Timpul prielnic

Kairos. Importanța Praznicelor în Ortodoxie

Abstract

Time and space are dimensions created by God, distinguishing the
created from the uncreated, and simultaneously constituting the framework within
which creation progresses toward the fulfilment and perfection of the divine project.
For the human being, time and space are, as Father Dumitru Stăniloae sustains,
intervals between God’s call and man’s response.
Kairos designates the favourable moment / time / appointed liturgical moment.
According to Saint Paul, this appointed time corresponds to the Jewish feasts, and for
Christians, it is the time of the Church Feasts. Thus, the Feasts of the Church constitute
the sacred remembrance, the anamnesis and the direct liturgical actualization of the
time redeemed by Christ, who entered our temporal and spatial existence through the
Incarnation. The Feasts simultaneously as a call to vigilance and as an invitation to a
direct encounter of man with God, through Christ, who became temporal for our sake, so
that we may discipline and educate our beings to transcend the confines of fallen time,
in order to comprehend the dignity to which we have been summoned by our Creator.
From a theological standpoint, it is essential to recognize that liturgical time is
grounded in cosmic time as established by God ‑ not the reverse. The liturgical time
does not abolish or suspend cosmic time; rather, it transfigures it qualitatively. It has
the power to transform fallen time into redeemed time suffused with the presence of
the encounter between man and God, from whose memory the “history of eternity“ is
shaped.