Experiment with Light: Truth of the heart

Rex Ambler considers the seventeenth century roots of a practice that many Friends are following today. This is the first in a new series about Experiment with Light written by various Friends

by Rex Ambler 30th September 2011

Experiment with Light is a relatively new practice for modern Friends, but it is probably best understood as a recovery, or retrieval, of a very old practice.  The retrieval  It is widely assumed that Friends at the beginning, in the seventeenth century, must have done more or less what we do in Meeting for Worship. But this would be a mistake. Friends did have Meetings for Worship, of course, and they were held in silence, so the continuity is there. But they also held smaller Meetings in which Friends were able to open themselves inwardly to the Light and to share these experiences with one another. As Barbour and Frost have put it in The Quakers, their fine history of the movement: