A Higher Gear

 

“The intellectual factors of religion are important, but their over­de­vel­op­ment is
likewise sometimes very handicapping and embarrassing.”
— The Urantia Book

 

 

In a thrift store recently I saw a framed sign for sale. I didn’t buy it, but remembered it.  It said:

 

                        Life is a test.

                        It is only a test.

                        If it had been a real life

                        You would have been given instructions

                        On where to go and what to do.

 

For the lucky few students of The Urantia Book, we finally have those instructions, clear and simple.

But are we obeying them? Are we doing all we can to live the realest lives we can, which are what the instructions are for, because life is no longer only a test, but seriously real?  If not, why not?  Do we really want to live the realest lives we can?

I believe that deep down we want that more than anything, but for various reasons find it difficult to stay in touch with, probably to just the extent that we find it difficult to stay in touch with God. Might we be able to help each other with this if we focused on it together?

Of course.

Do we need leadership with this?

Sure.

Am I answering my own questions too much?

Obviously.

 

 

I think the Urantia community is desperate for leadership, which is always a dangerous situation, in that it may tempt people to give over to someone else responsibilities that they have to fulfill for themselves if they’re to have any meaning and value.  We’ve always known this as a community, and been wary of anyone who seemed to be rising to prominence as a leader, kind of like Americans are wary of anyone who starts looking like a king. As with most unfulfilled needs, though, denying them will only make people more susceptible to trying to get them fulfilled in ways that don’t really work.  So Americans repudiate the idea of king and aristocracy and then fall under the influence of caricatures of both.

Sooner or later, though, as Winston Churchill put it, Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing—after they’ve exhausted all other possibilities.  I’m sure the Urantia community is just as dependable. Any true spiritual leader, of any religion anywhere, will, like the Spirit of Truth, direct people’s attention not to himself or herself, but to God.

Inward, in other words.  In fact, such leaders will be horrified by adoration of their own persons, seeing it for what it is—an attempt by followers to escape the responsibility to find God, the true leader within us all, in their own way— an attempt, in fact, to use leadership as a shield against God’s presence, which they find maybe too intense, or too transforming, or too real; or, if they’ve been shamed or become guilt-ridden for some reason, too good, true, and beautiful. It’s very easy, simple, and calming to imagine Jesus as your constant companion, but it means no longer trying to avoid transforming the way you think and act. Until we make our loyalty to him more important than any of our other loyalties, such companionship will feel judgmental instead of deeply, spiritually nourishing. Not that Jesus judges us and refuses to forgive us, but that’s the way it will feel until we live in a way that manifests our loyalty.

It happens again and again nevertheless, this adoration of human leaders, maybe because we lost our Adam and Eve. There’s a cult in India today that worships a statue of Gandhi, who I’m sure kind of sadly shakes his head when he observes it.

Closer to home, I once attended a study group in which there were strange warnings about spirituality, as if it were a dangerous territory you entered at your peril. There was even a lot of wondering about how mysterious “spirit” is and how difficult it is to understand or get your mind around. When someone said they didn’t know what spirit is there was general agreement, almost as if it were a self-evident problem.

I wanted to ask what everyone thought the statement in the book meant that says we need to make “effective use of thought while at the same time discounting the spiritual serviceableness of all thinking,” and how it related to the statement that “Jesus taught the most to those to whom he said the least,” but I got the definite feeling from those present that such questions were somewhat out of place in a philosophical discussion which was really more of a case of one person talking and everyone else listening and nodding.

I knew that everyone there actually did know what spirit was—because everyone there knew what love was, what honesty, compassion, selflessness, courage, loyalty, gratitude, and humility were—but they thought they didn’t because they were trying to understand it from the level of intellect alone, which is impossible. Even a child knows what spirit is, but it’s an experiential, not merely philosophical, knowing, which is deeply personal and inevitably a part of relationship. The fact that no one there could describe spirit in intellectual terms didn’t mean they didn’t know what it is, and pointed to one of the dangers of approaching such questions with the intellect alone—it can deceive people into thinking there’s no point in trying to explore them. It can distract people into developing their intellects while ignoring their spiritual development, because it tempts them to see spirituality as something vague and susceptible to fanaticism. Intellectualism without spiritual experience is a great blindness in itself.

Our intellects, though essential, are only part of a greater intelligence that has been given us, that if we’re to fulfill our destinies in larger, maybe even heroic ways (why not? what is eternal life worth?), we need to develop even more urgently.

