Timpul prielnic: Kairos. Importanța praznicelor în Ortodoxie
The Opportune Time: Kairos. The Importance of Feasts in Orthodoxy

Summary/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.

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