have been erased, and the first cause is forever beyond reach: “The scientist’s pursuit of the past ends in the moment of creation . . . He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
An old saying is to the effect that if one marries the science of the time, one will soon be a widow/widower, a caution that must be kept in mind. However, there are more than a few who maintain that science itself owes a huge debt to this fundamental Christian perspective that time is linear. The idea is that science, which traces causes and effects and evolutionary sequence, could only develop if you had, as you did in Western Europe, some such idea of the linear, progressive, or developmental character of time that infused the entire culture.
One aspect of time is that which is past. In a sense, we never experience anything but the past. The sounds you are now hearing come from a thousandth of a second back in time for every foot traveled to reach you. And what is true of sound is true of light, but on a “faster” scale. When we look up toward the sun, we see it as it existed eight minutes ago, for it takes that long for light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, to traverse the 93 million miles of space to earth.
All winter long the great galaxy M31 in Andromeda hangs in the night sky. This near twin of the Milky Way is the farthest thing that any human being has ever seen with the naked eye. If you know right where to look, you can see the hazy, glowing patch of light that our large telescopes reveal to be a spiral of perhaps 200 billion stars. It is 2.3 million light years away! That is to say, its light that reaches us tonight began its journey to us that far back in time, and what we see is a ghostly image formed that far in the distant past. Thus, deep space takes us into deep time, as well.
The attempt to transcend our limitations in time is a persistent theme in literature. H. G. Wells wrote a short story in which he imagines the possibility of science tapping into the “memory” of the human race itself: “A day may come when these recovered memories may grow as vivid as if we in our own persons had been there and shared the thrill and fear of those primordial days; a day may come when the great beasts of the past will leap to life again in our imaginations, when we shall walk again in vanished scenes, stretch painted limbs we thought were dust, and feel again the sunshine of a million years ago.”
In 1955, Albert Einstein learned of the death of his best friend, Michele Besso and wrote a brief letter to the family (as it turned out, just a few months before his own death): “He has
