The Jeff Cavins Show (Your Catholic Bible Study Podcast) - If I Could Put Time In A Bottle

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

Does your experience in mass on Sunday have an impact on your week? Today, Jeff explains the difference between Kronos and Kairos time, and how we can take the moments of mass and carry them into the rest of our week. Snippet from the Show “Sacred time transforms secular time.” Email us with comments or questions at [e-mail] Text “jeffcavins” to 33-777 to subscribe and get Jeff’s shownotes delivered straight to your email! Or visit ascensionpress.com/thejeffcavinsshow for full shownotes!

You're listening to the Jeff Kaven Show, episode 2.15, if I could put time in a bottle. Hey, I'm Jeff Kavins. How do you simplify your life? How do you study the Bible? All the way from motorcycle trips to raising kids, we're going to talk about the faith and life in general. It's the Jeff Kaven show. Thank you for joining me once again. I'm Jeff Kavans. and it is so good to have you with me. I love sharing this time with you, talking about all things,

discipleship and scripture and life. Well, you know something happened to me at Mass last week? I don't know if this has ever happened to you where you listen to the words being spoken in mass and then suddenly something is said and you think, oh my, I've never heard that before. That is powerful. Now, I know this happens in Scripture. I've been studying Scripture for about 45 years, and it's really not that unusual in the morning when my wife and I are reading Scripture that, you know, one of us or both of us will say, I've never heard that before, at least not like that. And that's what happened to me this last Sunday in the Eucharistic Prayer. I'm going to talk about that in just a few minutes. But I want to kind of set the table here by asking you a question.

Jim, is your experience in Mass, your experience in worshiping on Sunday? And if you go to Mass every single day, your experience in Mass every day or on Sunday, does that have an impact on the rest of the week for you? Now, I know we say the words at the end of the Mass, go in peace to love and serve the Lord. And we say amen to that. And so, We are technically supposed to be taking something from the Mass and going out and serving the Lord throughout the week. And whatever it is that we received or experienced in the Mass should have an impact on the rest of your week.

And wow, my eyes were opened up this week to one simple phrase, which I'm going to give you, which kind of transformed me this week. And I love when that happens. Don't you, where you hear something and you think, never going to forget that. That is solid gold for me. Well, in 1973, I was a freshman in high school, and one of my favorite artists at that time was a guy that was really becoming more well-known. His name was Jim Croce. Jim Croce was a singer-songwriter, and he wrote a song called If I Could Put Time in a bottle. And I think it was about, I think it showed.

up about to number one, about three months after he died in a plane crash in 1973. That's when it rose to number one. And anybody that was raised in that era of 71 through 77, that song is part of their growing up repertoire. And if you were born after that, no doubt you've heard the lyrics before and they're so beautiful. In fact, it's probably one of the most beautifully written songs that I've ever heard. And if you haven't heard it, it goes, and I'm not going to sing it, don't worry, I don't want to ruin this for you, but it says, if I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I'd like to do is to save every day till eternity passes away just to spend it with you. And if I could make days last forever, and if words could make wishes come true,

we'd walk through the fields of ripening corn and time would flow through us and you and i'd save every day like a treasure and then again and again i'd spend it with you and then he goes on and says if i had a box just for wishes and dreams that had never come true the box would be empty except for the memory of you of time they were answered by you it just goes on and on and it's really beautiful, and you can look it up on the internet and get the whole song if you would like to. But it really does say something very special, and that is that time is very, very important. And not only time and how we spend it, but the quality time that we have in our life. And if I asked you to go back into your memory, to your childhood,

or you're growing up or you're dating years or your early working years, there would be certain moments that would stand out as being different than most of the days that you experienced because most of the days that you experienced were common. They were everyday types of things. You went to work, you came home, you read the paper or today, you look at your phone. And you might watch the evening news or something like that. And day after day, things are pretty much the same. But then suddenly something comes up and it kind of shouts at you that this is different. This is different. That happened to me this last week. But also, when you read the Bible about Abraham, for example, or David, it's important to remember that most of their days, most of Abraham's days were like

yours where he did what he needed to do as a husband and father and his job and you know leadership skills all of that those are common things in his life but there were a few days where that time changed and it was it was different well this last sunday in the eucharistic prayer number one uh it was a the thanksgiving portion second sunday and easter here's the the word the paragraph that was said by our priest, Father Zarin. You know, I get a lot of good ideas during Mass, things that hit me, and I typically would take my phone out and write this down, but Emily's always reminding me people are going to think you're texting. So I bring a notebook with me. So here's where these were the words in Eucharistic prayer number one. Therefore, Lord, we pray, graciously accept this oblation

of our service, that of your whole family, order our days. in your peace and command that we be delivered from eternal damnation and counted among the flock of those you have chosen through Christ our Lord. Amen. Now that was the paragraph that was recited on the second Sunday on Easter and the one phrase that jumped out at me and I thought, whoa, I haven't heard that. That hit me differently. It was the phrase, order our day. days in your peace. Just say that once with me. Order our days in your peace. Now, that really hit me. And I thought about that for a moment that, God, what if you, what if our days were ordered in your peace? Now, we go through the liturgical calendar and we have Advent and Lent and, you know,

