Jan. 17, 2026
Time After Time:
Seasons of Eternity
New years and birthdays – they keep coming and we keep marking them, feeling instinctively that they must mean something in the measure of a life. Scattered with regret and gratitude behind us, anxiety and hope ahead, 𝘤𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘰𝘴 is our default orientation to the unfolding of time. Yet each of the major religious traditions shapes and is shaped by its own particular intuitions about time; these days, science offers yet another. As we face the often daunting prospect of another year of challenges and opportunities, we might benefit from reflecting on different ways to parse the living of it.
Chronological time is certainly a practical way to organize things. One foot in front of the other; one event at a time – if we truly did life that way, but we don’t. Apart from the frantic multi-tasking that become 𝘥𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘶𝘦𝘶𝘳, human beings have always functioned within a swirl of doing, being, feeling and thinking that draws us outside any sort of continuum. That should have been the first hint that time was a bit more complicated than a straight-ahead march.
We know that most ancient cultures had a primarily cyclical concept of time. The heavens, the seasons, the tides, all pointed to a pattern of emergence, maturation, death and rebirth, over and over. Life accommodated the cycles;
the cycles nurtured life. Not until technologies developed to mitigate the effects of these inexorable rhythms was a more progressive model of time possible. With the growing sophistication of ancient cultures and better tools of measurement and control, chronologies became better defined and more persuasive. But not exclusively so.
Cyclical and chronological time have in fact lived together comfortably and complementarily for most of history. But within that partnership there was also a place for 𝘴𝘢𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦, woven throughout creation and breaking through in propitious moments to usher in new possibilities for humanity. The Greeks had a term for these providential episodes: kairos. It is the term used in the New Testament to locate the Jesus event, the “fullness of time” that made his entry both necessary and possible.
The ancient Hebrew people represent well the reciprocity of cyclical and linear time. They had a story, a story that had unrolled over centuries, a story of the key events that told them who they were. So interspersed, and sometimes joined, with seasonal festivals of planting and harvest were celebrations of remembrance, the regular return of those moments not only as history but as renewals of the repentance, reconciliation and renewal that constituted life in the covenant with Yahweh. And when the Jews contemplated the coming of the Messiah, it was not the expectation of an end to time as they knew it, but the turn of a new age of peace and plenty within which the seasons would still spin and the covenant would be renewed, in eternal circles of time.
And so it might have continued in the Christian age, inaugurated by Jesus the Messiah and soon to be realized in its promised fullness. But when Jesus’s expected return to complete what he had begun was delayed, the explanation that evolved pushed his reappearance into a distant future, and one that would therefore need to signify greater effect. Jesus’s return and the fullness of the kingdom he had preached were both pushed to the “end of time.” But an end of time only makes sense for lines; circles have no beginnings or ends. So despite the inescapable sway of life’s cycles, 𝘤𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘰𝘴 ruled the day. Human ends justified means; divine ends justified hope. Mutual participation of human and divine in the regular renewal of life languished.
Eastern Time
But not everywhere. Our friends in the East read history and time much differently. In Hinduism, the oldest religion in the world, the linear is almost wholly disregarded. Within a splendid scheme of becoming, life cycles upward in a grand spiral of evolving consciousness through cosmic ages into greater and greater wholeness. Throughout the seasons of life, of death and renewal, individuals, societies and the world as a whole will engage again and again the essential lessons and seasons of life, each encounter offering the opportunity to learn and move into a greater participation in the divine life of beauty and harmony. Here is a representation of life we may recognize in our own, the helix that both returns and progresses, and whose source and goal are beyond our view.
But then along came the Buddha, who was very troubled by time, by the inevitability of sickness, aging and death. He felt that this could not be the whole story. So he sat down under the bodhi tree, to wait for the greater reality to show itself. What was revealed to him was a timeless and boundless reality, an eternity beyond time but giving birth to it in each moment. Nothing has absolute being, he taught; everything that is arises in concert with everything else, moment to moment, with nothing it can call its own. He did not teach that past and future were meaningless or insignificant. They were deeply important, for in them lies the call to end suffering, both our own and others’. But he saw too that the only place that such suffering can end, that the freedom and peace of eternity can be known, is in each moment’s advent. In a sort of perpetual 𝘬𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘰𝘴, each enlightened action sends out ripples within which other transformations may blossom.
Jesus Time
In all faith traditions, though, one thing seems clear: however we think of time, it is the carrier of hope. Whether the Hindu’s spiral upward, the Buddhist’s eternal present, Jewish apocalyptic or Christian eschatology, we discover hope from within the roll of our experience as shaped by time. The concreteness of life that moves through a traceable history is not an accident. It is the point.
But how we conceive of time will dictate where we situate hope, where we look for it as we walk through time. Even – or perhaps especially – in our day, it seems clear that that precious promise calls forth a trust that something more elemental, more benevolent, more creative is at work. Those who still want to argue for an unlimited strictly human potential have a difficult case to make. Whether we call that greater something God, the wisdom of the universe, or some other transcendent title, however, the next step we must take is to contemplate 𝘩𝘰𝘸 we think the divine presence offers hope, 𝘪𝘴 hope.
The Christian tradition has anchored hope at the end of time, in the anticipated inbreaking of God into history that will launch us into the eternity of which virtually all religions speak. And perhaps there will be such an event, but honestly, we have no way to know. For the essence of that expectation did not issue from Jesus’s teaching, but from the accommodation of doctrine to the delay of the new kingdom that Jesus proclaimed. The people were waiting for Jesus to return to finish what he had begun, even though Jesus had told them that the kingdom was theirs to create. That they were not other than, separate from, the God to whom they looked for deliverance. They were God’s vehicles of hope.
Jesus’s own sense of time’s operation was shaped within the Jewish braiding of cyclical and linear time, even as he himself embodied the kairos. So as we consider how to move toward the new kingdom he saw so vividly, perhaps we would do well to engage other images of time than the one we have inherited. Instead of surrendering to the inexorable march of irreversible events, we might find our place in the spiral of becoming, drawn by the God who participates in us as we participate in God toward ever greater manifestations of being. Instead of despairing of the destructive direction along which history seems bent, we might open to the Source outside of time that hovers behind and beneath each emerging moment as the real possibility for something absolutely and creatively new.
Instead of counting on a divine rescue at the end of time, we might take our place within the cycles of life within which the creative purposes of God, the Universe, Eternity are revealed. We might embrace the death, the letting go, that makes way for the new to appear. And finally, we might not despair at the destruction in front of us, but take our place in fashioning the renewal that must come.
This Time
We might add one last view of time to our reflection. Quantum physics has a lot to say about time, none of it definitive. But one thing it is fairly sure of is that time is relational, that it somehow arises within changing physical variables, emerges from the interactions of systems. No single entity or group of entities can cause anything to happen in time by itself, and even within a universe of apparent cause and effect, nothing can yet be absolutely predicted. Time happens within the intersections of all that is in a way that is nothing if not open. Time is not a thing, but an opportunity.
The wheel has just turned on another cycle of our planet. The new cycle will both destroy and renew, will give us beginnings and endings, whatever we do. But our choices and actions are its ingredients, in ways we may never see. The year will offer to us innumerable moments in which to open to something entirely new, a 𝘬𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘰𝘴 that may turn the course of history. A 𝘬𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘰𝘴 whose potential lives within relationship. A kairos to steer our time.
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