© 2010 Angela Thurston
© 2010 The Urantia Book Fellowship
| Cosmic Socialization and Planetary Citizenship | Volume 11, Number 1, 2010 (Summer) — Index | The Problem of Business |
My name is Angela Thurston and I’m twenty-five years old. In many ways, I know the upbringing my siblings and I received was not unique; many children are lucky enough to grow up with The Urantia Book in their homes and as part of their family routines. Some of these children embrace the book and some do not. It’s not my intention to posit the critical factors that led my two younger siblings and me to accept the book as truth and identify whole-heartedly as Urantians in our young adult lives. Our free will precludes that blueprint. However, there are ways in which I believe our experience growing up in a Urantian household and community was, if not unique, at least a positive example. I will elucidate some of them in the article that follows.
I can’t remember the first time I saw a Urantia Book, nor can I remember learning my parents were Urantians. The presence of the blue books on the shelf and their centrality to my parents’ faith were facts of my young life, and I took them for granted the way a child of Christian parents might take for granted the Bible and church on Sundays. Some of my earliest, blurriest memories involve Jesus’ birthday celebrations and playing at Urantia conferences, even before I understood what these gatherings were for. My parents were active members of the Urantia community and I, if not yet a participant, was avidly observing.
Moreover, The Urantia Book deeply informed our family culture. I didn’t know at the time that my parents strove to live Jesus’ teachings in raising us, but I did know there were ways in which our family behaved differently from my friends’ families. Primarily, this had to do with emphasis on the family. We all ate dinner together every day. At dinner, we went around the table and talked about our days, so we always knew the details of each other’s lives. On playdates at my house, my mom looked after us; at friends’ houses, the nanny looked after us. Once a week, my dad and I drove up Flagstaff Mountain and talked and ate doughnuts and watched the sun rise. Every weekend, my mom and I went to the Hotel Boulderado mezzanine and read classic novels aloud. My siblings Jesse and Haley are four and six years younger than I, respectively. While of course we had the growing pains of any siblings, we also developed a remarkable closeness as children that many found unusual, especially due to the distinct absence of bickering and petty fights. A woman once approached my brother and me in a bookstore to say she’d overheard our conversation, and by the way we spoke to each other, was convinced we would live great lives. My brother and I, at twelve and eight years old, thought it was funny. But in hindsight, the culture my parents created in our home encouraged Jesse and me to treat each other that way. By striving to manifest the Fruits of the Spirit, my parents also fostered them in us.
They also presented the teachings of The Urantia Book directly. Once a week, before we kids were old enough to begin reading the book ourselves, my family would sit in a circle on the living room rug for prayer time. There were two serious parts of this process. The first was to say what we were thankful for. Each of us would close our eyes and furrow our brows and think of impressive things—like our friends and our two cats—for which we were grateful to God. Then we would discuss a Urantia Book quote. This was selected by one of us (with a little help from Dad) in advance of the meeting. My dad worked in computer graphics and would design a little poster of the quote to look at while we talked. I particularly remember the night we discussed “The universe is not an accident.” We had learned about the Big Bang in school, and were so interested in the alternative explanation the book provided for our universal origins, that we kept the poster up above the cat dish for many months, serving to remind us—and our feline friends—that we were on purpose. The crux of the mini-study groups was how the quote illustrated concepts from The Urantia Book, and how these concepts mattered to our young lives. But the part we truly enjoyed came after. Analyzing the text was how we earned our reward: Fruits of the Spirit. Aka dessert. At the end of prayer time, we all got to pick a cookie (a “Fruit”) and sing any number of classic songs: “Jesus Row Your Boat Ashore”, “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands”, “Angels Watching Over Me”…even “Kumbaya”.
The Big Bang wasn’t the only concept that came up in school for which The Urantia Book offered an alternative or deeper explanation. My parents did not shy away from exploring these ideas with us, engaging our innate curiosity with ideas from the book for our consideration. Even the basic Urantia Book premise that setting and striving for goals is crucial for personal development, was cited to help motivate us in school. Always in these cases, I knew I could believe what I wanted, but I do think it was important that my parents presented what they believed. After all, they were not only grown-ups—and therefore presumably much smarter than I—but the grown-ups I loved and respected the most. If they thought something was true, my first instinct was to trust them.
To my mind, the experiences above, along with many more, added up to immersion in The Urantia Book at home. I can’t say objectively how much my home environment influenced my response to The Urantia Book once I started reading it myself. But it would be hard to overstate how conducive the environment was to encouraging me to read the book in the first place. It was impossible not to be curious when concepts from the book were constantly popping up, and in such positive, interesting, and fun ways. That said, my parents never insisted that my siblings and I read The Urantia Book.
