the shining thing

I heard the voice of Jesus say,
I am this dark world's light;
Look unto me, thy morn shall rise,
and all thy day be bright.

Margary, whom she had last seen white and fear-stricken, had color in her cheeks now and her eyes shone...Winkle's face, puce with rage a short time ago, had now resumed its normal rosiness and it was obvious that if Winkle had ever had a care she had forgotten it....Such things had no existence here..The children ate their biscuits and drank their milk, and the stormcock sang, and Mary thought, "I will remember about this rainbow place. When my own particular experience seems dark and hard I'll remember that it's really a shining thing holding like a flower to the branches of the tree, and that I travel in it, like Cinderella in her coach, to the ending of the days. And up above me in the tree the Seraph sings, and sometimes he sings peace for us and sometimes courage, praise, truth, love, death, but he is always the same Seraph. Who is he? On Mount Alverno Saint Francis saw a great crucified Seraph above him, filling the heavens. I'll remember."

                                                        -   Elizabeth Goudge, The Rosemary Tree

I looked to Jesus and I found 
In him my Star, my Sun;
And in that light of life I'll walk
Till traveling days are done. *

*words by Horatio Bonar, the melody is an old English one, adapted by Ralph Vaughan Williams