Thought for the Week: Words and silence

Patricia Gosling’s Thought for the Week

by Patricia Gosling 22nd January 2016

For a group of people who value silence, and whose mode of worship is based on deep silence, we Friends do get hung up about words: ‘theist or nontheist’, God-language or none’ and so on.

A word currently being thrown about with an aura of disapproval is ‘secular.’ I wonder what is wrong with ‘secular’? Does using it, perhaps, imply a rift between secular and spiritual? I always thought this was anathema to Quakers; that central to a Quaker perspective was recognition of the Immanence of God in everyone and everything.