The Kairos of Easter

There are two kinds of time. There’s the kind you can measure. That’s the kind we live through sequentially, moment to moment. The Greek word for this is “kronos”, where we get words like “chronometer” and “chronicle”.

Then, there’s the other kind. The Greeks call this “kairos”. This is the time when God acts, when eternity breaks into linear time. The preeminent moment of kairos is when God Himself pronounces, “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15).

We are creatures of kronos. In the sacraments, where Jesus continues His saving work, we can experience kairos, the breaking-in of eternity.

I mention this because we are in the Octave of Easter. And what, pray tell, is an Octave?

One of the things I love about the Church is our sense of time – the grandeur of the procession of the seasons and holy days, each in turn.

Some holy days are so holy that a single day can’t contain them. Take Easter, for instance. The ancient tradition of the Church is to add an entire week to the Sunday that is Easter, making it actually eight days long. This, we call an Octave.

In addition to the Octave of Easter, the Church also celebrates an Octave for Christmas from 25 December to 1 January. Before the calendar reforms of 1955 and 1969, the Church celebrated Octaves for a whole host of other holy days. There were probably too many to start with, but the rather severe pruning may have been too much; there’s a movement afoot to restore the Octave of Pentecost. We’ll see.

There’s also a quasi-official Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity that runs from 19 January (the Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter) to 25 January (the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul).

But I digress.

So the Solemnity of Easter lasts for eight days, but it doesn’t stop there. Oh no, Easter has an entire season.

For fifty days, from Easter Sunday to Pentecost, we celebrate a single massive festal season. Every Sunday in this period is a “Sunday of Easter”, and every day during the season is celebrated at Mass with alleluias in white (or gold) vestments.

In a sense, these traditions even predate Christianity itself.

The Easter Season exactly corresponds to the ancient Jewish counting of days (Counting the Omer) between Passover and Shauvot, celebrated fifty days later.

Passover corresponds to Easter, for Christ is our paschal sacrifice, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Shauvot, the day when God gave the Torah to Israel, corresponds to Pentecost, when God sent His Holy Spirit to the Church.

The meaning of both days is fulfilled and transformed in Christ.

That’s what a calendar’s for, though, isn’t it? To somehow track change and continuity, to remind us of the great natural cycles even as we continue our endless fall forward, to make sure that our future remains firmly grounded in our history.

And it’s a time machine that lets us celebrate fifty days of Sundays – to let us experience kairos in the midst of our kronos.