“Clocks have shaped my life,” confesses Andrew Achenbaum, a distin-guished historian of aging in America. “I spend much of the day wondering how much I can pack in,” he adds ruefully.

But Achenbaum tries to break this pattern so typical of modern culture: “Occasionally, I give time to focus in on life’s exquisite mysteries.” That’s when time becomes liberating for him as he attends to its possibilities.

This historian was a keynote speaker at last week’s meeting in San Diego of the American Society on Aging. There, people involved in a wide range of stu-dies about older people and services to them came together around the ambitious subject “Aging and the Meaning of Time.”

With heartfelt approval Professor Achenbaum quotes the late spiritual writer Henri Nouwen: “People must ripen.” These words suggest the purpose of aging – allowing ourselves to continue growing.

All faith traditions share the insight that long life allows for growth in spi-rit. They see time as a gift that makes spiritual development possible. As another speaker, Mel Kimble, wryly says, “God invented time to keep everything from happening at once.”

Kimble, teacher at a Lutheran seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, now sees time very differently from earlier in his life. Recovery from two life-threatening diseases, cancer and stroke, has led him to speak of “my post-mortem life.” From his survivor’s vantage point, these are his “bonus years.” For him, everything – family, friendships, the world of nature – has new meaning, enriching his expe-rience of time.

“How time and aging intersect depends on what we bring to the expe-rience,” says Robert Atchley, now a professor at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, a young university that operates according to Buddhist principles. Na-ropa tries to bring together the inner journey of students and teachers with the subject matter being studied.

Moments of silence, Atchley points out, change one’s feelings about time. That’s why Quakers begin business meetings by an interval of quiet. Ideally, this practice introduces soul into the discussion from the start and lays a foundation for consensus.

In private conversation, I asked Robert Atchley whether he has sets aside a special time for prayer and meditation each day. His answer pleased me because it gives hope to those of us who find it difficult to schedule spiritual practice. Rather than a set schedule, Atchley chooses to meditate during moments of respite during the day, waiting in line at the supermarket, for example.

Of course, this practice of “finding God in all things” does not itself come easily but demands a high level of spiritual maturity. When seized upon, such moments enrich time by infusing it with meaning that reaches beyond.

The Jewish challenge, according to Rabbi Samuel Seicol of Boston, is to look forward. This tradition says that “you don’t have to finish the task, but you must start it.” The patriarch Abraham was told by God to get up and go. He went toward the future without a map but with hope.

Rabbi Seicol, chaplain at the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center in Roslindale, challenges residents there “to see what they already know,” a seeing that the rabbi calls hard to do. Maybe that involves some responsibility for imposing our own meaning on time.

The sabbath and other holy days change the nature of time. They remind Jews that there is a point when time ends. But until that point, Rabbi Seicol says, time moves forward and challenges us to grow, no matter how learned we already are.

Another speaker, Susan McFadden, who teaches at the University of Wis-consin at Oshkosh, loves to distinguish between chronos and kairos. The first Greek word refers to ordinary time that can be measured by clocks. By contrast, the second word points toward those times that are filled with meaning. The New Testament is full of this distinction and moments of kairos loom large throughout its pages.

“What if no moment had any more importance than any other?,” Professor McFadden asked. In doing so, she alluded to the burden of chronos in those nurs-ing homes where one day is much like another.

Even for older people living in their own homes, however, building enough kairos into our lives can be a challenge. I will never forget the molasses- like pace of a year in my life when I lived in northern Wales. Almost nothing happened during the average day and I thought that this ten-month period would never come to an end.

McFadden terms the culture in which we live a chronos society. “Many people have trouble finding any meaning in society,” she says. Yet the beginning of the year 2000 seemed to be a kairos moment across the entire world. Maybe that moment of grace gives hope to us who are searching for the values hidden in the time of our lives.

Richard Griffin