We all know we’re much more than the part of us that thinks, but for some reason or reasons, many of us find ourselves somewhat embarrassed by that fact—maybe even a little afraid of it, or a lot afraid of it. As the old Puritan Jonathan Edwards once pointed out, God is not where it’s hardest to find him, but where it’s hardest to look for him.

Our minds alone will not deliver us from fear. We have to find ways to open our hearts as much as we’ve opened our minds if we’re truly to understand our destinies and those of others—understand God, Jesus, others, and ourselves—and be able to serve as we need to serve. Our need to serve in the deepest way we can is not only our responsibility, it’s also the only key there is to our joy, and the “peace that passes all understanding” that proves to us and others that we have truly been with God, and truly understand the message of the Fifth Epochal Revelation.

To take Christian experience as an example, few in the sincere Christian community came to their belief by being handed a Bible, or having the Bible talked up to them. Most came to it through their relationship with some Christian or Christians who they felt really cared about them.

 

“In science, the idea precedes the expression of its realization; in religion, the experience of realization precedes the expression of the idea.” —Paper 102, Section 3

 

Spiritual experience is real, despite it’s susceptibility to misinterpretation by the mind, not to mention the ego, and endless intellectual discussions won’t help us understand what can only be experienced as an aspect of relationship, to God and each other. If we were all sitting on the shore of the sea of glass and had all the time we needed to intellectualize about things, such discussions might be fine—though I’m sure we’ll have many responsibilities to fulfill there as well—but that’s not where we are, and our troubled world needs more from us. It needs our spiritual maturity more than our intellectual descriptions of reality, as useful as those can be at times. When trying to show a scientist the reality of values, for instance, sometimes a sincerely caring hand on his or her shoulder may be more effective than all the intricate explanations we can muster. It’s how Jesus could teach with a look much more than some of his lengthy sermons did to individual truth-seekers.

Science doesn’t handle feelings very well—distrusts and disparages them, for the most part, except for psychology, which is hardly a real science—but truth is something we can’t experience through the intellect alone. We have to feel it, and when we do it changes us. It doesn’t just leave us where we were with more ideas in our heads.

To illustrate the difference between spiritual and merely intellectual understanding, consider the parable of Jesus washing the apostles’ feet. A merely intellectual understanding would see that act as a teaching, which it was. Jesus wanted to teach his followers (and us in the future as well) a deeper meaning of service, and he did it with hardly any words. But to truly understand his teaching we need to realize that Jesus not only wanted to teach—he wanted to wash his apostles’ feet, because they needed their feet washed. He was being not only a teacher but a father, and the deepest friend they had ever known. This is the spiritual meaning of the parable, though words alone can’t convey the value of what must be felt to be understood.

Another warning that came up in this “discussion” was about thinking you can change the world. The ego aspect of this warning was legitimate, but again such warnings can be an excuse for spiritual inaction, which leads to stagnation—such as the present state of the Urantia “movement,” other than, for the most part, around the task of selling books. We’ve been given many more talents than just that of book-selling, and leaving it to the book to deliver the message at the heart of it is like Christians handing people Bibles and assuming that they’ve done their duty, that the recipients of their largesse will now be good Christians. Jesus’ teachings are focused precisely on changing the world, through changing ourselves into self-conscious sons of God and ambassadors of a better world. This is our primary responsibility, not a dangerous fantasy, yet so little of the “movement” is focused on it, other than in an intellectual (read “abstract and impersonal”) way.

No one can understand the Fifth Epochal Revelation without understanding the Fourth—this is made clear to us over and over again throughout the book, beginning with Paper 2—and that understanding can never come through the intellect alone. It needs the unified effort of all the powers of one’s being, a singleness of purpose that’s not a fanatical illusion but the best, truest, most beautiful and real experience human beings are capable of.

Philosophy and science are important to our growth, but when they try to usurp the role of religion and confine us to their realms they become sophistries and obstructions that can make us think we’re growing when we’re really not, inevitably limiting the scope of our service as well.

All sincere students of The Urantia Book display the fruits of the spirit in their lives in various ways, and helping each other with this is one of the most important services our community can perform—much more important than helping each other understand everything in the book. Bearing spiritual fruit is the only thing that can truly unify our community, a community, incidentally, that consists of not just this or that formal organization, because believers are believers, regardless of their organizational affiliation or lack of it. Whether or not we choose to believe it and act accordingly, we’re a family. All of us live in the same universe and one day will be as dedicated as it’s possible to be to the fact of our spiritual unity. It will form the basis of our identity in our consciousness as well as in truth and reality.

