08/19/2026
On the eve of classes, honoring the light we all carry
On a muggy Tuesday evening outside Founders Hall, students gathered in the dying light as the campus began to settle into evening.
They stood in circles, some talking with friends, others looking around at people they are only beginning to know. For first-year students, Guilford College is still new enough to feel like a place they are visiting rather than a place where they belong.
Then, almost imperceptibly, the evening changed.
The Passing of the Light is one of those Guilford traditions that can seem simple from the outside: a candle, a circle of students, a few words, the passing of a flame from one person to another. Except the gathering — a decades-old tradition on the eve of the start of fall classes — is not really about the flame. It is about what the flame represents: the Light each person carries within them, something singular and worth discovering.
At Guilford, the ceremony is rooted in the Quaker belief that Light can be found in every person. The idea is both ancient and practical: that we carry something within us worth listening to, and that we have a responsibility to recognize that same Light in others.
Helping students navigate the discovery process is the work of all colleges, though few do it as well as Guilford.
Not simply to collect knowledge or earn a degree, but to discover what is already within you when you arrive.
A student may show up at Guilford knowing exactly what she wants to become. Another may have no idea. One will discover a talent he never knew he possessed. Others will find that the thing they thought would define them — a major, a sport, a career plan — is something else entirely.
They will change their minds. They will fail at things.
They will meet professors who see something in them they cannot yet see in themselves. They will encounter friends who challenge their assumptions and classmates whose lives look nothing like their own. They will be surprised by what they care about.
Somewhere in those four years, if they are fortunate, they will begin to recognize their own Light.
Tuesday’s ceremony asks them to do something else, too: to notice the Light in their peers.
That can be harder.
College is full of comparison. Who is smarter? Who is more accomplished? Who has figured things out? Who belongs here? In the noisy machinery of campus life, it is easy to overlook the person sitting beside you.
The Passing of the Light offers a different way of seeing.
The student who seems quiet may possess a remarkable gift for listening. The athlete may be the person who brings people together. The student who struggles in a classroom may have an imagination that takes her somewhere no syllabus could predict. The person who seems confident may be carrying private doubts.
Every person has something to offer.
The Light is not a ranking. It does not burn brighter in one person than another. It simply burns.
That is what makes Guilford’s ceremony especially fitting at the beginning of a college journey. The first-year students gathered outside Founders do not yet know what the next four years will reveal about them. They do not know which professors will matter most, which friendships will last or which questions will follow them long after graduation.
They don’t even know themselves completely.
They aren't supposed to.
Guilford is, in part, a place for that discovery.
As darkness gathered, the candles became more visible. Faces that had been easy to distinguish in the fading daylight now appeared in the warm glow of the flames.
For a moment, the students were simply standing together, holding a reminder that seemed both modest and profound:
There is something in each of us worth tending.
And there is something in the person next to us worth noticing.
The light passes from one person to another, but it is never really given away. Each person keeps his or her own.
The hope is that over the next four years, the students will learn to recognize it — in themselves and in one another — and, once they do, have the courage to let it shine.
