Thought for the Week: Lost in translation

John Lampen considers what may be lost in translation

by John Lampen 24th June 2016

I sometimes hear Friends substituting ‘that of good in everyone’ for George Fox’s words ‘that of God’. Both ‘good’ and ‘God’ have such wide connotations that they mean different things to different people. But I believe that we lose something valuable by this translation.

A dear Quaker friend of mine, widely respected for her good sense, once rose abruptly in the middle of Sunday dinner and drove to the house of someone she knew – just in time to stop him from (very unexpectedly) trying to kill himself. She is a good person, but that does not explain why she went. Similar intuitions have occurred throughout Quaker history, as well as outside it. Our Quaker ‘heroes’ such as James Nayler, John Woolman and Elizabeth Fry all witness to them.