© 2008 Alain Coulombe
© 2008 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| The President's Word | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 42 — Spring 2008 | A Little Reflection on the Power of Loving (Part 2) |
It is only during his years of innocence or if he has managed, by personal decision, to purify himself and to spiritualize himself somewhat, sometimes at the cost of some harsh ordeal, that the human being can grant, partially and most often without his knowledge, the passage to the divine exhortation that the fragment of the universal Father delivers in his spirit. However limited and imperfect they may be, these contacts between the creature and the creator nevertheless immensely enrich human thought by allowing it to forge, day after day, what will remain of it after death, its soul, this pre-spiritual entity, altruistic and fraternal, freed from animal burdens and vivified by the spirit of trust and that of truth. Put to sleep at the moment of physical death and transported by spiritual personalities to worlds constructed for this purpose, the soul will be able to reveal itself capable of animating a supramaterial body there and then undertaking, with the loving and sure help of patient and devoted guides, the long and fascinating journey that will lead it towards eternity. And when it has finally conquered time and space, pierced the mysteries and mastered the mechanisms of cosmic thought and known God in the three infinite persons of his trinity, other accomplishments, even more prodigious, will be proposed to it.
If the spiritual beings of the central Universe enjoy from all eternity a status of sublime and unalterable perfection, it is not the same for the material creatures endowed with reason who populate the evolutionary worlds. The greatness of the latter consists, on the contrary, in rising, by a permanent effort of intelligence and will, from the precarious animal status of their origin, dominated by brutality, ignorance and fear, to the heights of knowledge, wisdom and goodness. It is this ascending, exciting and harsh road that God proposes to his material creatures, a road strewn with pitfalls and quagmires but which, in truth, will lead the confident and audacious children of today’s imperfect evolutionary Universe towards the balance and light of the millennia to come. The creator’s plan is that creatures have, at all times, complete freedom to fully associate themselves with the work of progress whose imperative necessity they can easily discern and can thus become true partners of God, co-builders and co-responsible for a material world and a human society whose destiny is, to a large extent, placed in their hands. In this enterprise, the greatness of creatures lies in the purity of their desires and the freedom of their choice. And this is why the voice of God is so weak and so discreet in the human spirit, so that nothing can hinder the sovereign will of the creature who thus holds the keys to his own future.
When, through his repeated moral decisions and his will to choose justice and goodness, the human being has enriched and strengthened his soul to the point of becoming, after his death, a citizen of a higher world and master of a body with unknown potentialities, he will then experience the first truly superhuman joy of his new existence. And this intense joy of having passed a brief but difficult and glorious stage will be only the starting point of an endless progression towards innumerable conquests, during which the spark of pure spirituality, which formerly accompanied the mortal stumbling from an unfinished planet, will become the eternal and inseparable companion of the pilgrim in search of his creators. And when, after ages of challenges and victories, of unheard-of accomplishments and inconceivable progress, this creature, having become pure spirit, finally immerses herself in all reality in the infinite love of the Universal Father, she will never cease to tell him and to tell him again the prodigious joys with which she will have been blessed during her fabulous journey.
He who believes in the existence of infinite forces, he who discerns, beyond the turbulence of the world, an absolute of beauty and goodness and conceives that this infinity, because it contains everything, cannot be devoid of the attributes of personality, he is able to recognize God in the form of a perfect person, of a creative father of supreme goodness and therefore of an eternal and sure friend. And if God is still something else than that, he is, above all, this personality radiating a limitless love, a form in which he is found to be the most immediately accessible to the human spirit and the most profoundly enriching for its spiritual progression.
He who conceives God as a father and a friend, who knows that he has received from this unchanging and faithful God an eternal fragment of his infinite spirituality, who realizes that each human being has the dual mission of transforming a fragile and unfinished planet into a better world and of transforming himself into a partner of God who is more generous and more fraternal every day, he, whatever the anxieties and dramas that threaten him, will always know where the path to follow lies. If his courage fails him, let him rest for a moment and set out again. If events or men conspire against him to bring him down, let him find the courage to stand up again, without bitterness and without pride, and to face adversity with patience, intelligence, humor and determination. Above all, let him not fear death, from which he will never be able to escape, even if he manages to delay it by a few hundred years in the millennia to come, this death which one day will become, in the enlightened and perceptive being of future civilizations, the happy conclusion of the earthly adventure, the awaited passport towards eternity.
