Candles are an amazingly rich source of metaphors. They show up in common sayings, such as “better to light a candle than curse the darkness” (which is itself of debated origin, often given as an old Chinese proverb but possibly dating to a written sermon by an American preacher published in 1907), and are a popular form of imagery as well as a focus for meditation or hypnosis. I doubt this is the first candle metaphor for Quaker spirituality, but it is the one I am given.

The gathered meeting is a table of candles, much as one might find in some churches. Each of us is a candle, stood shoulder to shoulder with the others, wax and wick and flame.

The wax is your body, the solid substance of being and the source of fuel, the vessel of life. The wick is your mind, or perhaps your soul, the connection between the wax and the flame, the channel between the solid and the ephemeral. It allows the fuel of gross matter to connect to the flame.

What, then, is the flame? It is not the Spirit, for there is not one Spirit for each candle-that-is-a-person. It is something that is individual to each of us, but is transcendent and not truly of us, just as the flame is not an inherent part of the candle but something that plays upon it even while it consumes it.

The flame is the meeting point of our mind/soul and the Spirit that is shared between all. It is our experience of the Spirit, the flame set in each of us that seeks for truth and insight and love. No candle is unlit, as no-one is divorced from the Spirit, though the flames may be different, just as the wax and wick may be different between different candles.

What, then, is the Spirit in this metaphor? What is it that the flame stands between, with what does it form an interface for the wick? It is not hard to see, once you consider that it is essential for the flame, but not specific to one flame; that it stands in the same role for all of the flames, existing between them and shared. The Spirit is the oxygen of the air, without which flames could not burn. It feed the flame of our spiritual experience and is the shared fuel of our religious life.

This is nice and full, and there is a danger in every metaphor in over-extending it. However, there is a further extension that is important and meaningful. The normal air of Earth at sea level is a little over 20% oxygen, giving a partial pressure of a little over 210 millibar (or 21,000 pascals, if you prefer). Increase the available oxygen, say keeping the same overall pressure but using pure oxygen, and the flame burns brighter and brighter – and bigger and bigger. The fuel is used up more and more quickly, and nearby objects may catch light – especially because they will burn more readily in such an atmosphere.

The spiritual atmosphere has other things in it than the oxygen of the Spirit, but they are all important, just as our atmosphere contains carbon dioxide as well as oxygen – necessarily, because air-breathing animals exhale it, and because it is needed by plants. In fact, the bulk of our material atmosphere is nitrogen, which plays no role in any common reaction, but which is pulled out of the air and made into biologically important compounds by specialised microorganisms. I do not know what the other constituents of our spiritual atmosphere might be, but I am certain that they are important, and that seeking to bathe in pure Spirit is dangerous. The results might be spectacular, but they are likely to be more than you might expect, and indeed more than you might want.