Thought for the Week: Experience of ‘the Light’
Ernest Hall reflects on experiencing 'the Light'
Advice & queries number 5 urges us to ‘take time to learn about other people’s experience of the Light… As you learn from others, can you in turn give freely from what you have gained? While respecting the experiences and opinions of others, do not be afraid to say what you have found and what you value…’
Well, I have found, as George Fox did, that the Christian faith as experienced within a Quaker Meeting for Worship, does ‘speak to my condition’. It would be an exaggeration for me to claim, like George Fox, that my heart leaps with joy. But there is something very special about Meeting for Worship that brings me back week after week.
A tiny ‘fish and cross’ badge in the lapel of my jacket expresses my unity with persecuted and often martyred Christians of every tradition worldwide. I hasten to add that I don’t endeavour to persuade everyone, or even anyone else, to embrace my faith, important as it is for me. I’m ready enough, though, to share it with anyone who wishes me to do so.
I have recently received a reinforcement of that faith from what I would once have considered a most unlikely source: from the ‘experience of the Light’ of the Swami Veetamohamanda, who has visited Clacton Meeting House on three occasions in successive years to join with us in Quaker worship and to explain to us the Vedanta tradition of Hinduism.
On each occasion he has attended our Meeting house forty-five minutes before Meeting for Worship begins, so that he can have the undivided attention of those who choose to join him. On the two earlier occasions I have been among them. This year, though, age and infirmity defeated me. I accepted the kind offer of a Friend who drove me to Meeting for Worship at the usual time. I therefore missed the Swami’s talk. This was a great pity as this time it had been a discussion, with questions and answers, in which the Swami told his audience of his faith and of his ‘experience of the Light’ straightforwardly and without equivocation.
‘Do you,’ he was asked, ‘believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead on that first Easter morning?’ ‘I do,’ he replied, and went on to express his conviction that Jesus was an incarnation of God and had been sent at that particular time because it was then that he was needed. He would, said the Swami, come again – when he was needed.
How I wish that I had been there! I wonder what would have been his attitude to the remainder of the Nicene Creed? He certainly – even at secondhand – strengthened and fortified my often-shaky Christian faith. It isn’t, I suppose, very likely that the Swami will come to Clacton again next year, and even less likely that I’ll also be still around if he comes. But if he does come – and I am still here with sufficient mobility to get to the Meeting house – I will be among his disciples.
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