Easter, Christmas, but by and large, the most number of days in the liturgical, calendar are what we call ordinary days. And that doesn't mean they're just ordinary, like blah, but they are ordinary, meaning they are ordered. They are ordered. And so right off the bat as Catholics, we know that our days are ordered according to the liturgical calendar. But here in the Eucharistic prayer, the priest says, order our days in your peace. Now, I broke that paragraph down. I came home, I looked it up, and I wrote it down, and kind of parsed it. And I came up with really four major things in that Eucharistic prayer. The one about ordering our days in your piece is the one I want to talk to you about. But the four things were, number one, graciously accept this

oblation of our service. Okay, that's how we participate in the mass. Number two, order our days in your peace. Number three, command that we be delivered from eternal. damnation. Not a bad thing, huh? And number four, and counted among the flock of those you have chosen. Now, we could do a podcast on each one of those, no doubt. And each one hit me as I came home and started to meditate throughout the day on those four parts of that Eucharistic prayer. But it was the second one, order our days in your peace that really, really hit me. And that led me on to a little study about time, which brought me back to 1973 and time in a bottle if I had time in a bottle by George Jim Croce. You know, number one, I would say this. The ancient Greeks, they had two words

for time. And you know both of them probably. The first one was chronos, chronos, and the second was chiros. Now, keep track of those for a moment because I'm going to try to weave this together. And I think it's going to make a big difference in the way you see the relationship between mass and the rest of the week. So the Greeks had two words for time, chronos and chiros. The first was chronos, which we still use in words like chronological or another words like a chronograph or that type of thing. And it refers to clock time that we can measure in seconds, minutes, and hours and years. It is the minute-by-minute passing of time, chronos, and we're all familiar with that. And where chronos is quantitative, chiros is qualitative. That's the difference between

chronos and chiros. Chronos is quantitative. You're 42 years old. An hour went by, 84 seconds went by, 10 seconds went by. That's chronos. So, where chronos is quantitative chiros that's different that's qualitative qualitative i got up in the morning and i ate breakfast and then i i took a shower and i brushed my hair and brushed my teeth i got dressed okay this is chronos and then i went to the church and got married that's chiros that's qualitative two hours of qualitative time so chiros measures moments not seconds. It measures moments and not seconds. Furthermore, it refers to the right moment or the opportune moment. You could say an opportunity, the perfect moment. And it's difficult to describe that feeling that you might have if you've never experienced it before. But if you have, maybe you describe that chiros moment that was different than the rest of the minutes throughout the day. you may have described it as heavenly. Oh, that was heavenly. That was so otherworldly. That was above

the clouds. Kairos has a spiritual sense to it. Time that is lifted out of the ordinary business of Kronos life. Nothing for a moment. What have been the Kairos moments in your life? Those moments that were lifted out of chronos, where, no, it wasn't just another day. It was a day beyond days. It was heavenly. Kairos. It has this spiritual sense to it. Now, Ecclesiastes tells us a little bit about time when it says, to everything, there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heavens, a time to be born, and a time to die. A time to plant in a time to pluck up that which is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal. And so on. Now, in the first Greek translations of the Bible, you know it as the Septuagint,

each use of the word time in that passage in Ecclesiastes is rendered as chiros, not chronos. It's an opportunity. It's lifted above chronos, a time to die. That isn't just another myth. a time to plant is not just another minute the time to reap is not the time to kill that is certainly not chronos it is different and we say things like you probably have used this one i know i've used this one so many times you know i'll be sitting with my wife out on the boat on a lake and we have something to drink and some snacks and we're looking out the sun's going down and i say you know it just doesn't get any better than this. That's Cairo's.