Why not focus on being in this unity consciousness, not just getting there? Is that not the only way we can get there? That may sound paradoxical to the intellect, but we have to develop the ability to recognize when our thoughts are interfering with our larger intelligence and understanding. Our culture often encourages such interference because it suffers from scientism, the religion of pseudo-scientific reasoning, which confuses intellectualism with intelligence, the part with the whole.

A spiritual community is a community of people dedicated to something transcendent, and in the case of Urantia Book students does it not have to be dedicated, first of all, to the Great Commandment? “You shall love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” This is our primary responsibility, shown us by the Fourth Epochal Revelation, which is not just part of, but the foundation of, the Fifth. It came before it, and the climax of the Fifth is a deep restatement of it in the clearest way it can be expressed with words alone.

We survive in the universe because we have a universe purpose—the task of finding God. It’s good to sell Urantia Books, and to study the book and coax others to read and study it, but we don’t survive in the universe because we do such things. We survive because we’re sincerely seeking to find God, or because we even sincerely want to sincerely seek to find God. There are many other seekers who know nothing of The Urantia Book who may be even better than we are at fulfilling this greatest responsibility, though what we know, if communicated wisely, could be of great value to their quest.

This important ability, though—to communicate wisely—is a spiritual skill the book alone can’t give us. It needs actual experience in relating to people who see things differently than we do, as everyone, in some way, does. We survive not because we read and study The Urantia Book, but because we believe The Urantia Book, or sincerely believe some other description of our pathway to God that awakens our loyalty to the supreme values of love, service, honesty, humility, gratitude, selflessness—or because we want to sincerely believe.

A sincere, wholehearted desire to believe is actually a greater display of faith than half-hearted, merely intellectual assent, as Jesus clearly pointed out to his apostles when he came down from the Mount of Transfiguration and healed the child of James of Safed.

All of us in our individual lives prove that we’re capable of truly spiritual experience whenever we love and unselfishly serve, but we have yet to prove that as a community we can truly call ourselves spiritual. In fact the community, especially when we include the Foundation, may have a great deal to atone for in this regard, and the best way to atone for the actions of some in our family is to move forward doing and being what we should be doing and being, which we can discover, ultimately, only through our loyalty to the Great Commandment.

The victory of religion over politics in the good sense is when the truth of spiritual family dominates all other loyalties. Is this not the victory the world at large needs now? Are the horrors we see in the news every day not a direct result of the distraction from this truth in the minds of so many? Is it not our responsibility to contribute to the victory of this truth in every way we can, consistent with our loyalty to the Great Commandment? Can we fulfill this responsibility, even in the midst of intellectual disagreements, without spiritual unity? A true brother is a brother, a true sister a sister, whether or not they’re agreeing in the moment about mere ideas.

The value of a truly spiritual, not merely formally religious, community is that it’s a spiritual family of people personally dedicated to God’s way (love), to one another, and to the needs of our suffering planet, people who help each other attain those heights of loyalty and dedication where we actually draw closer to God’s spirit within us and one day may even hear the divine voice while still in our first bodies, and fall in love with that voice forever.

To know God is to love God, to find the peace that passes all understanding that our world so needs more people to experience and share. To know God is to experience the joy that in a wonderful way also reveals an eternal inadequacy—to ever be able to thank him enough, not for what he has given us, nor for what he will make of us, but for who he is—for simply being able to know him, whose goodness is forever inexpressibly humbling, maybe especially to us who begin so lowly.

What we have been given does not belong to us alone—even our lives. Our primary duty in this life, and even in life eternal, is not to understand, but to relate to others as God relates to us, as the human life of Jesus so clearly showed us. A thoroughgoing intellectual understanding of the words of the revelation is not what our children or our world or the supermortal government of Urantia needs from us. It’s not what our caretakers and supporters watching us from beyond, and our spirits from within us, are waiting for.