In these future times of greater balance, mutual aid, increased wisdom and spirituality, when earthly life will no longer be considered as a path of mourning opening onto nothingness, but as the indispensable, difficult, but exciting antechamber of the future life, the hazards of existence will take on their true meaning, that of training in effort voluntarily accepted and the formation of an altruistic and robust character. Do not fear. Injustice is not what you think. To those whom life on this still miserable planet deprives of acceptable conditions for final decision, to those whom death takes prematurely, is widely and fully granted, on other more perfect and more hospitable spheres, the freedom to make the personal and definitive choice of survival or stopping the adventure. And few then refuse the path to perfection.
Love, in the spiritual and divine sense of the term, is not what material creatures believe. Far from being an emotion, it is an act of will by which the individual decides to pay reduced attention to what concerns him, in order to pay increased attention to what concerns others. A mother sacrificing her well-being to ensure that of her child offers a beautiful example of love and spiritual enlightenment. If in this case as in others, emotion or feeling can largely favor the decision, they do not create it. The decision, and even more so the consequences of it, namely the real and ordinary acts of devotion that its implementation implies, result from a lucid and determined will and constitute the demonstration and the concretization of the act of love. This allows us to understand the distance which separates love, in the spiritual sense of the term, from sexual attraction and, even more so, from the sexual act which take the place of love in so many human couples, necessarily ephemeral.
When you have reached the limits of your earthly life and have begun your ascension to the higher worlds built for this purpose, you will find that the work to which you will be invited will consist more and more in caring for the well-being and progress of other beings and less and less in worrying about yourself. With the ever more effective help of the spiritual fragment of the Universal Father with which you will then be totally associated, you will apply more and more perfectly the rules of this cosmic altruism which transforms each being wishing to elevate himself into a servant of the Universe and its creatures and into an immortal son of God.
Is it not strange that human creatures agree to submit their relations with God to the rule of religious organizations, often authoritarian and rigid, while these creatures possess within themselves, in the form of a spiritual fragment of the Universal Father, the surest and most faithful friend, who assists them permanently, waiting and hoping for their progress, and who would only risk leaving them if they themselves came to reject definitively and absolutely any shadow of spiritual progress and if they confirmed, by their repeated acts, their irreversible decision to choose evil and exclude good. Shouldn’t human creatures, on the contrary, learn to collect themselves in order to try to discern the inner voice of divine essence, which never ceases to demand their sincerity and to exhort them to your goodness, which enjoins them to be just and upright, which helps them to acquire balance and strength of character, which teaches them to appreciate beauty and to discover peace of mind, but which also asks them to open up to others and to engage, according to their abilities, with all the necessary audacity, in the construction of a perfect world.
Human creatures should not expect God to demonstrate his power to them through miracles or other strange manifestations. God has nothing to demonstrate to material creatures. It is they, on the contrary, who can, if they wish, show God their firm will to become his partners. Certainly, the Universe currently offered to evolutionary creatures is barely sketched out, but it is governed by strict material laws which God, who is its author, has no intention of contravening himself in order to respond to some childish whim or naive calculations. God does not infringe on the free will of any creature by imposing on it His overwhelming proof of his existence. On the contrary, He allows uncertainty to reign, which leaves the way open to disinterested help, to the flight towards the saving spiritual, alone capable of fertilizing and transcending the material, shadow of eternal reality.
Despite God’s extreme discretion, it sometimes happens that, for one reason or another and most often when a planetary emergency requires it, the brief and limited intervention of supramaterial personalities strongly influences certain human creatures, thus creating some rare but spectacular interferences of the spiritual in the material. It is also common for the message transmitted in these circumstances to be partially misunderstood and transformed by the human spirit that receives it, but this is not always the case. Generally speaking, any message containing propositions contrary to the essential exhortation of God, which enjoins that we rise up to him by loving, helping and respecting other human creatures, must be considered altered. A few decades ago a long written message appeared on this planet which brings human beings an updated history of the relationships between God and his creatures and which will doubtless provide future generations with an abundant source of reflection.
| The President's Word | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 42 — Spring 2008 | A Little Reflection on the Power of Loving (Part 2) |