by Lauralee Farrer
Somewhere I read that “time” was the noun most often used in the English language. Who knows how (or why) such surveys are conducted, or by whom; nevertheless, that result would not surprise me. We live in time the way fish live in water, so talking about it—or making films about it—opens us to a world of reflections as vast as there are people on the earth. Yet it is surprising how similar our feelings and experiences are in time. We waste too much of it, forget the things that are most important, run out of it before we’re ready to.
Praying the Hours producer Ron Allchin recently received an article from a friend who knew that he was working on this project. The article quoted Kevin Miller in his book on Technological Prudence: What the Amish Can Teach Us.
For the Amish, there is a steadfast determination to make technology fit what anthropologists call relational time. The ancient Greeks and the Apostle Paul called it kairos, or “ripeness,” time. When we zip past an Amish buggy on a Holmes County, Ohio, or Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, road, it hits us that our modern time is on a different wavelength than the time those Amish in our rearview mirror are experiencing. Ours is a trajectory of time shaped like an arrow. Chronos time gets us “there” quickly and efficiently but just as often leaves us feeling as if there is nowhere. There was little joy in the journey….
“A trajectory shaped like an arrow”—that’s a lovely phrase for chronos, and one that accurately describes the aim we take with hours intended to be productive, but that are often woefully empty. In this film project, we are trying to imagine the gap between kairos and chronos time visually, through the character of the Traveling Man. He’s called that because his journey in the film is from life toward death, or put another way, from temporal time into the eternal. As he is crossing over, he witnesses his friends from a perspective hidden to him before the accident that ended his life on earth. And as each hour of his last day passes, he sees something he wished he had known before—something he attempts to communicate to those he loves and leaves behind.
If chronos is time felt like a released arrow, then perhaps kairos is felt like a kiss: immediate, memorable, alive, and life-giving. The analogy may be more poetic than practical, but it makes it easy to choose.