God’s Time 4 comments

By Jessica Mesman Griffith

There are many things I’d hoped to write about for this post: those Dominican nuns on Oprah last week; the moral ferocity of Little House on the Prairie; how I finally finished Middlemarch. But every time I sit down to write, the baby inside me starts kicking, and it becomes impossible for me to think of anything else.

Yet I can’t imagine him outside my body at all. I try to remember what it was like to hold my daughter when she was a newborn, but I just can’t conjure it, not even with the aid of photographs and videos. The image of her now, at 4 years old, with all her newly acquired little girl ways, has replaced all those that came before. Her infancy and babyhood are blurred into her present being. The pictures seem to be of a different child.

I babysat a 6-month-old last week, and as I labored clumsily over the diaper and mixed too much water into the formula, I realized how much I’d genuinely forgotten. It has been long enough that I’ll have to relearn much of that hard-won knowledge. I pulled her baby book from the shelf and tried to jog my memory.

But of course I didn’t note the practicalities, or even the daily trials and accomplishments. I wrote instead about the shock of her being, the intensity of her presence, and the way it consumed me. Even when I wasn’t holding her, everywhere I looked I saw her round face: in Dave’s face, in the bathroom tiles, on the inside of my eyelids when I closed them as she nursed. I felt her weight in my arms when others held her.

And there were strange dreams. Incoherent scenes haunted my fitful sleep: riding my bike on the cracked pavement of my childhood with Charlotte in my arms, trying to balance her and steer at the same time. Drinking beer at Kelly’s Lounge in Pittsburgh with my grad school friends, knowing that I should wash my hands before I nurse the baby, but finding the sink broken.

Those dreams spoke to more than my anxieties as a new mother. They told of the jarring experience of that precise moment of birth—that instant when the baby is suddenly with you on the outside of your body, no longer hidden, abstract. In an instant, there is both body and being to attend. In an instant, my context was radically altered, and all was reordered accordingly.

It should have been as awkward as balancing a baby on the handlebars. It was, and is, sometimes. It was also as unsurprising as if she’d been there—somewhere—all along, on bikes and in barrooms, secret and waiting, but not really unknown. It was both things at once.

In her autobiography, A Circle of Quiet, Madeleine L’Engle writes of chronos and kairos, the Greek words for time. Chronos is the measurable passage of time. It’s chronology, the time “which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out.” Kairos is the immeasurable moment, an opening or a break through, an intersection with eternity. God’s time.

L’Engle was remembering an instance of rocking her grandchild, feeling no older than she had when she rocked his mother, singing the same lullabies, but knowing all the same that chronos had done its work.

“I sit in the rocking chair with a baby in my arms, and I am in both kairos and chronos. In chronos, I may be nothing more than some cybernetic salad on the bottom left-hand corner of a check; or my social-security number; or my passport number. In kairos, I am known by my name: Madeleine.”

In pregnancy I need both words. Like L’Engle, I am in both kairos and chronos. I am never more aware of chronology, of days accumulating into trimesters, the passage of time made real and visible in the growth of my body.

But kairos lies in wait. Some nights the fourth chair at the table no longer seems empty. I feel a squirming inside. I await a breakthrough.

Writes L’Engle: “The baby doesn’t know about chronos yet.”