Sometimes when I hear the scriptures assigned for a given day, I wonder why of all the things we could read, we read that. Today is one of those days. My experience though, is that, whatever my first impressions may be, the scriptures always have the word we need to hear, if only we listen well enough.

As a younger person I was fascinated by the famous image by the 19th century Quaker painter Edward Hicks, known as “The Peaceable Kingdom.” It depicts the scene we heard in Isaiah just a few minutes ago: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den” (Isaiah 11:6-8).

We in this nation don’t have any firsthand experience of monarchy – we may accuse some of our leaders of wanting to be king or queen, but we really do not know what it would be like to live under one. Coming to this third week of a seven-week Advent, centering our worship on Christ as Ruler of Nations – Rex Gentium – I suspect we are more than a bit at a loss as to how to understand, let alone relate to, Christ as King.

Around the feast of All Saints, it is my father who most often comes to my mind. My dad is one of my surest lifelines to the communion of saints, my link to that great cloud of witnesses, the saints, who from their labors rest. Although he died more than twenty years ago, I miss him more now than when he first died. He was older than most of my friends’ fathers, and I often felt more distant from him because of that. But now I wish I could sit down with him and talk; about the world, about the Church, about anything, really.