Grieving Kairos Moments

Today was to have been the day that we feted the community partners who worked with us this past year by serving as Field Education (FE) supervisors for our students as they engaged in the practice of religious leadership at congregations, health-care facilities, prisons, non-profit organizations, colleges and universities, and sites of social justice efforts. It is one of my favorite days of my professional year as Nashville’s religious leaders come to our school for a big celebration. We transform our multi-purpose space into an inviting bistro with fresh flowers on every table. A local chef prepares a feast. Our Dean, who is also a poet, speaks words of deep appreciation. Our best students offer reflections on the year. We give awards. We have school swag at every place setting. It is a festive time of celebration and merry-making.

The loss of this chronological marker of the end of a year of FE, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, has hit me in a visceral way and I have been struggling to understand my grief. On the one hand, it feels a bit trivial to be sad about missing a party while folks all around us are struggling with matters of actual life and death. Just across campus, on the medical center side, teams are working day and night to transform a parking garage into additional emergency room space. In the face of this, our FE celebration simply does not matter.

And yet it does. In the same way that graduations, and weddings, and funerals matter. And it matters in the moment. Schools everywhere are bringing their best imaginative impulses to creating some sort of virtual alternative to graduation ceremonies, and will try to capture a bit of the pride and accomplishment of the day through screens at kitchen tables and in living rooms all across the world, as students and families tune in from their own time zone. And while it will surely carry some meaning, and will certainly be a ceremony no one is likely to forget, it simply is not the same as being together with hugs and handshakes, and pats on the back, and so many photographs.

Our own school is promising to have a celebration for the 2020 graduates at the 2021 commencement and I worry that we will have missed a moment. Graduating at one’s appointed time is not just a Chronos moment in that it is the culmination of a long process, but it is also a Kairos moment, having to do with a sense of right timing, or God’s timing or appropriateness.

The grief I feel today is a realization that Kairos moments cannot be re-scheduled.

At this year’s lunch we would have honored a local pastor who is a force for justice in Nashville, and who has hosted a dozen or more of our students through the years at her church on the north side. We would have given her a standing ovation and invited her to take a bouquet of flowers home with her. We would have acknowledged those folks who had supervised one of our students for the first time, dubbing them the “Rookie Class of 2020,” and signaling to them that we hoped for a dozen more years from them. There would have been good chemistry and energy in the room, and all of that is an intangible dimension to the vibrancy of our FE program.

I sent the retiring pastor a warm email, and I made a point to especially thank the “rookies,” but we missed a Kairos moment. And in order to move forward with my work, I need to acknowledge the griefs along the way. Esther Perel, a Belgian psychotherapist, is fond of reminding us that “life is in the details.” When those details are disrupted or on hold, or even gone forever, they must be grieved. It is good and appropriate, and in God’s timing that we grieve along the way. Maybe grieving the lost Kairos moments is, in fact, a way to honor them.