November is a strange month.  For those of us who work with the calendar of the school year, it marks the start of the second half of the autumn term.  Whereas the first half is almost a continuation of summer - September often being better weather than August - by the time the second half begins, the clocks have gone back, making darkness fall early, the weather is generally dreich (what a lovely Scots word!), and there's no doubt that the summer is well and truly over, and we're into winter. 

So it's a melancholy month, too, a month for looking back at the past, at what has been but is no more.  The annual act of Remembrance - this year on Sunday 9^th - intensifies that sense of melancholy as we recall the thousands upon thousands who died during the world wars.  But it's there anyway; as the year dies, we are drawn to reflect on all the other losses in our lives, as we move further into darkness and ‘the very dead of winter'.

But we're still not close enough to Christmas to start looking forward to it with any sense of excitement or anticipation, and certainly we're still a long way away from the new year and its promise of spring.  So November is the time when we are really ‘between two worlds'.

In the Church's calendar, November is known as the Kingdom Season.  This starts with the feast of All Saints, and ends on the eve of Advent Sunday, when not only the season changes, but the new Church year begins.  So we start this season by looking back - back to all the women and men who have trodden the path of Christian discipleship before us - and we end it by looking forward, both to the first coming of Christ in  the baby at Bethlehem, but also to his second coming as king at the end of time.

So, in this Kingdom Season, we are also ‘between two worlds', the world of the past, and that of the future.  But that, of course, is where we always are.  For we always and only exist in the present, eternally suspended between what has been and what will be.  So what the Kingdom Season says to me is that this is where the Kingdom of God is to be found, in the here and now.

So often, I fear, we don't look for it there.  We look back, to the old world of the past, seeing a time when people were more godly and morally better, when life was simpler and more wholesome.  The era we choose varies.  For some, it will be the time of ‘Victorian values', for others, the post-war age before the Sixties revolution, for some in the church, the age of the apostles.  But, whatever age we choose, the idea is the same - the Kingdom of God was more fully present then than it is now.

Alternatively, we may look forward to some future time when justice will have been established in our society and our world, and peace will rule.  The means whereby this will come about also vary, whether it be through the universal adoption of Communism, or the rule of a great leader, or the dissemination of democracy, or in Christian terms, when the Gospel is truly known throughout the world.

It is all folly.  Unless we can always find the Kingdom everywhere, we will never find it anywhere.  God calls us into His Kingdom here, and now.  So this November, this Kingdom season, is not about looking back or looking forward.  It's about opening our eyes and looking around.