When you find yourself in Cairo's time, you completely lose track of chronos time. Do you remember when you were dating back in high school and you were with that special guy or that special girl? You lost time. When you're in love, you lose time. It's a state of flow, as they would say today. A state of flow is activated and it cannot be measured,

but only experienced. That's what we're talking about here. Put simply, we would say that we are to rest in peace. That's another way of saying rest in heaven. And as peace stands in for heaven here, I would suggest to you that in the Roman canon, peace has the additional meaning. Now, there were different instances in the Bible,

Bible where New Testament characters certainly experienced chiros, something extraordinary out of time. And when we come back from the break, I want to go through that with you and give you some suggestions on what Monday through Saturday might be like because of the Cairo's moment in mass. You're listening to the Jeff Kaven show. Did you know that every single item in a Catholic church points us towards heaven? Make every visit to a Catholic church a powerful reminder of God's presence with a new book from Ascension, The Sacred That Surounds Us by Andrea Zackman. The sacred that surrounds us awakens Catholics to the mystery of the seemingly ordinary items we see every week at Mass.

It explains with clarity the symbolic realities. and historical facts of each one. To order the sacred that surrounds us, visit ascensionpress.com or Amazon. Thanks for coming back. It's about time. We continued with this podcast. Okay, so we're talking about time in a bottle,

but more specifically, we're talking about the difference between chronos, which is quantitative, or quantitative, and chiros, which is qualitative, right? The experience of most of us is pretty normal, but then there is lifted out of Kronos some Kairos event. Now, in the New Testament, it was in Luke chapter 24, where you have the Emmaus Road experience. As the disciples were walking away from Jerusalem with their heads hung down, you know, a couple people there. They were walking with their heads down suddenly,

in the midst of the chronological experience of their day, a chiros experience rose up as they met Jesus Christ. And that experience of walking with Jesus Christ was different than all the earlier seconds in their day. When they met Jesus, Jesus asks them a question, what are you guys talking about. And they said, well, are you the only one in Jerusalem that is sort of a drifty about this little thing that happened in Jerusalem? What happened? How Jesus Christ was crucified. Thought he was going to rise from the dead. Our lives were going to be different. And Jesus began to do what? He began to tell them all about himself in the Old Testament. And they didn't know what was him at that point. But he is talking to them about the salvation history in the Old Testament and how

Christ had to suffer all those things. And later on, what did they say? They said, when we were on that road, didn't our hearts burn within us? Chiros, qualitative time. But then it was when he stayed with them and he broke bread that suddenly in the breaking of the bread, their eyes were opened and bang they saw him for who he was it was jesus and that experience that qualitative time was different than all the other times and it would now affect all their chronos from that day forward do you see that do you see that so i remember one one writer saying saying how do we cultivate more of these opportune moments? And I've always been struck by that. How do we cultivate more of these opportune moments, more of these chiros moments? We know we can't live in them

forever, right? I can't live forever on that wedding day in 1978, but I can be affected by that day even till now, 43 years later. But how do we fill ourselves and not just our calendars with moments of chiros? How do we live our lives, not just chronologically, but in the sense of chiros, chirologically, I guess we would say. And when I heard those words in the Eucharistic prayer, order our days in your peace, I think that that is perhaps, first of all, a request from the busy, the very weary Christian, talking about how the world has overcome them in daily life, the stress of COVID, the stress of their work, the stress of children at home. Lord, order our days during COVID and any other difficult time in our life, order our days

in your peace, that we carry the peace of the mass into the other. days of the week. Isn't that powerful? Don't you see how powerful that is? Paul seemed to understand this when he said in Ephesians chapter 5, and I'll put these in the show notes for you. And if you don't have the show notes, just type my name, Jeff Kaven's one word and text it to 3377. I'll get you the notes from here and forever. He says in Ephesians chapter 5, look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time because the days are evil. My friend, I would suggest to you that the one way that you can make the best use of your time is to live it in light of that chiros moment, that experience in the mass, where you experience

the word of God and you experience the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ being given to you and the fact that you have been freed from sin. Philippians four, Paul said, and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. So if the priest said, order our days in your peace, then we know that we can take that peace and it will guard our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus from Monday through Saturday, or if you go to Mass every day for the next 23 hours. I love that. He said in, that was Philippians 4, 7, but then he said in verse 8 of Philippians 4, he says, finally,

brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable. If there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. So he draws this correlation, this relationship between having your hearts guarded by the peace of Christ and also the words in mass order our days in your peace. He ties that to what we think about. How can you walk with a guarded heart? How can you experience the peace of God which surpasses all understanding?

