Some personal memories

Once for a time I attended Quaker meetings for worship. Which meant, roughly speaking, that we sat silently, waiting for what would well up in our minds and hearts.

Now for me, what welled up was nearly always a dark experience, perhaps a big one out of my childhood, perhaps a petty one from last week. And by "dark experiences" I mean damages or losses or inabilities to achieve something I longed for - or, connected with particular persons, feeling damaged or robbed, oppressed, disrespected or alienated by them.
And with that dark experiences there welled up the dark passions: distrust and fear, envy, jealousy, acute hate and that sort of deep-seated bitterness which destroys any kind stirring you may feel in your heart.
(I must add that after a while those experiences and passions left me; and if I ever have felt "broken" or "humble", but at the same time alleviated, freed and open, it was at the end of such a meeting.)

I was rather disinquieted by that all. Shouldn't I have, in a Quaker meeting, experiences of light instead of darkness? So I found some consolation in the following passage in George Fox' Journal:
"the Lord showed me that the natures of those things, which were hurtful without, were within, in the hearts and minds of wicked men...the natures of these I saw within, though people had been looking without. I cried to the Lord, saying, 'Why should I be thus, seeing I was never addicted to commit those evils...' and the Lord answered, 'That it was needful I should have a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak to all conditions!' and in this I saw the infinite love of God." So at least, whatever difference in detail, Fox had felt those dark passions as well and accepted them as something God had sent him for his good or for the good of others.