Clocks of every kind fill every nook and cranny of every home. Most homes have some kind of time piece in every room, and most of the people who live in those rooms have the current time displayed on smart watches and cellphones for any region in the world. We are a time-driven people; we are obsessive about checking the time. Cell phones lord it over our every waking moment. Ovens, microwaves, bedside digital clocks flash the time all day and all night. Décor clocks make statements on every wall and hallway. The tyranny of time!
But I long for timepieces that mean something. My father, a pastor of small churches all his life, always wanted a grandfather clock. He and Mother saved for years to finally get one for each other one year for Christmas. Our children remember the ritual they had of winding it on Sunday each week and loved the comforting sound of it when they spent weekends at their house while we were out on the road singing. Benjy and Melody now have that clock in the corner of their piano room. Its music is now part of the natural habitat of their children who take for granted the sound of the chimes that mark the hours as they pass. They wind their clock on Sunday, just as their great grandparents did all those years when their parents were growing up.
Bill and I, too, have a grandfather clock, given to us as a very special Christmas gift from those who worked with us to publish and send out our music. It’s a real presence in our family room. I, too, wind it on Sunday.
At our cabin in the woods where I go to write is a clock that looks like a china dinner plate. I keep it because it was given to us years ago by Dino and Cheryl Kartsonakis; I think of them when I see it. And the crystal clock in our living room was actually a very special award given to us by ASCAP in New York, while the one on our roll-top desk was a gift from Anderson University for just that spot next to the antique writing pens and bottles of old-fashioned ink.
The Christmas he was one year old, I gave to our grandson Liam a clock that looked like “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie”. He loved it when I sang “Sing a Song of Six-pence” to him, so this clock from the famous Indiana artist FB Fogg found a place in his nursery.
Our daughter Amy and her husband Andrew once had a little place in the woods in quaint Brown County, Indiana. Amy is the one in our family that was always at war with time and hated schedules that overruled the inclinations of her heart, so when I asked her what they would like for their cottage she said, “I want clocks that don’t work or have no hands. I want a collection of them on the wall. That will be the one place where our family can lose track of time!”
Don’t you have to just love that?
Well, I loved it, too! So when we were in Carmel, California, on vacation, I discovered in a lovely French country shop a dainty bracelet made of thin gold and silver faces of antique watches. I just couldn’t resist it. It had Amy’s name all over it! We gave it to her for her birthday. None of the hands move on these tiny watch faces—Amy’s kind of timepiece.
When Benjy was a teen-ager, he asked me to listen to part of an album by the Canadian rock group Triumph. On it was a brilliant musical study called “Time Canon,” a trilogy of songs about time. The first was a cut called “Time Goes By”. There was a cut called “Killing Time”, which, if I recall, was a song about the young who think they have all the time in the world to kill. But gradually, there is a turn in the trilogy and the meaning of “killing” turns from a lighthearted comment about killing time into an adjective meaning time that kills! Loneliness and too much time becomes lethal, killing the soul. Unforgettable.
I think of that trilogy of songs now that social distancing, too much time alone, and isolation from the happy interaction of family gatherings become a strange new norm. People were not meant to be alone. Children need children, squealing down the hillside. Families need to be crammed around tables, sharing turkey and pumpkin pie, telling the hilarious stories to the new generation, laughing their heads off together. We need each other!
I think again about the two kinds of time: Chronos and Kairos. The first is earth time, the kind of time that schedules are built on, the kind of time that runs our lives and keeps up the pressure and causes the wheels of commerce to turn with relentless urgency. Any chronological time-keeping is the product of this earth and its value system. Chronos gets us to work and to school and to church and sets the framework of our days.
Then there is God’s time. Amazing how something like a worldwide pandemic can stop down what we all thought was totally essential, and make us reconsider what is vitally important after all. God’s time, Kairos, is eternal and not the victim of earth’s systems, values, or pressures. I am coming to believe that it may be our mission on this earth to turn what Chronos time we have here in this life into something eternal—to make something “Kairos” out of the hours of time we are given on this earth, something that will transcend time and space and go on after time and space shall end.
And I visit the clocks of my life again. It is more than their ability to tell me what time it is; it is to remind me the value of the moments we have. It is Liam winding my parents grandfather clock on Sunday because it matters. It is making conscious note that Sunday isn’t just another day to be driven by our cell phones. It is the day to make something of the time, put some eternity in it by the way we dish up the pot roast after worship and have that lingering conversation with the teen-agers and the little ones, and the old ones, and the usually-too-busy-ones and the college students who know more right now than they will ever know again in their lives. It is listening—and seeing in everyone’s insight a kernel of truth and that is a treasure we may not have recognized before. And it is that “something,” that Kairos sitting right here in the middle of our Chronos—right here in this moment on this planet at this time with these people we love, barely aware that the clock is chiming away marking something, well, timeless!