Understanding is something the mind craves on its own, and habitually and sometimes necessarily fabricates when it can’t actually achieve it. The quest for it is an essential part of our growth, but to elevate intellectual understanding above the experience of spiritualizing relationships and insight into the actual human needs that stand before us is a betrayal of our duty to God and his Creator Son. We are here to love, and whatever gets in the way of that, or distracts us from the realization that we need to get better at it, is a sophistry that has no real value to us or our world. Even Paul, in II Corinthians (3,6), said:

 

“[God] hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”

 

Intellectual study of the book is good, but in itself it does nothing to promote the evolution of the kind of community the world, whether it knows it or not, needs us to show it. “Love, and do what you will,” Augustine said, and if you take that in the right spirit it will always be true. Understanding something before committing to it is the way of science. It is not the way of spirituality. God needs our faith and loyalty, not simply our understanding, and it is usually the case that the spiritual growth that results from our loyalty is necessary before we can truly understand, in a much deeper than just intellectual way. We believe, we act, we grow, and then perhaps we understand, or perhaps our understanding will have to wait for much more growth before we have any hope of actually realizing why we were asked to act in the ways we were, which we don’t need to be suspicious of because they are always beautiful, good, and true—even self-evident from within the experience of them.

Right now we are being asked to exhibit the new and amazing affection for each other and others that proves to everyone with a modicum of soul consciousness that we have been with the spiritual source and destiny of all life, through his Son. This is the only key there is to our own happiness, the fulfillment of our duty, and even, ultimately, our eternal survival. It is also the only key there is to true understanding. But no one needs to understand this intellectually in order to experience its truth. The words, the names, the ideas I just expressed are of little importance compared to the spiritual realization of true, eternal relationship we share with others, whatever they believe intellectually. This relationship is immediate, self-evidently more valuable than any attempt to define it, and something we will understand completely only in the endless future that lies before us.

Isn’t it time that we focused on the need to develop ourselves in this way, which we can do only in partnership with others? The sharing and strengthening of awareness of spiritual values is the essence of a truly spiritual community, and the deepest need of all formal religious groups—or at least of their individual members. When religious groups don’t serve this need they are already dying whether they know it or not, even if they control whole nations and peoples, because they’ve cut themselves off from the source of their spiritual sustenance even as someone who cries “Lord! Lord!” but betrays real spiritual ideals at every turn is merely living out the winding down of his physical energies to the ultimate dissipation of the self.

We shouldn’t balk at the need to save the world. Of course only God can change it in a way that’s truly forward-looking and progressive, partly through us if we’re truly following his spirit, but it’s a task that actually needs us and all other people on our planet who realize what needs to be done, beginning with the purification of our own hearts and motives. As Margaret Mead’s famous statement put it, “Never doubt that a small group of committed individuals can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Let’s study The Urantia Book, of course, but let’s also study the true needs before us, of the world and the individual—needs that we can see and serve only by actually loving, not by impersonal philosophical attitudes of altruism. If our study doesn’t help us serve these needs, it hasn’t led us to understanding.

The time is nearing for us to fully play our public part on the stage of Urantian history, and only our commitment to the Great Commandment and the socialization of it in a truly spiritual community will prepare us to do justice to the role that has been given us. In these times that try people’s souls, let’s show what we, and all other people, whether they know it or not, are truly made of. Let’s give the world a community of God-conscious sons and daughters of God, and all that means. It’s not beyond us to do this. A great deal is expected of the generation following a great revelation, and when more is expected of it, more is given it to fulfill such expectations.

It begins with feeling the real value of what we have to give the world, which is not the revelation only but more importantly what it means, and what its message has made and is making of us, and the proof that affords of what it can make of others.

 

“About” is an important word in The Urantia Book—the religion about Jesus, rather than the religion of Jesus (the religion with Jesus). How many religions, knowingly or ignorantly, are religions about God, rather than religions with God? How many religions know that they can be a practice of being with God personally, intimately, lovingly present with each human being, who has the deepest, most transforming respect for each of us that we’ll ever experience, and is closer to us than any of us can be to each other except through this same spirit gift?

How many really want to know that, and all that it implies about our responsibility to fulfill the incredible potentials we’ve been given even in this first life, where their fulfillment can do so much to contribute to our world’s spiritual needs—relieving suffering, promoting healing, facilitating mutual understanding, and most of all transforming spiritual loneliness into the joy of companionship with God? Isn’t this the message Urantia needs most, and isn’t it a message that those who need it most will believe only when they see it and feel it, not just read it or hear about it?

“About” implies separation, abstraction, distance. How long will we continue, as a community, to spend most of our time talking about God, talking about Jesus, as if neither were actually present with us—even as we criticize Christianity for the same kind of neglect and disrespect? Isn’t it time to practice the presence of God together, to include God and his Creator Son in all our thoughts and acts and communications, and experience the intensity, yes, but also the peace, clarity, love, healing, and divine energy of that experience?

