Decolonizing Easter (and Autism) Through Time Itself

Autism, the very thing that colonized consciousness pathologizes as dysfunction (non-linear time experience, difficulty with schedules and demands), is actually proximity to the original relational temporality. This means that autism diagnosis is, in part, a colonial measurement instrument, with chronos (linear time) identifying and penalizing those who resist its logic most visibly.

“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” — Isaiah 43:18-19

“He who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’” — Revelation 21:5

The ancient Greeks gave us two words for time that most English translations collapse into a single word.

Chronos is sequential, measurable, and accumulating time. The clock. The calendar. The ledger. One thing after another, forever.

Kairos is the saturated moment. The appointed time is outside of the sequence. Not when something happens, but that it happens, fully, without before or after. The moment that contains everything. It is the opportune, critical, or "right" moment to act, often in contrast to linear, chronological time (Chronos), and it signifies a momentous, strategic, or divine opportunity that requires immediate, purposeful action; a "passing instant" that must be seized.

Isaiah speaks into chronos. A people in Babylonian exile, counting days, rehearsing losses, their identity organized entirely around what was taken and when. God breaks in with a message to stop counting. Something is happening now that the calendar cannot hold. Revelation speaks from kairos; John’s vision does not unfold on a timeline. God seated on the throne, present tense, active: I am making. The Greek word used for new is not neos, a fresh copy of the same thing. It is kainos. A different quality of thing altogether. Not replacement, but transformation. One promise is delivered mid-wilderness, while the other is delivered from the place where wilderness no longer has meaning.

That is the current theological understanding of these biblical passages, but it is wrong.

The Aberration We Mistook for Reality

The assumption buried in that framework is that chronos, as linear, sequential, accumulating time, is the default condition of human consciousness, and kairos is the rare divine interruption. But what if that is backward? What if chronos is not natural at all? Linear sequential time was not a philosophical preference that European colonizers happened to hold. It was infrastructure. It was a tool.

You cannot extract without measurement, own without boundaries, incur debt without a ledger, or colonize a people who do not experience time the way your legal system requires them to, in order to dispossess them.

Imposing clock time and calendar time on Indigenous peoples was not incidental to colonization. It was colonization, the interior version, the one that restructures consciousness itself. Break the relationship with cyclical ceremonial time, with land-time, with ancestor-time, and you break the people’s ability to perceive what is real.

The Original People

Consider the word: Ab-original. Ab means from, away from, the original state before. Original means the first, the source, the thing from which others derive. Aboriginal: of the original. From before, the ones who were there at the source.

Whether the etymology carries intentional meaning or falls to linguistic coincidence, the resonance holds. The Aboriginal peoples of Australia and Indigenous peoples broadly across every continent did not experience time as a line. They experienced it as a field, a simultaneous presence, and a relationship.

The Australian Aboriginal concept most often called the Dreamtime is not mythology about the past. It is an ongoing reality in which creation is always happening, ancestors are always present, and land is not territory to be owned but a living relational entity to be in conversation with. Past, present, and future are not sequential positions on a line; they are simultaneous dimensions of a single living reality.

This is not primitive cosmology waiting to be corrected by modernity; this is kairos as a way of life. And it was precisely this, this relational, simultaneous, non-linear experience of reality, that colonization had to destroy first, before anything else could be taken.

What This Does to the Theology

If chronos is the colonial imposition rather than the human default, then both passages have to be read again from the beginning.

Isaiah 43 stops being about emotional healing and becomes about cognitive liberation.

The exiled Israelites were not just sad about the past. They had been colonized into a chronological structure of grief by Babylonian imperial time, a time that located their identity entirely in what had been lost and when it had happened. God’s instruction to stop dwelling on former things is not therapeutic advice. It is a call back to a pre-imperial way of perceiving reality. The streams and roads in the wilderness are not future miracles being promised. They become visible again when the colonial timeline loosens its grip on perception.

“Do you not perceive it?” is not a gentle encouragement. It is a diagnosis. Something has happened to your ability to see.

Revelation 21:5 stops being eschatology and becomes ontology.

If time is relational and simultaneous rather than sequential, then “I am making all things new” is not a promise about the end of history. It is a description of what is always already happening beneath the imperial overlay. The new creation is not the destination at the far end of the chronological line; it is the original condition, the aboriginal condition, and that colonial consciousness is buried.

“Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true” becomes not the preservation of a future promise but a witness against the imperial present. Evidence entered into the record that another reality exists, has always existed, and cannot be permanently obscured.

What Breaks. What Is New?

The framework I started with assumed this arc: Isaiah addresses people stuck in chronos, calling them to notice kairos breaking through. Revelation describes kairos fully arrived, chronos itself redeemed. But decolonizing the Bible breaks that arc.

Because if chronos was never the baseline, if it was always the wound, always the imposition, then neither passage is about movement through time toward a better time. Both passages are about the recovery of a way of being in which linear time was never the primary reality to begin with.

The resurrection is not an event that happened on a dateable morning in the first century and whose effects accumulate over time toward an eventual consummation.

The resurrection is kairos breaking the back of chronos entirely. It is the announcement that the colonial management of reality, the ledger, the timeline, the productivity logic, the debt structure of sin and payment, has been exposed as the fiction it always was.

He is risen indeed.

Takiwatanga: My Own Time and Space

In 2017, Maori language specialist Keri Opai was tasked with creating a te reo Maori word for autism. He rejected the clinical frameworks, the jargon, the deficit language, and the polysyllabic terminology designed to describe dysfunction. Instead, he spent hours in conversation with his autistic friend Matt, noticing how the conversation meandered, became tangential, moved at its own rhythm, and recognizing in it the same quality of presence he experienced sitting with Maori elders in deep teaching.

From that observation, he coined Takiwatanga, derived from the phrase toku/tona ano takiwa, which means my/his/her own time and space. Not a disorder but an entirely different relationship with time itself.

Here, the threads converge completely. If chronos is a colonial imposition, a technology of extraction that restructured human consciousness away from relational, simultaneous, kairos-native experience, then autistic people are not failing to adapt to time; they are failing to adapt to colonization. The very features that chronos-structured institutions pathologize, non-linear thinking, resistance to rigid scheduling, and difficulty performing the sequential productivity logic of industrial civilization, are precisely the features of a consciousness that never fully surrendered to the imperial timeline.

Takiwatanga is not a deficit relative to kairos. It may be the closest thing to it that colonized modernity still produces. The wilderness never needed redeeming; the streams are always there. And autistic people never stopped hearing them.

This Easter, that is the resurrection worth perceiving. Not an event on a calendar. Not a date to commemorate. But the ongoing, present-tense, kainos reality that the new creation was never waiting to arrive. It was always the ground beneath the colonial overlay, inhabited most visibly by those the empire marked as broken.

References

Opai, K. (2017). A time and space for Takiwatanga. Altogether Autism Journal, Issue 2. https://www.altogetherautism.org.nz/a-time-and-space-for-takiwatanga/

Isaiah 43:18-19. New International Version. Biblica, 2011.

Revelation 21:5. New International Version. Biblica, 2011.

Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press.

Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). Zed Books.

Zerubavel, E. (1985). Hidden rhythms: Schedules and calendars in social life. University of California Press.

Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The double empathy problem. Disability and Society, 27(6), 883-887.

Stanner, W. E. H. (1979). White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938-1973. Australian National University Press.

Isha Snow is the originating theorist of Autistic Standpoint Theory and the founder of NeuroHomes Foundation & Communities.

This essay was written at the intersection of critical theory, theology, and the politics of perception.