My dad was raised Protestant and my mom was raised Jewish, and both were dissatisfied with the way religion was presented in the home and the community. For my dad, going to church was a dreaded obligation that did not satisfy his desire for spiritual content. For my mom, being Jewish was a cultural and political imperative as opposed to a faith-centered practice. In both cases, rules took precedence over spirituality. As a result of my parents’ mutual dissatisfaction with “institutional religion” and yearning for truth, they both spent years searching for what they ultimately found in The Urantia Book. But their experience taught them not to impose practical obligations on their children when it came to discovering faith. By living the teachings to the best of their ability, while introducing the book through inventive community and family traditions, my parents set an example that encouraged our natural curiosity to get the better of us.
My family moved to Boulder when I was eight, in part because of the Urantia community there. Right away, we started attending Friday night study groups in a church on Broadway and Pine. The grown-ups went upstairs to read and discuss, and the kids played downstairs with a different supervisor every week. The supervisor was responsible for incorporating some kind of lesson into every week’s activities. One week my mom brought in pipe cleaners and googly eyes and we made fandors to name and take home with us. Other activities centered on storytelling from Jesus’ life, including putting on a Urantian Christmas pageant. This regular group lasted for many years, and, as usual, my favorite part was the cookies. At the end of the night the kids came upstairs, eating goodies and mingling with the adults before retreating back down to the basement to play tag.
I had the luxury of taking this community for granted because I knew no alternative. Of course there were other families with other kids being raised on The Urantia Book, and of course these kids also turned up at my elementary school and summer camp. As one of the eldest, I got to know many of the adults as well, and especially as I got older looked forward to having grownup conversations with members of this now-familiar community. That said, I knew our community was small compared to the youth groups and synagogues some of my friends attended. I also knew the Boulder group was considered large by national standards, which introduced some of my first questions about the Urantia movement in the country and the world. On a weekly basis, I remember distinctly the feeling of being in someone else’s church. There were Bible quotes plastered all over the walls, and the basement was full of Christian books for children. There was a poster of a beach sunset, with the text of the well-known poem, “Footprints in the Sand.” I remember studying this poem, part of my regular environment, and wondering how it did and didn’t correspond with Urantia Book teachings. Mostly, I remember wondering about the regular patrons of this church, and how much truth they had really figured out. In my eight-year-old confidence—never yet having read the book myself—I often pitied them the revelation they were missing.
For a period of time our study group tried to initiate a regular church service on weekend mornings, with hour-long services that included sermons from rotating members of the Urantia community. I can’t remember how long this lasted, but various members of the community thought it was too institutional so it did come to an end. Before that happened, though, we had Consecration. During this ceremony of May 18, 1997, a number of us kids dressed in white and went up to the front of the church in a celebration of having received our Thought Adjusters and dedicating ourselves to the Father’s will. At twelve, as usual, I was one of the oldest kids. I remember not knowing what it meant to be consecrated, but believing with full certainty that it was a necessary rite of passage. The grown ups said a few words and we all received our very own Urantia Books.
At a certain point, a number of factors contributed to our family ending our involvement with the Friday night study groups. We began holding a weekly study group with just one other family. The structure of these weekly groups, conceived by the adults, was as follows: First, dinner—inevitably pizza—during which the kids hung out in the basement while the grown ups talked upstairs. When they had finished eating, the adults yelled “time for study group!” down the stairs, and we slowly but surely emerged. One of the kids was the leader each week. If I was the leader, I would have selected a quotation in advance, usually about a paragraph long, to read aloud. This marked the beginning of study group. Then I led a spontaneous prayer and got to decide who read first. We went around in a circle, each reading about three paragraphs, and always punctuated by discussion. We tried to read a paper a week, and usually succeeded unless the paper was really long or someone had too much homework. After study group, we all gathered around the kitchen counter for dessert—usually popsicles—and talked and joked and heard about each others’ lives that week.
We laughed a lot at study group. Being in high school, of course I sometimes resented the routine, and sometimes felt too busy or in demand or in love to spend my Tuesday night this way. But we actually had a lot of fun. We were all amused by the revelators’ frequent commentary about how we mortals couldn’t hope to understand a given concept or how there just was no word in our feeble language to possibly convey what they wished to convey. We loved Those Without Name and Number. We had long talks about the reversion directors and the nonbreathers. When we finished Part I, we had a party. When we finished Part II, we had another party, and graduated to beautiful leather-bound books. I left for college before we finished Parts III and IV, but the group continued and eventually finished the whole book.
I cannot imagine the ten years between the ages of eight and eighteen without the constancy, levity, and community that defined our regular study groups. I am incomparably lucky to have had the opportunity to discover The Urantia Book with a group of people I loved and trusted, and especially to have had the mentorship of my parents and other adults combined with the partnership of my siblings and friends. Even though I was the only Urantian in my high school graduating class, I knew everyone at study group would appreciate my senior year book quote: “The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frog is to live loyally each moment as a tadpole.” [UB 100:1.4]
My high school boyfriend was Orthodox Jewish. He was the first person who doggedly called my beliefs into question. In fact, my beliefs—and his—were the reason we broke up when I left for college. I was never going to raise my children keeping kosher, and he was never going to find space in Jewish Orthodoxy for an inhabited, governed universe of the kind I described. But even while engaging in heated arguments, and despite my full, youthful conviction that I was right, I found myself envying him. I have just described my gratitude for the Urantia community that raised me. But here was someone with centuries of tradition to back his points, with physical buildings to worship in, and with not only a community but a legacy. I envied that he didn’t have to be the sole ambassador of his ideas or defend against accusations that his religion was a cult or a science fiction novel. I envied that people had heard of Judaism.
