When did I first know the Light, as in the Light, or Presence, of God? Though I’ve been Quaker all my life, it took until I was over 50 years old to understand that my inability to see – or my unknowing of God as – the Light was not due to my living in evil darkness or in some fold of the Heavens that excluded me from all those others who were able to experience the Light of God. Instead, it is just the way given to me, by God I believe now, to know God’s Presence in a huge vast Darkness where nothing is. I was able to experience God “there” only after I learned to trust it, through my Quaker teachers, particularly Bill Taber, at Pendle Hill (a Center for spiritual growth and learning run by Quakers in Eastern Pennsylvania.) Only after I learned to allow myself to rest in and be held in the Darkness, and once I could trust that experience, then I began to be aware, deep in the core of that Dark Reality, that God was there, that God was aware of me, and that His/Her Love was immense, present, open, and very real. Think of it as some mystics have written: once we let go of our conceptions of what God is, let go of every scrap of story and image and knowing, then we are face to face with nothingness, or as I shape it with my words, “No-Thing-Ness”. And there is God, at the Center, or Bottom, or Core of everything—and it is awesome to feel the wash of Love from that “place” and that “Being”, and to be touched by God out of the center of Nothing/Everything. That kind of Love strips me bare – but God gives each of us more Love than we know how to grasp. Thanks Be!
— Name Withheld
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