The Urantia Book is a call to action like our world has not experienced for two millennia—even the same call to action of two thousand years ago, but with the advantage of all those years of the work of the Mystery Monitors and the Spirit of Truth in all moral minds on our planet, building a foundation for our present work here, and the work of all others who love God. There’s a great deal in the revelation that will mean much more, and be more understandable, to future generations, but we are the present, human, visible foundation of the revelation’s impact on our world.

 

What do we present to newcomers when they arrive in our study groups? Ambassadors of a better world? People who are truly respectful of them, and truly interested in their experience, not just in sharing our own with them or getting on with our own agendas? Jesus’ method with people, though it shouldn’t really be called something as calculating as a method, was so effective because he opened their minds by first opening their hearts. We need to learn how to do this, by seeing people, first, not as future Urantia Book readers, but as the sons and daughters of God they are—as God sees them, as Jesus sees them.

When people realize that we’re genuinely interested in them, not just interested in selling them something or telling them something we know that they don’t, they’ll be much more liable to be genuinely interested in us and what’s important to us. We will have served them as God desires us to, and received the gift as well of meeting another eternal friend whose life is irreplaceable in the universe.

We also need to serve each other in these ways. Spiritual relationships, the basis of a real spiritual family, are characterized by trust, loyalty, selflessness, nonjudgment, understanding, and love, and trust comes first for a reason. It’s so easily avoided, and even irrelevant, in merely intellectual encounters. It implies the willingness to be vulnerable, and the willingness to confide in each other—the lack of which was largely responsible for Judas’ downfall.

Our spiritual relationships are based in the fact that we are also, in a way, dual creatures—sons and daughters of God, but also material human beings with all the fears, doubts, joys, sorrows, desires, and distractions of our animal-origin evolution. Our humanness isn’t inherently bad, though. It has a value greater than we may ever understand—otherwise why did God chose us to give the gift of his spirit to? Why did Jesus say that we are not to love just the souls of our fellow human beings but to love them?

We reach the degree of trust we need through understanding each other enough to be aware of each other’s true motives—by trusting each other enough to confide in each other as true friends, not just like true friends. Friends don’t need friends to agree with them all the time. Their value to each other is their recognition of each other’s value, regardless of merely intellectual beliefs—and this recognition is also a gift from God that comes most surely and deeply by knowing God and feeling his infinite love and respect for each individual. When we freely receive this, how can we not freely give it? If we’re not giving it freely, doesn’t it have to be because we’re not truly aware—in our hearts, not just in our minds—that we’re receiving it? Then we need to get aware of this, and help each other do so. Our world doesn’t need us to be merely a cosmically well-informed community. It needs us to be a deep community—a spiritual family.

We have a common father, and a common mother in the Supreme and in the Divine Minister who is part of the Spirit of Truth, always directing our attention, the direction of our growth, to the Father and the Son. They’re immediately present with us at all times, leading us to the truth of Father’s will for us in all our experiences in this world. Exchanging our minds for the mind of Jesus is not a hopelessly complicated and ridiculously idealistic idea. It actually simplifies our experience. It doesn’t mean giving up our minds. It means making them like his, and it happens little by little whenever we simply remember him and include him in our present experience and choices. If we help each other practice this awareness, it will lead to our unbroken consciousness of his spirit, and Father’s, and deepen, enrich, and delight us in ways that make all our decisions clearer and more certain of spiritual success.

He doesn’t make decisions for us, but how much easier and simpler it is to choose God’s way when you’re in his or Jesus’ presence, who are not concerned so much with what decision we make but how we make it—what we take into consideration in doing so—what our motives are. There’s no way that we can ever figure out God’s will, and we have no need to when we’re aware of the presence of Jesus, because his spirit tells us what God’s will is in every situation much more clearly and deeply than our intellects can. This remembering of his immediate companionship would be made so much easier if we all reminded each other of it, directly or indirectly, whenever we felt we could use such reminding.

