Light reading? Abigail Maxwell takes a leap in the dark

‘If darkness is evil, or the bitterness and pain we find in life, it is covered over by light.’

‘Darkness is not dark to you, and the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light to you are both alike.’ Psalm 139:12 lives with me as a statement of the power and Otherness of God. I quote the version from the Church of England’s Celebrating Common Prayer. I used that book for some time, praying daily in familiar poetic words. I loved the verse, though I never understood it. That was unimportant: it explains God not by bringing God down to our level but by seeking to raise us to God’s. God for me then was a reality apart from me, the Creator of heaven and earth, whom I worshipped with beautiful words, alone or with others.

Then I felt driven out of the Church of England, and came to Quakers, who gave me Quaker faith & practice. I read George Fox’s journal, and found another great statement: ‘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.’ If darkness is evil, or the bitterness and pain we find in life, it is covered over by light. Or it is like light, for God. Depressed and unable to go on, I felt I was in encompassing darkness, yet Something put a blanket over me, to keep me warm. ‘Darkness is not dark’ was reassuring. God is with us in darkness.

Then I did The Hoffman Process, a personal growth workshop. I had a vision of moving down a dark corridor, with doors off it into incomprehensible, unbearable light and colour. I could not bear the light, so stayed in the corridor, which became darker and more constraining.

I pretended, even to myself, that I was someone other than I am, even after transitioning male to female –someone rational and trustworthy, not the fey, eldritch something that shocked others and frightened me. I craved the apparently level, solid floor of the corridor.

Quakers told me I had an inner light, which I believed. A light or ‘that of God’ must be good, surely, helping me do what I ought to do, stopping me being bad. So my conventional morality stops me seeing the Light, which is so much greater.

My despair grew. Unhappiness was a burden I dragged about with me, heavier and heavier. It was like the rucksack of stuff from my childhood bedroom which sat unopened in my living room for months. I could not look at it.

I could not enter silence, alone. The burden would be too much. In worship I explored and grew, but also shook, rocked, sighed and wept, which bothered others.

I can’t do it all the time, but if I accept my feelings of pain and hurt, they cease to be a burden. I step out of the corridor into the Light. There is pain and joy at the same time. The psalmist was saying what they knew experientially. I accept the things I cannot change, joyfully, because their darkness becomes like light. The light and colour are only unbearable until I surrender.

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