you have your heart guarded and your mind in Christ Jesus. It's so powerful. You see, the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, is connected to the mass and the ultimate sacrifice for our sins, and it allows us to be called one of His. We belong to Him. We understood this in the Mass in that Kairos moment, but it will now color the rest of our week. One of the one of the other things that we can learn from this is that the richer meaning of the phrase that we that we are looking at here, this tremendous phrase, order our days in your

peace, seems to be a reminder that all of our days and our daily work should be ordered around the mass, that the mass, whether we make it daily or weekly, is the principle. Is the principle of that slice of time in which in which it falls the mass can permeate all of our life converting chronos to chiros converting it from quantitative to qualitative that monday is not just quantitative 24 hours it's qualitative with chiros how by taking the mass into Monday. In some sense, sacred time colors or transforms common time, secular time. Another thing, I guess I would say the third chiros, example of chiros and your participation in the mass goes to a whole new level. Participation in the mass is not

merely a slice of time that lifts you up and makes you feel good about God and makes you you feel good about life and makes you feel good about yourself, participation in the mass is in fact participating in the life of heaven itself. And through the mass then, if our days are ordered in it, defined by it and around it, so that its laws and aspirations and language become a lived second nature to us through this mass, this experience, daily life itself takes on a foretaste of heaven, a taste of heaven. And we truly could say then, this is heavenly. This feels like heaven.

This experience is like heaven. It doesn't get any better than this. So we tend to think of our time in a chronos mindset. Let me kind of wrap this up for you here and give you just a little bit of encouragement. we tend to think of our time in a in a chronos mindset don't we and that's when we talk about the days are long and uh that day was a long day wish i could get that back we think of having 24 hours in a day we define our work weeks by the number of hours that we work and how many hours do most people work well in the united states we call it 40 hours we're going to have

40 hours of chronos. And boy, I don't really like what I'm doing, but I'm going to do it. And this is what I studied for. And I got a job. And I don't like my manager. And I don't like my colleagues. And I wish I could get home earlier. And all the things that go along with a 40 hour work week, we have a list of things to do in the 40 hours. And only so much time to get everything done. That's not only true of work, but that's true with all of the hours. outside of work, the chiros moment of the mass influences our chronos experience. And so if you have those 40 hours and you have that to-do list and you come home and you have more hours and you've got to-do lists, or you're just plain bored in chronos, well, the chiros moment of mass should

influence your chronos experience. And Paul is saying in Ephesians 5, Paul instructs us to do what, to redeem, to redeem time, to pay attention and take advantage of the opportune times and seasons. And so having an opportunity to encourage someone can become a chiros moment. Having the opportunity to share Christ with a stranger can be a chiros moment. Feeding the poor can be a chiros moment. Playing with your children can be a kairos moment going on a vacation can be a kairos moment even a week i look back at uh growing up and if you were to ask me if you were to ask me tell me about all of your days i'd say oh man i can't remember all of that i can't remember all of that what did you have for lunch on june 4th

1973. I have no idea. I have no idea at all. But what happened in February of 1967? My sister was born. And so that stood out. That was a memory. That was qualitative. And you could go back into your childhood and make a list of all of the kairos moments growing up and you could share those with other people that these were the qualitative events in my life but that the point i'm trying to make today is that we can go beyond that and make kairos moments today by paying attention taking the opportunity to do something some moments are more valuable than other moments the hour i spent with a troubled friend is a more valuable moment than an hour-watching network news. I have to take advantage of my opportunities, and it's influenced by the mass in all I received.

We must change our view of what effectiveness really is in terms of time. We buy up opportunities or look for opportunities that transcend mere minutes going by. And I'll conclude with this, a disciple has their senses attuned. to the slightest hint of an opportunity. A disciple orders his steps in such a way that there is margin to respond to a Chiros moment, a moment of opportunity. So, my friend, let's pray together, shall we?

Lord, we pray, graciously accept this oblation of our service, that of your whole family. Order our days in your peace and command that we be delivered from eternal damnation, and counted among the flock of those you have chosen through Christ our Lord. Amen. My friend, I love you, and I do pray that you will have a phenomenal week. And remember, if you're interested in going to Israel with Father Mike and myself, along with a cast of wonderful Catholic characters,

then you can go to my website. It's going to be in June of 2022. We had to cancel it this year due to COVID again. But we'd love to have you. with us and remember that every thursday if you're reading the bible in a year with father mike you can join me on thursdays at the ascensions catholic scripture study facebook page and i'll give some answers to some of the difficult questions that's two o'clock eastern one o'clock central lord i thank you for my friends and lord jesus lord jesus we love you with all of our heart with all

of her heart. And if I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I'd like to do is to save every day till eternity passes away. And Jesus, I'd just spend it with you. Help us to live Cairo's moments as a result of our experience in the Mass. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Have a great week. I love you. Thank you.