I am sitting at the kitchen table and Cate and Rachel are sitting on either side of me.  Each has a bright blue and a bright yellow lump of Play-Doh.  Cate grabs her blue lump with two little fists.  She clenches her teeth and squeezes the air out of the lump.  Then she stretches this lump thin until holes appear.  Holding up a piece, she looks up at me through the hole and smiles. 

Meanwhile, on the other side Rachel separates little blue and yellow balls of Play-Doh into separate color-coded piles.  She pulls two of the empty containers close and says “cup.”  Then she begins dropping bits of yellow clay into one cup and blue balls into the other until the space in front of her is clean.

Not quite two years old, neither of my granddaughters has any concept of time.  We live in a perpetual “now” without a past or future.  For the next five hours we are together without a clock, agenda or schedule.  As their companion, caretaker, friend and grandmother, my time has become theirs. 

Grandpa has put up a pup tent for us in the sitting room.  A large stuffed “Elmo” is in the magazine crock and at some point we will unpack the box of toys in the corner.  Whenever the mood strikes, we play a CD of Irish fiddle tunes and dance around together until Grandma collapses and turns on an educational video about farm animals or shapes and colors.  Whatever we think of is what we do next until one or all of us tires of it.  The Greek word “kairos” means dancing with God in the present moment.  Truly, Cate and Rachel bring kairos into my life.  

St. Ignatius of Loyola said, “There are very few people who realize what God would make of them if they abandoned themselves into His hands, and let themselves be formed by His grace.”  I had almost forgotten what it means to abandon my schedule for life without structure.  When my own children were young we played while I kept one eye on the clock, and so I only half-entered their world.  Now I know how quickly kairos time can disappear into the structure of pre-school, kindergarten and school.  In the grown-up world only little puddles of kairos slip into our hurried-up lives.  A walk beside the ocean at dawn, the birth of a baby, moments of forgiveness and reconciliation, the visit of friends from far-away; all bring time without borders into days that are shortened by clutter.  Jim says he thinks kairos is the way time must be measured in heaven.  Once we were too young and too busy to enter kairos when it came upon us.  As we sit at this table, finding out what we can do with Play Doh, I know Cate and Rachel are forming me too, helping me understand what it means to abandon ourselves to the grace of God.