I Will Hold You in the Light:
Brooklyn Meeting’s Email Light List

by Linda Gnat-Mullin
Brooklyn Meeting

The Quaker practice of holding people and situations in the Light has been described as imagining those named enveloped or bathed in Light and Divine Love, without seeking a specific outcome. Each of us may have a different approach to “holding in the Light.” We are trusting the Light with those we care for and love. 

At Brooklyn Meeting we have an email Light List that has evolved over time. Right now, we have 125 members and attenders who receive a weekly list of the latest requests for Light, and the prior three weeks’ requests as well.  

Our Light List was founded by our beloved Friend Lucy Sikes, who, years ago, stationed willing volunteers around the Meetinghouse to listen to the requests for Light during the service. Afterwards, during Social Hour, we would meet to compare notes, spellings, and identification of the people who might say, for example, “Please hold my mother in the Light.” We had a lovely time putting the list together, and Lucy posted it weekly. Those of you who knew Lucy also knew that she was an artist and an activist of the first order, and so important to our meeting. 

Lucy rendered such prodigies of service. She passed away several years ago minutes after having just completed playing piano for a holiday rehearsal of an interfaith choir here in Brooklyn. Her absence was keenly felt. There were many pieces for the meeting to pick up. Several of us believed that the Light List needed to go on. So, we found an old email list that had not been bcc’d, and invited everyone to consider joining the new list. We added members. In time, this membership evolved into a Google group of 125 people.  

Although we are not an official committee, a core group of about six of us, some of whom had originally been listening with Lucy, are now known as Lucy’s Light Listers. I knew this was a good name when a young attender asked me if there really was a Lucy, and I could tell her a little of Lucy’s story. 

And, because of privacy issues, COVID, and tricky handwriting, the gathering of names evolved from listening in the meeting room to a sign-up sheet in our vestibule to an email-only arrangement.  

Google groups do offer the option of allowing members to email one another, but we stayed with Lucy’s tradition of sending the requests from an administrator to the list once a week. That seemed to be the simplest method, and created more likelihood that our email would be noticed. 

As of now, as we solicit requests for Light once a week, we ask all with a request, whether they’ve mentioned it in the meeting or not, to email [email protected] by 4 p.m. on Sunday.  

We send out a reminder to our Google group on Friday evening or Saturday morning, and it always  begins with a Quaker quotation of some kind. While this was originally done to keep our reminders from sliding into spam folders, we have received compliments on the quotations themselves. Our reminder also appears in our meeting’s e-newsletter, and someone in the meeting will also announce the Light List and how to access it, because we often have newcomers. 

Our core group of Lucy’s Light Listers will also render a special service for emergency situations, in which we will immediately hold people and situations in the Light, and invite others to do so as well. 

A member of Toronto Monthly Meeting, intrigued with our Light List, started one as well. And, in March of 2022, we had a Brooklyn-Toronto Joint Light List Meeting, a grand name for what was a wonderful time on Zoom, in which friends in Brooklyn and Toronto compared notes on how they held people in the Light and what it meant to them to do so. 

Our Light List, organized and delivered regularly to in-boxes, is just a present-day iteration of an ancient and beautiful practice. Patricia Loring wrote, “Part of the experiential wisdom of the Quaker practice of holding people and situations in the Light consists precisely in the Gethsemane (“Nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.” Matthew 26:39) spirit in which we hold people and things in the Light. We offer what is painful to us, what is patently in need of healing, cleansing or reconciling to the Divine Healer in confidence that—although the solution is beyond us—good may be brought out of evil, solutions beyond our capacity to imagine or realize may evolve and—if we are open and willing—our participation may be radically different than we imagine.” 

Does the Light List work? God works in mysterious ways. We can’t always know what is “working” and what is not. But here is a quotation from an individual, diagnosed with cancer, who has been on the Light List for a number of weeks: “Thank you for continuing to keep me in your thoughts and prayers! My update is that I’m still here, baby!

I was given weeks to live in June and it is now October. I am in the land of miracles. I am able to get outside for a walk in the woods most days and to enjoy the changing leaves, the forest floor covered in fungi, the geese honking from their chevron pattern in the skies above. I lift my face to the sun and glory in the light, the life, the moment. I don’t know what tomorrow brings. But I am in awe of and so grateful for today. Sending much love your way. Xxoo.” 

Holding you in the Light as well, reader.