What Is Inner Light? The Paradox In Quaker Belief
I’ve been thinking lately about George Fox’s maxim that there is “that of God” in everyone, which we discover by finding our inner light. The idea wasn’t original to Fox. He was trying to revive the earliest forms of Christianity and borrowed from the Gnostics. As Quakerism has evolved, I’m not sure the definition has remained the same — or that there is, any longer, a singular meaning for the light within. But that kind of ambiguity is welcome among Friends.
Do you know why Quakers sing hymns so slowly? They are reading ahead to see if they agree with the words. My kind of people.
For many Quakers, I think inner light means more or less what transcendentalism meant to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who believed in an Oversoul, or a collective divinity to which everyone belongs. Most of us find that part of ourselves obscured — we know it is there, but we can’t access it. This is why we need poets who can rise above these limitations and bring back glimmers of the sublime. Poets thus reveal us to ourselves, giving voice to what we’ve always felt and known, but never had words to express.
Readers of Zora Neale Hurston will remember a simpatico idea in Their Eyes Were Watching God:
When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.
I am still a fledgling Quaker, grateful that there are others like me who call themselves “non-theists” (though I prefer “humanist”). There is room for a broad spectrum of belief in a community that worships with an hour of silence.1 The goal of that silence? To draw closer to the light.
The strangeness of belonging among others who hew to traditional Christianity has made me aware of inner light as a paradox. It is intensely personal — no one can define it for anyone else, there is no binding dogma about it in a foundational text — yet it is also unifying, a commonality across our differences. For some Friends, inner light might be interchangeable with the Holy Spirit; for others like me it might represent a more metaphorical truth. Somehow — and I can’t explain it satisfactorily — our attentive presence to one another mitigates what might otherwise turn into disharmony.
I first sought out a local Friends Meeting during the early days of my divorce. I’d left many friends behind in Iowa for a family move to Pennsylvania. The only people I knew were my in-laws and their social circle, which was now more or less dead to me. If I was to weather the transition, I needed some way to build my own community from scratch. My Iowa friends who felt most like kindred spirits were nearly all Quakers, so even though I’d sworn never to darken a church door again, I took their advice and sought out the local meeting house.
What I discovered was a kind of bidirectional energy. You can be held by group silence. I needed to be held in that way when I first attended. But it’s also possible to redirect attention outward to the group, to actively hold the silence with others as if sitting hand in hand. I began to think of my method as centering, dropping anchor, and then reaching out, thinking of my kids and then of others in need, sometimes even sending warmth to people in the meeting who I was coming to know.
If light can be said to exist within each of us, presumably we can experience it anytime, anywhere, in a crowd or in solitude. Yet the collective silence in Meeting seems to unlock more illumination than we might experience on our own. This seems equally true for those who prefer a more literal interpretation of the light as the divine revealing itself and for those who take a more secular view of epiphany.
Revelation feels joyful however it comes.
It is curious that neuroscience seems to vindicate these aspects of Quaker belief. John Kounios and Mark Beeman believe they have located the exact region of the brain that lights up with sudden insight. They measure this with fMRI scans, which show different results when a problem is solved by cold reasoning versus a spontaneous AHA. I’m not certain that inner light must always manifest suddenly, but this is often how it seems in Meeting, where insights appear in a flash, not gradually.
There appears to be agreement among brain scientists about how to optimize the conditions for these breakthroughs. Long sightlines and high ceilings are thought to be good for free association. The shower yields more visitations than any other place because so many of the senses are dulled. Whenever we reduce external noise and simplify our sensory inputs, ideas that have been incubating beneath the surface have space to break through.
Quakers benefit from a collective energy, from a gathering together of so many shafts of light, and also from sustained silence, which creates ideal conditions for illumination. Even if there might be secular explanations for how inner light breaks through, there is as yet no accounting for the original source of that light, whether it be divine or simply the spark of life crackling through our neurons and tissues.
I have written most recently in defense of traditional structures like peer review and against the idea that feelings can become facts via claims to immediate revelation. But I also enjoy living with(in) mystery, which is what I find every week at the Friends Meeting.
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As someone raised Pentecostal, I have a lot of hang-ups with words like “worship,” which allude to monarchy. But the mercy of a Friends Meeting is that an hour of silence is essentially an anti-ceremony. No hollow rituals or liturgies. And the radical egalitarianism of the community works against the hierarchy that flows from an omipotent God. In practice, Quakerism is almost indistinguishable from humanism. Authority resides first in the individual, then in the group (by consensus, preferably). Nearly everything is perpetually up for debate. As it should be.
The search is the key and the lock is connection.
Thanks for this, Joshua. I’m taken by your note about relying on poets to “bring back glimmers of the sublime.” That’s it, exactly. And ZNH’s book, and they very passage, are touchstones for me. I love that she was a folklorist and collected some of the stories in that book from her research in the South. Reading this has renewed my motivation to try the Friends Meeting here. We had such good experiences with the UU’s that I got a little lazy.