Last week, I received an email from a college professor who teaches philosophy and is writing a book about what he calls petitionary prayer. I can’t count the times I’ve been contacted by college professors writing books. Well, actually I can. This was the first time.
He wrote saying, “I’m a philosopher working on questions about petitionary prayer. I’ve written extensively about the classical puzzles that arise from asking an all-knowing, all-powerful God to change the world, but lately I have turned my attention to something I call quasi-petitionary prayer. This involves bringing a situation or concern before God without asking for anything in particular. One of my projects is about the relationship between quasi-petitionary prayer and the Quaker practice of holding someone in the Light. In correspondence with the Quaker scholars Stephen Angell and Ben Pink Dandelion, a conjecture has emerged, and I wonder if you have any reactions to it. Stephen and Ben don’t recall hearing the phrase “hold you in the light” before the 1980s, and they suspect it arose among liberal Quakers as a kind of accommodation to the rise in non-theistic members, for whom the concept of traditional intercessory prayer would have been off the table. The phrase “Holding in the light” is ambiguous enough that non-theists can say it and do it without reference to the God of traditional theism, or so it seems to function in the circles I travel in. Do you have any sense of the history of this?”
I’ve been thinking about that ever since, especially since we’re a “holding in the Light” kind of Quaker meeting. But do we say to people, “I’ll hold you in the Light,” because we are reluctant to say, “I’ll ask God to heal your sick child.”? Because what if God doesn’t heal their sick child? What if prayer doesn’t work that way? I don’t know what your answer to that would be, and wouldn’t presume to tell you what it ought to be, but I can tell you that at a pivotal moment in my life as a pastor, I stopped praying for people and started holding them in the Light. Let me tell you when and why that happened.
I was pastoring at Irvington Meeting 34 years ago when a young couple in the congregation, expecting their first child, discovered, after a routine blood test related to her pregnancy, that the expectant mother had an aggressive form of cancer, and would die without immediate treatment. The doctors told her they couldn’t begin treatment while she was pregnant, that it would kill the fetus, so if she wished to live, she would have to terminate the pregnancy, which was well-advanced. She had grown up in a deeply religious family so no one was surprised when she decided to continue the pregnancy, hoping that after delivering a healthy child, God would heal her. The child was born, ten fingers, ten toes, happy and fit. The mother began treatment, and every Sunday at meeting we prayed for her to be healed, as did her parents, who sat by her hospital bedside every day praying for God to cure their daughter. I visited the hospital several times a week, each time praying with the family, asking God to heal this young mother.
We prayed so often and fervently we began to believe God would answer our prayers. Indeed, we couldn’t imagine God not answering our prayers. Nevertheless, she died. When she died, my prayer life died with her. I no longer asked God to do this thing or that thing. I no longer asked God to intervene in space and time to achieve a certain outcome. I found myself in a spiritual crisis. I had just started to write and even thought of leaving pastoral ministry to focus on writing, so people would no longer ask me to pray. People don’t expect writers to pray, something they regularly expect from their pastors.
Not long before, I had heard the phrase “I will hold you in the Light,” and began using it, knowing its ambiguity gave me a theological out if something went south. It let me off the hook. But what began as an implement of protection, instead became a meaningful practice. Today, when I promise to hold someone in the Light, I am not asking God to miraculously or magically intervene in their lives, something God doesn’t seem inclined to do, at least as often as, or in the manner, we would like God to. Rather, what I am promising is that, insofar as I am able, I will embody the love and light of God to those who are hurting. I will, insofar as I am able, walk alongside those victimized by hardship and hate. I will, insofar as I am able, do justice in the midst of injustice, practice mercy in the midst of cruelty, and tell the truth when all about us the world is drowning in a sea of lies.
Praying is asking God to do something, but when we promise to hold someone in the Light, we become the doers. We no longer ask God to heal; we commit ourselves to lives of healing. We no longer ask God to tend the poor; we commit ourselves to lives of generosity and selflessness. We no longer ask God to magically intervene; we commit ourselves to lives of connection and support.
When we do this, holding someone in the Light becomes less a saying and more a way of life, not just for people of faith, but for all people everywhere.
Here’s what it looks like in real practice. We learned this week that ICE is leaving Minneapolis, where they have been hard at work illegally targeting people of color, with no regard for their citizenship or criminal history. It was intended from the very start to terrorize our non-white brothers and sisters. And it would have worked, had not the citizens of Minneapolis resolved to hold their city in the Light. In the midst of injustice, they became the face of justice. In the midst of fear, they became the face of courage. In the midst of oppression, they became the face of liberty. In so doing, they held themselves, their neighbors, and their city in the Light. They did what this government has wholly refused to do. And they won the day, because they walked in the Light, they held others in the Light, and the Darkness could not overcome them.