Watching Part 2

The doctor had given him a few books to bring away with him, and lying in his hammock at night, he would try and shut out the den and stench of the lower cockpit and read. He did not take in very much, but every now and then some lovely phrase would shine up at him from the page, as though it were a pin prick in a dark curtain, letting in the light. When vile things happened outside himself, he now always managed to find something to pay attention to besides the vileness–the flash of fine anger in one man's eyes when another was flogged at the gangway, the sudden gleam of moonlight through a rent torn in the clouds by the frenzy of a storm...

-Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill,206.

Stories are Light

Do you remember when Despereaux was in the dungeon, cupped in Gregory the jailer’s hand, whispering a story in the old man’s ear?

I would like it very much if you thought of me as a mouse telling you a story, this story, with the whole of my heart, whispering it in your ear in order to save myself from the darkness, and to save you from the darkness, too.

“Stories are light,” Gregory the jailer told Despereaux.

Reader, I hope you have found some light here.

-Katie DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux, Coda.

Batty

The baby bat
Screamed out in fright,
"Turn on the dark,
I'm afraid of the light."

-Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic

O Love That Will Not Let Me Go

O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

O Light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.

-George Matheson

Dark and Light

The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
on them has light shined.

-Isaiah 9:2

Incarnation

Rome was a flea market of borrowed gods and conquered peoples, a bargain basement on two floors, earth and heaven, a mass of filth convoluted in a triple knot as in an intestinal obstruction. Dacians, Heruleans, Scythians, Sarmatians, Hyperboreans, heavy wheels without spokes, eyes sunk in fat, sodomy, double chins, illiterate emperors, fish fed on the flesh of learned slaves...all crammed into the passages of the Coliseum, and all wretched.

And then, into this tasteless heap of gold and marble, He came, light and clothed in an aura, emphatically human, deliberately provincial, Galilean, and at that moment gods and nations ceased to be and man came into being—man the carpenter, man the plowman, man the shepherd, with his flock of sheep at sunset, man who does not sound in the least proud, man thankfully celebrated in all the cradle songs of mothers and in all the picture galleries the world over.

-Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

The Magendanz Lights

Once again the Magendanzes have outdone themselves with the biggest display of Christmas lights in town – a little Las Vegas – with Santa, Tiny Tim, and Ebenezer Scrooge all standing around the manger; with six wise men, not three, and Frosty, and Rudolph, and the Grinch.

- Garrison Keillor, Now it is Christmas Again

Lux Venit

Arise, shine, for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
For behold, darkness shall cover the earth,
and thick darkness the peoples;
but the Lord will arise upon you,
and his glory will be seen upon you.
And nations shall come to your light,
and kings to the brightness of your rising.

Isaiah 60:1-3

Thy Kingdom Come

Kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight...

-Rev. Charles Garland (this year's Fairmont speaker)

Sonnet on His Blindness

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent, which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He, returning, chide:
“Doth God exact day labor, light denied?”
I fondly ask; but Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work, or His own gifts; who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

-John Milton