The gift of time
Review of "Saving Time" by Jenny Odell.
When my local coffee shop advertised a summer book club featuring Jenny Odell’s Saving Time, it didn’t initially grab my interest. I did buy a copy, though, to support their post-pandemic effort to build connections in my community. And it became one of my best summer reads!
Odell takes us on a tour of the region near her home in California. Beaches and hiking trails are explored in beautiful detail – as are also graffiti on rundown buildings and peeling paint on gridlocked interstate highway signs. Interwoven through this local geography, Odell reflects on how her chronological worldview has changed since emerging from the pandemic lockdowns. She reveals how our cultural context shapes our experience of the “ever-flowing stream” of time.
John Witvliet, the director of the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship, argues that nothing has changed congregational worship more than the wristwatch. Church services now orient around the clock’s hours and minutes. Who hasn’t checked the time when the sermon feels to be going long? This is what Odell is getting at: so much of our life today is pre-determined by our clocks and the worldview they create. Should we ever have the desire to, is this something we can escape?
Her subtitle implies that we can “discover” life beyond the impositions of clock-time. This discovery only comes to those who are willing to ask probing questions about our cultural assumptions, though. For example, Where did that phrase that “time is money” originate? Who introduced the 24-hour clock, the 8-hour work day, the 40-hour work week, or even the distinction between work and leisure time – and why? Odell might even offend some by pointing out that the “American Dream” has been a nightmare for those who don’t have as much time as the more affluent.
Don’t we all have the same 24 hours each day? Conceptually this may be true but Odell points out that different people experience those hours differently in the concrete details of their lives. For example, someone who has a nanny, a cook, a housekeeper, a driver, an administrative assistant, a grocery deliverer and a financial manager will spend their 24 hours far differently than someone with none of these supports and also uses a non-motorized wheelchair to get around and must use the toilet frequently. How much time these two actually have is very different. They have vastly different experiences of time. The expectation to produce 8 hours of work each day will be experienced vastly different by them.
Odell uses the two different Greek words for time to make her point. Chronos (from which we get the English word chronology) is quantitative hours and minutes. But kairos is quality time, the right time as opposed to any old time. Odell notes that in modern Greek, kairos is the term used for weather: it’s not what’s happening in general, in the abstract, but what’s happening right now, in this place, and unrepeatable at any other time because of its specificity. We often live in chronos time – a Tuesday in January, for example – with little marking this day or this moment as unique and unrepeatable. But from a kairos time perspective, this particular Tuesday in January could also be a milestone birthday, a day on which I choose to live in a new way going forward, like a rite of passage, unrepeatable, unforgettable. This is the day the Lord has made, not just every day. This is the day of salvation – because this was the day I met Jesus in a new way. These are kairos time ways of thinking and living. Kairos time is the path back to life having its point of reference in God rather than the constructions of the chronos calendar.
Though I am unaware if Odell identifies as a Christian or is at all religious, her perspective has a prophetic edge to it. The biblical prophets revealed the specifics of their present moment until they were unavoidable. They spoke the truth about what was going on behind the camouflage of political power or the facades of piety. This is what Odell is doing as well: she makes the implicit assumptions we have about time explicit. She pulls back the curtain that blocks our awareness of how our view(s) about time have been constructed through historical and cultural developments. She shows how our view of time benefits some and enslaves many others. Time doesn’t just exist blankly; it is a powerful tool that some use to block others from life.
In this way, Saving Time challenges readers to a more intentional engagement with our embodiment in time (as well as space). To be human is to live within an unfolding succession of moments, always rooted in the present. Odell helps reorient us, ground us, in God’s gift of time to all of us. Time is the gift God has given us so that everything doesn’t happen all at once. It is our task, as responsible image-bearers of God’s to ensure that time benefits the life of all creation.
