By DONALD DeMARCO
The Ancient Greeks had two words for “time”: Chronos and Kairos.
The former referred to chronometric time. We refer to a watch as a chronometer. This is time that unfolds second by second and can be measured. In this regard, all moments are equal.
The latter referred to a moment in time that stood above all the other passing moments. Kairos indicated that a particular moment was “momentous,” worthy of honoring and remembering. When Kairos enters Chronos, something very special takes place.
In Old Testament theology, Kairos conveys the sense of “ripeness.” In Ecclesiastes, we read: “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.” In the first Greek translations of the Bible, the word Kairos was used for “time.”
On the tombstones of departed Jesuits are the words Natus, Ordinatus, and Mortuus (birth, Ordination, death), the three Kairos moments of a son of St. Ignatius. Birth belongs to Kairos. Therefore it is most appropriate to celebrate birthdays. So, too, is death, which is deserving of remembrance and commemoration. In Christian theology, the Annunciation, Nativity, and Resurrection are three Kairos events, feast days that have profoundly affected history.
Chronometric life would become boring and uneventful if Kairos events did not rescue it from the ordinary and elevate it to the extraordinary. We know this instinctively. Children say that they cannot wait until next Christmas, that great Kairos moment which makes the intervening time merely an extended period of anticipation. There is no Kairos for the incarcerated; they simply serve time (Chronos).
We feel the need to add Kairos even to the world of sports. Thus, the homerun that Bobby Thomson hit in the bottom of the ninth inning to win the pennant for the New York Giants in 1951 has been dubbed “The Shot Heard ’Round the World.” More recently (February 5, 2017), Tom Brady and the Patriots had their Kairos moment in their remarkable Super Bowl victory over the Atlanta Falcons, coming back later in the game from a 25-point deficit.
Unlike in theology, however, a Kairos moment in sports is usually accompanied by its opposite, what the Greeks called Moira, and what we call “fate.” For every hero there is an anti-hero or a “goat.” Thomson hit his pennant winning homer against Dodgers relief pitcher, Ralph Branca, something that created a dark shadow dogging the Dodgers relief pitcher for the rest of his life. Branca passed away on November 23, 2016 at age 90. He won 21 games for the Brooklyn team in 1947 when he was that many years of age. He toiled in the Major Leagues for 12 years and was an All-Star three times.
Yet, he is best remembered for serving up that fateful home run.
“Why me?” he asked shortly after the game. He directed his question to a Jesuit priest by the name of Fr. Pat Rowley, who was a cousin to Branca’s fiancée. “Ralph,” the priest told him, “God chose you because He knew you would be strong enough to bear this cross.”
How much that fateful moment haunted Branca is open to speculation. “A guy commits murder and gets pardoned after 20 years,” he remarked. “I didn’t get pardoned.” On the other hand, he made the following statement to Sports Illustrated 40 years after the incident:
“They say that Bobby’s home run was such a trauma that I couldn’t go on. That’s ridiculous. If you play sports, you expect to lose some.”
Life can be terribly unfair. There was a lot more to Ralph Theodore Joseph Branca than can be gleaned from his baseball statistics. He was the 15th of 17 children born to an Italian immigrant father and a Jewish Hungarian mother. He was raised a Roman Catholic and jockeyed with 18 others for the use of the family’s single bathroom.
On Opening Day in 1947, which was Jackie Robinson’s major league debut, Branca lined up on the field next to his teammate while other Dodgers refused to do so. He and Robinson became good friends and he was one of Jackie’s pallbearers in 1972.
After retiring from baseball, Branca served as president of the Baseball Assistance Team, an organization that provided financial aid to needy baseball players.
Branca had more than his share of Kairos moments which, unfortunately failed to overshadow his negative image as the one who cost his team the 1951 pennant. He was the subject of the 2013 documentary, Branca’s Pitch, produced by Andrew J. Muscato. In 2001 he released his memoir, entitled, A Moment in Time.
Bobby Valentine, a former major ballplayer and manager, and husband of Ralph Branca’s daughter Mary, offered these words on the occasion of his father-in-law’s passing:
“One of the greatest guys to ever throw a pitch or sing a song is no longer with us. Ralph Branca passed this morning.”
If Ralph Branca was better known for one fateful pitch, Rob Manfred put his life into the proper perspective when he said:
“Ralph was a true gentleman who earned universal respect in the game he loved and served so well. Ralph’s participation in the ‘Shot Heard ’Round the World’ was eclipsed by the grace and sportsmanship he demonstrated following one of the game’s signature moments. He is better remembered for his dedication to the members of the baseball community. He was an inspiration to so many of us.”
We honor Ralph Branca and many others, not by accepting how the media portray them, but in terms of how they lived and how they were faithful to the Kairos moments that entered their lives.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That Is Going Mad; Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; How to Flourish in a Fallen World, and Footprints on the Sands of Time: Personal Reflections on Life and Death are available through Amazon.com.
(Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.)
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