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    Kairos
    Kairos
    Kairos
    Ebook259 pages1 hour

    Kairos

    By Denisa Nica

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Kairos (καιρός) is an ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment (the supreme moment). It is the time when God acts. This book is an invitation to enter the space and time when God lives among us. Humanity has wrestled with questions about God throughout its history. Who am I? Who is Jesus, and why does it matter? Does He really care about my life here and now? Where is God in the midst of suffering? Can He really be trusted? The deep global trauma of the last few years has caused more people to struggle with these questions and others like them.

     

    As a spiritual director, Denisa Nica is called and trained to accompany souls on their journeys with God. As a poet, she is called to enter the place where God holds space to listen to Him speak. Through images and metaphors, poetry speaks the language of the Gospel. The Gospel, in turn, informs and inspires her poetry. The Bible speaks many times about the importance of co-sojourners as we move forward on the way. We learn that Christians don't have to, and shouldn't, be alone on their spiritual journeys. As you read these prayer poems, join Denisa and in the words of Frederick Buechner, "listen to your life to taste the sacred" by finding your kairos in the everyday.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDenisa Nica
    Release dateJun 15, 2023
    ISBN9781739014919
    Kairos

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      Book preview

      Kairos - Denisa Nica

      Foreword

      As a spiritual director, I am called and trained to accompany and hold space for souls on their journeys with God as we listen together to Jesus speaking in the midst of their everyday lives.

      As a poet, I am called to enter the space that is most real to me, where I am most fully human, the place where God holds space for my own self to listen to him speak. Then, I open trembling hands and share it with others on the path. As I do this, the reader and I walk together, listening to Jesus’ voice in the middle of our Tuesday morning lives.

      The Bible offers us glimpses into the importance of having co-sojourners as we move forward on the way. On the Road to Emmaus in Luke 24, Jesus shows us that we don't have to be alone on our spiritual journeys.

      This book is a hello to here and a hello to now. It is an invitation to rest with me in the space and time where God lives among us right here and right now. It is an invitation to walk forth and share our own Emmaus Road with the other and with Jesus, as He walks right alongside us.

      If where you find yourself is a place where God is not, you don’t have to retrace your steps and travel over ungracious land to find God again. You simply pause to look, to listen and there God is walking right with you in the weeds finding a way beside us in the darkness, glad to be in your presence. There is no traveling back. There’s only being here.

      What helps you be here where God is? What helps you be here now? Whether it is slow breathing, laughter, listening, prayer, dancing, being outside among the trees, or driving alone in your car, there is a presence with whom we can rest without performance, free from scolding, filled with delight, glad to be with us.

      Kairos (καιρός) is an ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment (the supreme moment). In the New Testament, kairos means, the appointed time in the purpose of God, or the time when God acts. In kairos time, we enter God time, full time.

      In my spiritual direction work, I hear more and more people talk about deconstruction: Who am I? "What does it mean to be human? Who is Jesus? Why does it matter? Where do I belong? What is the Church? Where is God in the midst of such widespread suffering? Does He really care about my life here and now? Can God really be trusted?"

      Humanity has wrestled with these questions throughout history. However, life in a technological, post-Christian, post-modern, and post-pandemic world have caused many to wrestle with these questions, perhaps more than ever before in our lifetime.

      I pray that these poem prayers may offer those wrestling through a season of spiritual doubt an honest, safe, and restful place where they come and join others on the Emmaus Road.

      You are holding in your hands my own pilgrimage through the wilderness and my own wrestling with God. This book represents some of the seeds of my own contemplation through the experience of what 16th century Carmelite monk John of the Cross calls The Dark Night of the Soul.

      Like Jacob in Genesis 32, I ached for God's blessing right there in the darkness, where nothing made sense. Prayer felt dry and rough, like sand in my mouth. After many years of walking alongside me, God simply vanished. I knew He was here, but I no longer felt Him. Instead, I felt disoriented and alone. These poems are prayers birthed out of the wrestling that simultaneously brought forth both new intimacy and painful struggle, but that ultimately yielded a blessing. However, as in Jacob’s case, the blessing does not happen immediately. And it comes with a price. Jacob’s leg is put out of joint, and at sunrise, he leaves the encounter with a limp. He names the place The Face of God, to mark his face-to-face encounter with God.

      Many of us are marked by the wounds we have sustained from our struggles. God often wrestles with us, we often wrestle with him, and we are permanently changed by this life-and-death encounter. Ultimately if we make it out alive, the place of our wrestling becomes holy ground, and we grow in that process. Pain always forms us or deforms us. We will be forever changed by pain.

      Now, prayer in the night is hard because we often don’t have words to help us make sense of our experience. And frankly, sometimes we don't want to. Naming reality, what we really feel, can simply be too painful. Coming face-to-face with our loneliness, confusion, and disillusionment might undo us.

      But words, when given the chance, can unlock our hearts and put meat on the bones of our suffering. Words give our battered souls language and a voice. Words are spoken through our lips, our bodies, and like tears, are material God uses in the very physical sense to connect us to the realities of our interior life. They help integrate us and lead us, if we let them, to a wholeness we may not otherwise experience, all the way into the arms of God.

      Interestingly, Genesis 32:25 starts with the emphasis on Jacob’s solitude. It is while Jacob is alone in the night, at the ford of the Jabbok (an actual physical place), that the wrestling starts.

      In my darkest hours of solitude and silence, sitting in my butterfly chair by the big window of my study room, so I started wrestling with God.

      We wrestled about many things. His silence offended me. My circumstances grieved me. The state of the world broke my heart, my hope. My ongoing migraines and back pain broke my body, my joy. Some days I was very angry. Some days we would argue, and I could be heard raising my voice. Some days I didn't have, nor wanted, words. Some days I had tears, many tears. Other days I couldn't find tears, and all I could do was belly laugh at the insanity of it all. Laughing with God in the night sometimes ended in lots of words, sometimes it left me unable to open my mouth. Some days, my body, no longer able to run on pain, refused to move.

      These poems are a truth-telling story about two things, my honest wrestling with God in my season of wilderness, right in the middle of my ordinary life, and more importantly, about the realization

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