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Relating!
Jacques Tetrault, Quebec, Canada
Readers of The Urantia Book should take advantage when they feel the urge to communicate with one another, to share their knowledge but most importantly to share their religious experience.
Spiritual growth does not appear to follow a straight line.. It seems to follow a spiral shape with some plateaus, sometimes vicious circling and even falling backwards as if to reach out for useful information left behind.
Always there is a risk that we dig a trench in which we trap ourselves and sometimes others with us. It is the old story of sacred scriptures, fixed rites, and dogmas. And this happens on a collective as well as on an individual basis. The common causes of such situations are mind-closing isolation of either the group or of the individual, pride of knowledge, and being too easily self-satisfied.
We were all blessed with a superb epochal revelation. We all read the same book but we read it as we are, from what our individual past experience has made us, and from what we are becoming from reading to reading. Furthermore, we are indwelt with similar and equal Thought Adjusters, but each with our own unique program for growth. The same reading; different revelations.
Truth is living. It evolves with personal experience. Experience is essentially a question of relation. We relate to our own past, to events around us but, more importantly, we relate with people and with God as a personality.
There is only one Universal Father but our perception and our experience of God is not identical, we each have our own specific relation with Him. And this religious experience is constantly changing, growing. Each of us, each believer who is free to think, believe, relate and adjust, has his particular experience of God--his religion.
Each one of us is therefore a unique and specific part of the total mosaic of the sons and daughters of God. We can be united but never uniform.
We have much to receive and much to give from communicating with, working with, stimulating and sustaining each other. We are invited to do so in many different ways.
But let us be very careful not to fall into dogmatism, institutionalization, ranking of student-readers, or any other form of power game.
The invisible brotherhood of sons and daughters of God is tightly knitted but the celestial weavers are much more far-seeing than any human being. What we are asked to do is to submit to God's will, not to substitute our will to His or to our brothers and sisters. What do we really know of the needs or the good of our brothers and sisters? Would we have the nerve to direct them or otherwise tell them how to run their relation with God? Let us simply be attractive, inspiring, never directive.
Should we not better use our energies for serving each other as we learn to serve all our fellow beings? We can benefit by co-operating with all types of other believers; not working at getting them organized but at growing together with them by generous and free giving, understanding, and love.
I have been in contact with readers of The Urantia Book, study groups, brotherhoods, fellowships, and so many other formations and institutions or pseudo-Urantia institutions for over twenty years. I have also developed personal relationships with numerous readers across the planet. My personal conclusion is that only intimate and personal relations have helped me to produce the fruits of the Spirit. They have not however produced these fruits--that is altogether something else.
Could we try to imagine what would have happened if each of Jesus' eleven or twelve apostles, plus the evangelists and the prominent Greek and Alexandrian believers had all chosen to go individually, or two by two, each to spread to various lands to spread the essential and simple message of Jesus' gospel, instead of the one made up by the church at Jerusalem or that of Rome? Furthermore, if this message of love had been truly shared by the very lives of these messengers, and exemplified by their doings to their descendants and associates, would it have been lost to the world because of lack of organization to distribute and/or promote the message? Are we of so little faith?
Whatever the answer, we are no longer at that point in time. To my knowledge, no specific apostles have been duly appointed, or should be, in order to spread this new good news. I would even distrust any individual or group who would tell me, "Truth is here, or there; listen to me, listen to us."
As each of us makes himself available to freely do His will, to grow spiritually, and tries to do good as he passes by, without fuss and great noise, then do we become useful and will be sustained. I pray that we may all become transforming agents simply by the way we will honestly live as our daily tasks require us to do our work with much love and in a spirit of
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