‘Let light into our lives’

It’s the turn of Lucy Faulkner-Gawlinski, of King’s Lynn Quakers, to write our weekly Thought for the Week column…How we long for light at this time of year. Each day it slips away far too early, well before we have dealt with all our daytime tasks. To comfort ourselves we fill our seasonal festivities with lights.In John’s gospel, we hear of the light that enlightens every human coming into the world. We are all enlightened. How do we experience this?

One of the inspirational early Quakers, George Fox, wrote: “Now this is the light which you are lighted withal, which shows you when you do wrong… and you know with that when you have wronged anyone, and broken promise, and told a thing that is not so, there is something riseth within you that is a witness against you, and that is the light… if you love this light it will teach you.”Modern believers know that we have a conscience but we associate it with guilt, not seeing it as something to be celebrated. It’s more of a dirty secret than something that illuminates our lives.If we explore the experience of being guided by this inner teacher we can begin to notice what gets in the way of the exposing light that brings things into the open that we might prefer not to see. It is our fear, our sense of inadequacy, our shame or burden of guilt that cast the shadows. And also all the many distractions we can find to turn our attention other ways. This isn’t our own private problem – each and every one of us has the capacity to see clearly.In the 17th Century, there was a Quaker called George Watson living in Upwell who, as a young man, took the King’s shilling and went off to fight in the Low Countries. Then after a season of fighting and a winter season in camp, he came to realise that he could not, when the time came, take up arms again. That could not be what God wished him to do, he could see that very clearly. He defied orders and thought he would be shot, but instead he was left to make his way home through enemy territory as best he could. One Sunday many years later, having rejoined his Quaker meeting, he listened to some inspirational preaching and once again felt a clear nudge to act. He made a written confession to his meeting and his testimony is kept in the Norfolk Record Office. But the burden he was carrying was not that he had been a soldier and, very probably, broken the commandment not to kill. What he confessed to was that he had received a powerful and irresistible push from God to change what he was doing and he had not shared that experience with others.George Watson came to understand that the point is to support each other in sustaining a practice of letting light into our lives. It’s not about being “good” (and being ashamed if we are not). If we are to retain trust in the moments when we allow light to shine upon our inner lives, we do have to remember that everyone carries that amazing inner light and we can relate to each other in ways that reduce the shadows.Lucy Faulkner-Gawlinski King’s Lynn Quakers