Transtheism: Harvey Gillman finds a bridge to gratitude

‘I need a vocabulary that dares to point beyond.’

by Harvey Gillman 16th January 2026

Each day I receive a quote from the Daily Quaker website. It’s a useful way to begin the day’s emails. But recently one sentence jumped out at me: ‘Gratitude is not a Quaker testimony.’ There was no suggestion that gratitude was in any way unQuakerly, only that it was not a ‘testimony’. Personally, I do not see testimonies simply as a list of social values, but rather a response in everyday life to a relationship with Spirit, so I have to question that statement. True, we may consider a ‘concern’ as something that arises from an individual or group, with a ‘testimony’ as something that has the formal backing of a Yearly Meeting, but I felt that there was something missing in the comment, and in the way we sometimes refer to testimonies in an entirely secular manner.