#MonthOfMinistry Days 17 and 18
In Quaker circles we talk a lot about the “Light”.
It’s one of the commonest words we use to point at the sense (beyond all words) of good and loving kindness within each of us. We say we “hold someone in the light” when we wish to uphold them perhaps at a time of difficulty. We are encouraged to “walk in the light”, for our actions in the world to be guided by a sense of what is right:
Dearly beloved Friends, these things we do not lay upon you as a rule or form to walk by, but that all, with the measure of light which is pure and holy, may be guided; and so in the light walking and abiding, these may be fulfilled in the Spirit, not from the letter, for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.
Postscript to an epistle to ‘the brethren in the north’ issued by a meeting of elders at Balby, 1656
There’s a famous passage from George Fox, where he sees the love of God as an ocean of light, flowing over an ocean of darkness:
I was under great temptations sometimes, and my inward sufferings were heavy; but I could find none to open my condition to but the Lord alone, unto whom I cried night and day. And I went back into Nottinghamshire, and there the Lord shewed me that the natures of those things which were hurtful without, were within in the hearts and minds of wicked men… And I cried to the Lord, saying, ‘Why should I be thus, seeing I was never addicted to commit those evils?’ And the Lord answered that it was needful I should have a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak to all conditions; and in this I saw the infinite love of God. I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. And in that also I saw the infinite love of God; and I had great openings.
Journal, 1647
I’m troubled though by this identification of “light” with what is good, and “darkness” with wickedness and death. Don’t we need both dark and light? It is maybe time to begin reclaiming darkness? Darkness is the place of creativity, of new growth, of rest and renewal – we plant seeds in the darkness. Here’s a great song from Kate Thomas about planting seeds:
They thought they could bury us
dig a hole, dig a hole dig a deep hole
They thought they could bury us
dig a hole, dig a hole dig a deep down hole (×2)But they didn’t know that we were seeds
carrying within us the germ of life
And they didn’t know when they put us in that hole
it was the place
that very place where new life begins