Jesus Christ, King of the Universe
“Mightier than the sound of many waters, mightier than the waves of the sea, the Lord who dwells on high is mightier.”
While the 19th C. Russian artist Julius Sergius Klever is most known for his sublime landscapes, in Christ on the Water (ca 1880), he turns trained to the interplay of faded sunlight with the horizon to the subject of Jesus Christ, and his singular and solitary presence upon the waves of the sea. The simple painting is serene but unsettled: Christ stands alone and forlorn in an impossible space, and the roiling waves are offset by a warm luminosity. But the light is the light of Christ himself: even the sun is caught up within the drama of his divinity, although he — his eyes humbly cast downward — quietly receives this centrality, rather than seizing upon it
My kingdom is not of this world.
— Jesus Christ, the Son of God (John 18:36)
Last Sunday of Ordinary Time
Texts for the Feast
Prayer
Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords: Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
The choir of Westminster Abbey offers a rousing performance of the popular hymn "Praise, my soul, the King of heaven." The lyrics of the hymn were penned by the English poet Henry Francis Lyte (d. 1847) as a versified paraphrase of Psalm 103. The tune, composed by John Goss to accompany the text in 1868, is LAUDA ANIMA, following the Latin incipit of the psalm. Together, the hymn is regarded as one of the finest and most enduring examples of Victorian hymnody. The pictures are all of Westminster Abbey with the final picture being the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, situated inside the Abbey's western entrance.
