In Your Light We See Light

New for 2025, the Bible Study department runs four times a year in the February, May, August, and November issues. It invites Friends to reflect on Bible passages that have inspired or challenged them, whether through writing or discussion. We welcome your submissions at Friendsjournal.org/submissions, and your comments at Friendsjournal.org/bible-study.

“In your light we see light.” It seems, if you’ll forgive the pun, glaringly obvious: Of course we see light in light! But God’s light offers us much more than simple illumination. It gives us love, salvation, and hope.

You may find it hard to feel hope these days.

Many Friends have deep concerns, for example, about where the United States is headed now that President Trump has returned to office and begun to fill key government positions with people eager to fulfill his agenda. We see how billionaires and other captains of industry have already begun to align themselves with this new regime. We’ve taken note as elected officials who declare themselves in opposition show little resistance to the first steps in a campaign of oppression against various marginalized communities.

And we’ve watched mainstream media normalize all of this as simply the way politics works now. I haven’t even started on the hurricanes, or the wildfires, or the bird flu looming on the horizon. I can understand why these conditions make people anxious and afraid.

I’ve spoken with trans friends, for example, so depressed after Election Day that they found it hard to even leave their apartments. It would have felt insensitive to tell them they should have hope. (It certainly might have come across as insensitive, probably with good reason.) Same with immigrant families prioritized for deportation, or people who have lost the freedom to make their own reproductive healthcare choices.

It doesn’t just feel insensitive—it can fly in the face of the understanding many of us have about modern Quaker faith. Don’t get me wrong, Friends believe in hope, and I imagine most Friends have hope. Not just hope, but a specific kind of hope—a spiritual hope grounded in the belief that we’ve been promised steadfast love and salvation. The earliest Friends believed that promise had been made by the God of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Many Friends today maintain that belief; some don’t but still believe that some force in the universe bigger, grander, more powerful than us cares about us, looks after us, and wants us to thrive.

But sometimes Quakers hesitate to talk about that because we don’t like to be seen as evangelizing, especially in the corners of the Religious Society of Friends with a more universalist bent. I’m not condemning that reluctance; at its best, it demonstrates a sensitivity to other people’s spiritual autonomy. And, honestly, we shouldn’t use “God watches out for us” as a one-size-fits-all response for spiritual seekers, and we shouldn’t use it for people we encounter who face concrete, material crises—people whose homes have been washed away or burnt down, people who face expulsion from their adopted homeland, people whose basic human rights are being negated.

I’m intrigued by a slight difference in Robert Alter’s translation of Psalm 36:10.

“Draw down Your kindness to those who know You,” Alter says, “and your justice to the upright.” I find that “draw down” particularly compelling, because it reinforces the immediacy of God’s promise. The blessed community doesn’t just wait for us in the distant future. We could take refuge under the shadow of God’s wings now; we could drink from the river of God’s delights today. We could live in a society grounded in kindness and justice. Knowing God, which includes following God’s ways, enables that society to unfold before us.

The secular world of empire and capital gives us plenty of reasons to doubt the coming of the blessed community—but for those among us who believe in God’s promise, no other guarantee is needed. In the light of God’s promise, we see the light of hope. Even if you don’t believe in God or God’s promise, though, you could find hope in the model of the blessed community. As Václav Havel, a Czech dissident who became his nation’s first post-Soviet leader, wrote in Disturbing the Peace, “Hope . . . is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

So when someone comes to us seeking refuge, we don’t just say, “Don’t worry, God will look after you.” Instead, we ask, “How can we work together? What can I do to help?”

If we pay attention to the world around us, we will undoubtedly have many opportunities to make such queries in the years ahead. I hope we’re prepared to follow through with meaningful answers.

Discussion Questions

• Do you have hope in this moment? If so, what can you say about where that hope comes from?
• What is a goal—maybe one you share with other Friends in your meeting—that you feel hopeful about, no matter how impossible it may seem?
• What can you do to let people know you’re someone they can come to for help and hope?