The Light and Interpretation
Hi Friends!
I’ve been thinking recently about what the Light *says*, the forms it takes, the way it communicates. More concisely, I’ve been thinking about how the messages we receive from the Light are inextricably interconnected with our own experiences and, more concerningly, our roles of power, our class positionings, our experience of certain social and economic structures, et cetera.
I think many of us have a tendency to think of the Light as a singular divine “voice from nowhere”, so to speak. It’s something neutral and infinitely clarifying. For many Friends, this seems to be a central point and almost *the* point of the Light — it serves as something that literally guides us through these situations. However, epistemologically and metaphysically, I just find the idea that the Light’s communication is fundamentally relatively neutral to be incredibly problematic.
I guess I say all this to say that even as a Christ-centered Friend, I think my communion with, and interpretation of, the Light, is something subject to distortion and power purely via that act of interpretation. When I interpret, I (consciously or subconsciously) project my experiences, my biases, my beliefs onto that — it might be even more problematic, because if the Light truly is something immanent within me, that is both me as myself and that of God within me, than those biases are present in the observation and communication with/from the Light to begin with. It is the origin.
I wonder if any of you have thought about this or have any thoughts on this. I view this not as all as a challenge to my faith and status as a Friend but as a genuinely edifying problem that deepens my views profoundly.