Kairos and Mothering

"Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness… Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Apassionata, are in kairos. The saint at prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby, are in kairos."- Madeleine L'Engle

To live in this world, the world of the unhurried mother and child, the world of kairos, is to know and be known by something real and sacred, to participate in something creative beyond numbers and schedules and meetings and screens. Of course, it is not just homemakers who may experience the beauties of kairos time – the fisherman on the dock at sunset knows this, as does the grandfather telling his grandchild a story, the person at prayer, and countless others. My husband has even said that he experiences kairos when doing landscaping work. It is not just about mothering or homemaking; it is a core aspect of human life itself, as God intended it to be lived. Yet in our current day and age, we mothers at home are fortunate to experience kairos more fully and more frequently than most.

If freedom is the beginning of love, then kairos is the time of love. Working in chronos time can be an act of love, which serves a family, of course. But that’s different than the time in which love is.

-from the deep well of Hearth & Field