Letters - 20 February 2026
From a companion piece to no strings
Companion peace
Gerard Guiton certainly covers a lot of ground in his missive of 6 February. May I offer a companion letter?
Because the human being is part of what has been created, we cannot enter into the mind of whatever caused creation. We generally use the term ‘God’, or more accurately ‘Godhead’ so as not to confuse with the God of the trinity, to identify this cause of creation, and we are constitutionally unable to enter into God’s mind. This God is the Godhead or Mystery. But if we cannot enter into its mind, we can identify some characteristics of its nature from what it has created. The Mystery reveals something of itself in what it has created. Mystery is both transcendent, beyond human comprehension, and immanent or present to some degree in all the elements of its creation.
Human culture has to interpret the immanence of the Godhead according to the degree of culture’s thinking in succeeding eras of human history. Hence, we have the progressive understandings of theism, deism and panentheism. Each ‘ism’ or profession of belief is thus re-expressed according to the evolution of society’s worldview. The ‘classical theism’ that Gerard refers to is now embraced within the concept of panentheism or the understanding that some aspect of the Mystery is present in everything, leading to everything being understood as interrelated and interdependent.
In universal terms this aspect reveals itself in the spirit of life which asserts itself whatever the circumstances. Should human beings destroy any part of planet earth, large or small, life will re-assert itself in some form. The Mystery will maintain its evolutionary purpose. In human terms this is seen personally as Mystery’s benign spirit present in every person. This immanent divine spirit is described in Christian language as the Holy Spirit of God, or in conventional language as unconditional love. It is the Quaker Inner Light. It seeks to work in cooperation with the human spirit identified in psychology as the ego. The relationship between the two determines each person’s journey through life. Ultimately, the power of the ego needs to be assimilated into the divine spirit, but at our present stage of evolution this is far from happening and discord and evil are still omnipresent. But the ultimate purpose of this Godhead of infinite and unconditional love has to be to create more unconditional love through the process of evolutionary change. The nature of unconditional love is such that no other way will work because the way of unconditional love has to be voluntarily chosen. Hence, the Christian faith is as expressed in the words of the traditional peace song, ‘Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day’.
Gerald Drewett
Not sentimental
I consider Ol Rappaport’s argument confused in his reply (13 February) to my letter (6 February). I also find his use of the term ‘sentimental’ as borderline offensive in the circumstances, and his claims misleading: we do in fact have closely documented evidence of other genocides.
My letter points out precisely what Ol claims is the message of the Holocaust for us all: ‘ordinary religious people participate in atrocities whilst maintaining a sense of moral righteousness’. If we cannot apply this truth to contemporary conflicts, I fail to see how it can have any force at all. It is sad to see the implication that the work of the Etty Hillesum Trust, and an account of the terrible murder of Hind Rajab and her family, dismissed as ‘sentimental’. The Jewish historian Nira Yuval-Davis describes a tension in Judaism between exceptionalism and universalism in relation to the Holocaust, which interested Friends can read (www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/against-jewish-exceptionalism>). It is clear to me which of these two positions accords with our Quaker testimonies.
Nicola Grove
