Our Kairotic Moment | February 1, 2026 | Rev.Dr. Kathryn Benton

Keep our lamps trimmed and burning…for the time is drawing nigh. It is clearly time to unite in spirit and be prepared…prepared for new realizations…new ways of seeing life…May we connect with the Great Spirit of aliveness in which we live and move and have our being…

A teacher of mine, Bayo Akomolafe wrote:

What would change if we took seriously the consideration that the world is alive, that we derive our being from a never-static, ever-changing field of entanglements, and that we are not the center of the universe?

What would this mean? It would be revolutionary, wouldn’t it? To believe that humans are not at the pinnacle of creation…not the center of the universe…what would that be like? We derive our being from…an ever-changing field of entanglements…what does this look like?

Well, to begin with, we would have to acknowledge our relatedness to each other…the human, the other animal, the plants, the fungi, etc. We would have to acknowledge that we are (as I often tell my 5-year-old grandson) not alone in the world. In a recent post by Matthew Fox, highlighting the recent murders in Minnesota, he writes:

Americans need to learn the meaning of “solidarity.” It has to do with community-building after all. It cuts at the heart of the “rugged individualism” and egoism so central to capitalism and a John Wayne version of America. It is another word for interdependence, which lies at the center of what compassion means.

Cutting at the heart of “rugged individualism” has so long been needed. Howard Thurman wrote often of our relatedness to the natural world and each other as community. He wrote an entire thesis on it called The Search for Common Ground. He begins with the words:

Here is the paradox. A person is always threatened in the very ground of being by a sense of isolation, by feeling cut off from others. Yet a person can never separate from others, for mutual interdependence is characteristic of all life.

This is a profound understanding of life that seems to be missing in our current time for so many people. Individuals have fooled themselves into thinking that they are isolated…cut off from others. We know this is not true. We are part of one another, with no clear boundaries between us. Howard Thurman says it like this:

…the universe is not only vast and overwhelming in its immensity, it is also minutely structured and coordinated, maintaining itself by a boundless energy that configurates in rich variety, each configuration integrated with other units to comprise the totality of the universe.

This is a very complicated reality that Thurman talks about. We know it is true. The universe is vast and overwhelming in its immensity. It is not something we can even wrap our minds around. Rumi wrote:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

There is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

The world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

Doesn't make any sense.

This field is vast and full…too full to talk about. It is inviting, isn’t it?  It is a field without right or wrong…without the binaries that so plague us in our time. Bayo Akomolafe writes of this time…

May this [time] be remembered as the time of the strange path, of the third way, of the broken binary, of the traversal disruption, the kairotic moment, the posthuman movement for emancipation, the gift of disorientation that opened up new places of power, and of slow limbs.

I wonder what this strange path is. We are, I think, unable to see it in its entirety. This means that we do not understand fully our present kairotic moment. Yet, we have been here before…many times. It reminds me of last year when Hope Briggs sang this song:

I don’t feel noways tired

I’ve come too far from where I started from.

Nobody told me that the road would be easy

And I don’t believe God brought me this far to leave me.

I just can’t give up now

Come too far from where I started from.

Nobody told me the road would be easy.

And I don’t believe God brought me this far to leave me.

That song has been echoing in my brain…in my body…in my soul for the past year. It won’t let me go. The message is simple; we are not tired…we can’t be tired. Just like Fannie Lou Hamer couldn’t be tired. She said:

And you can always hear this long sob story: "You know it takes time." For three hundred years, we've given them time. And I've been tired so long, now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, and we want a change. 

I wonder what Ms. Hamer would say to our current kairotic moment? As much as she was sick and tired, she knew that we couldn’t give up then and we can’t give up now on change. Yet, things may have been a little different in her time. Our world has changed dramatically since then, especially our human world…especially our awareness of our human world. We need the spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer and the new vision of Bayo Akomolafe. He writes:

I am quite confident that even as the oceans boil, and the hurricanes beat violently against our once safe shores, and the air sweats with the heat of impending doom, and our fists protest the denial of [climate] justice, that there is a path to take that has nothing to do with victory or defeat: a place we do not yet know the coordinates to; a question we do not yet know how to ask.

I think for many of us, this sounds too vague. We want a blueprint…a plan. As we are preparing…keeping our lamps trimmed and burning…realizing that we are not tired. Maybe we have a source of power…an energy that, as Akomolafe says we do not yet know the coordinates of. There are questions we do not yet know how to ask. Mohandas Gandhi put it like this:

 …there is underlying all…change a living power…that holds all together,

that creates, dissolves and recreates.

It is this living power that we must acknowledge. It is what Gandhi called God, but we may call it whatever we like. It is, as he says, what holds everything together…creates, dissolves and recreates.

May we prepare ourselves then, to consider those questions today and in the days ahead that there will be no past greater than our future. May we in this congregation join together in community with this thought from Mrs. Thurman in mind. I would like to end with the words of Bayo Akomolafe again. Speaking of our work in the world…the work of rebirth. He writes:

May this decade bring more than just solutions, more than just a future - may it bring words we don't know yet, and temporalities we have not yet inhabited. May we be slower than speed could calculate, and swifter than the pull of the gravity of words can incarcerate. And may we be visited so thoroughly, and met in wild places so overwhelmingly, that we are left undone. Ready for composting. Ready for the impossible.

This is not something for tomorrow, but for today. It is not only something external to ourselves, but internal. It is nothing less than a total transformation…with humility and with power…composting and preparing for the impossible. Soon and Very Soon!