God’s will in any situation is something we have to “wait upon,” not try to figure out, and when we wait upon it in the right way, by simply remembering his presence with us, it comes to us. He’s with us whether we’re heroically confronting obstacles or just sitting around picking our noses, and his love for us is the same in both cases. When we actually realize this, that he’s with us not as a judge or a taskmaster but as a father who believes in us and loves us more than we can imagine, not ready to pounce on our every mistake but foreseeing them without their affecting his love for us whatsoever, knowing we’ll learn and grow from all of them and wanting to be with us through all of them and their consequences, we won’t spend a lot of time doing the equivalent of sitting around picking our noses. We also won’t spend much time doing the equivalent of trying to figure out how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

Dedicating ourselves to being with God as a group makes it much easier to do so individually. Our natural propensity is to stray from our awareness of his spirit into the sea of distractions around us. What keeps us from evolving spiritually is forgetting where our primary responsibilities and potentials lie—in our relationship with Father and in serving the need to find him of those who have not yet found him.

Being with Jesus is not some sentimental idealistic ritual—it’s at the same time the most challenging, strengthening, inspiring, and comforting experience we can have—one so rich that we’ll do anything to stay in it once we really experience it, and will want everyone else to have it as well. That wholehearted desire is the only thing that can enable us to fulfill our responsibilities in this life in the deepest way we can.

Familiar as they are to many of us, could anything be more clear than these words of the midwayers:

 

“In Jesus the universe produced a mortal man in whom the spirit of love triumphed over the material handicaps of time and overcame the fact of physical origin…

 

…mankind languishes and stumbles along in moral darkness because there are so few genuine second-milers—so few professed followers of Jesus who really live and love as he taught his disciples to live and love and serve.

 

The call to the adventure of building a new and transformed human society by means of the spiritual rebirth of Jesus’ brotherhood of the kingdom should thrill all who believe in him as men have not been stirred since the days when they walked about on earth as his companions in the flesh…

 

If [Urantia Book students] would only dare to espouse the Master’s program, thousands of apparently indifferent youths would rush forward to enlist in such a spiritual undertaking, and they would not hesitate to go all the way through with this great adventure…

 

The true church—the Jesus brotherhood—is invisible, spiritual, and is characterized by unity… this brotherhood is destined to become a living organism in contrast to an institutionalized social organization. It may well utilize such social organizations, but it must not be supplanted by them…

 

The great hope of Urantia lies in the possibility of a new revelation of Jesus with a new and enlarged presentation of his saving message which would spiritually unite in loving service the numerous families of his present-day professed followers.

 

…the supreme purpose of life [is] the development of a majestic and well-balanced personality…

 

High-gear spiritual performances must await the new revelation and the more general acceptance of the real religion of Jesus.”

 

And these words of Jesus himself, who even now watches over and guides us, if we will, to be loyal to these teachings: 

 

 

“You should give ear to my words lest you again make the mistake of hearing my teaching with the mind while in your hearts you fail to comprehend the meaning…

 

I have lived the God-revealing bestowal that you might experience the God-knowing career…

 

I admonish you ever to remember that your mission among men is to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom—the reality of the fatherhood of God and the truth of the sonship of man. Proclaim the whole truth of the good news, not just a part of the saving gospel…

 

That which the world needs most to know is: Men are the sons of God, and through faith they can actually realize, and daily experience, this ennobling truth…

 

I lived my life in the flesh to show how you can, through loving service, become God-revealing to your fellow men even as, by loving you and serving you, I have become God-revealing to you…

 

Love all men as I have loved you; serve your fellow mortals as I have served you. Freely you have received, freely give…

 

I will go with you into all the world. I am with you always, and my peace I leave with you.”

 

 

It is his peace and all it means—the realization of sonship in our hearts, not just in our minds—that our world most needs from us. It’s the essence of our duty here, which we need to commit to doing all we can to fulfill. Our instructions couldn’t be plainer. We have them. We have had them for the better part of a century in a form unencumbered by dogma and ecclesiastical traditions. Will we take up this responsibility that has been given us?

Apart, for any one of us, it would be an awesome task, but together we can find ways to actually accomplish it, in our individual lives and in the life of our selflessly dedicated Urantia family, helping each other find ways to serve as God needs us to serve our world. Of course we should continue to sell books, but does anyone seriously think we have a right to be satisfied with ourselves for that? We’re on trial before the bar of human need, and though the judges we stand before are merciful, the more we know, the more is expected of us, and the more is given us to fulfill it.  Let’s believe that so it can be proven to us, and shift now into a higher gear. 

 

  

 

 

I follow my father into the day.

I follow my father along the fence

to the watermelon patch.

I follow my father into the cornfield

when the day comes down.

I will follow my father wherever he goes.

 

                                                            – Jan Wikima, Hopi, age 7