On Liturgical Time
Why the Orthodox calendar reframes how I think about software cycles.
The liturgical year does not begin in January. It begins in September, with the Feast of the Indiction — an ancient Roman tax cycle that the Church absorbed and sanctified. Engineers might recognize the shape: a cadence external to the product that nonetheless structures everything inside it.
Kairos vs. Chronos
Greek distinguishes two words for time. Chronos is sequential, measured, the kind we put in UNIX timestamps. Kairos is the opportune moment — the fullness of time in which something becomes possible.
Software tends to optimize for chronos: release trains, sprint lengths, uptime percentages. But the decisions that matter — when to refactor, when to ship an imperfect thing, when to stop — are kairos decisions.
The right time cannot always be scheduled.
The liturgical calendar refuses chronos as the primary frame. It insists that some weeks are qualitatively different from others: not because the earth moved faster, but because what is being commemorated shapes what is available to do.
What this changes
I am not arguing that engineers should fast before deploying. I am suggesting that a purely metric-driven sense of time — velocity, lead time, MTTR — flattens out qualitative distinctions between periods.
There is a rhythm to good work that the metrics cannot capture, and ignoring it produces teams that are efficient and brittle.