In retrospect, I now think this envy had a positive effect. I truly enjoyed spending time with my boyfriend’s religious community, and craved its comfort and stability, while simultaneously noticing how the weight of its traditions reinforced his social identity without necessarily clarifying his spiritual understanding of why he engaged in its practices. This contradiction, along with our arguments, forced me to proactively question my burgeoning faith. Because I envied his community, it meant all the more for me to affirm that yes, every paragraph I had read in The Urantia Book rang true based on my experience and yes, it was worthwhile to sacrifice a comfortable institution for that truth.
With my high school boyfriend, I was the radical. With my new college friends, I was the dogmatist, accused of clinging to the fundamentals of a text I kept in my dorm room. On the one hand, these accusations helped me learn how to intellectually defend what I believed; on the other hand, they opened the door to doubt. Because of my good fortune to be raised in a family and a community of Urantians, it wasn’t until college that I truly realized how “marginal” my belief system was. I hadn’t grown up particularly studying other religious texts (besides what is outlined in The Urantia Book about them) and I had never been surrounded by people with such intellectually-backed arguments about religion. I had also never had to explain mine so thoroughly and frequently. I would always give it my best shot: It claims to be a revelation…it’s kind of like a textbook on the universe…Jesus is a big part but not the Christian kind…there’s no Atonement Doctrine or concept of Hell…
But there were a lot of questions I couldn’t answer. And, inevitably, my least favorite and the most frequently-asked would arise: What are the origins of the book? I disliked this question so much, in part because I felt it shouldn’t matter. What matters is the text and whether it resonates as truth based on living life on this planet. But of course—especially to my mind-centered peers at Brown University—it did matter. And I hated that it mattered because I knew it was grounds for dismissal. An unsatisfactory answer meant The Urantia Book could be safely tucked away with the other weird cults one doesn’t give credence to, masked in the language of, “Wow, that’s fascinating.” I was often tempted to cite the strangeness of other religious origins, the unlikelihood of one or a few people, quarantined on this planet, figuring it all out and recording it perfectly. But I didn’t because at the time it seemed too hard to stand up to thousands of years and millions of people with a little blue book—even one all bound up in leather to look like a Bible.
These conversations took their toll, and though I brought my book to college, I never read it. After freshman year, I almost entirely stopped engaging people in conversation about my religion, and after a few ventures to the local study group—on one of which I brought a friend who couldn’t take it seriously—I stopped going to that as well. I felt too overwhelmed to be the only ambassador in school for this revelation, much less a world full of people who knew nothing about the truth I took for granted. Who was I to explain it to them, to be their very first introduction to The Urantia Book? I hadn’t even read the whole thing through!
The book teaches that eternal learning—and, therefore, eternal education—are essential to our cosmic career. After all the questioning my parents did to find The Urantia Book, I think they would be disappointed if I didn’t critically assess the truth they passed onto me, and question with the full power of my thought and feeling whether it was my truth as well. The learning I did in college, by thoroughly doubting, questioning, and self-educating about the context for my faith, was imperative to its growth. There are times I feel almost jealous of those who discover The Urantia Book on their own, because I can only imagine the profound satisfaction of seeking truth and finding revelation. But I had a different and likewise powerful experience, of being given truth and choosing it. I had to question to make that choice, and I see questioning and re-affirming as a constant element of active faith.
I remember the day I first decided I was a Urantian. I was eight years old, and had just found out many people called themselves Urantia Book readers, as opposed to Urantians. This did not make sense to me. Not only was I an inhabitant of Urantia, but I believed in the teachings of The Urantia Book the way Christians believed in the teachings of the Bible. They didn’t say Bible reader.
Not all eight-year-olds immersed in the teachings of The Urantia Book become Urantia Book readers, much less self-identified Urantians. Some never adopt the book as truth, and others are not ready to adopt it until later in life. But I think it makes sense to at least inform the next generation of what it is they might one day be “ready” to adopt. There is a concern in parts of the Urantia community, I am told, that raising children on the book would be imposing dogma or at least unsolicited information. Much more studied arguments than I could provide have been made to the contrary. What I can offer is the experience of one who was immersed in the book, did believe more or less blindly by the age of eight, and did then go through an (I think) inevitable and healthy period of questioning and assessment on my own that resulted in personal faith, independent of my parents. If they had not provided me a thorough education in the Book as a child—through both explaining and living the teachings—I wouldn’t have even known this faith was an option.
Angela Thurston lives in New York City, where she attends weekly study groups and is excited to be getting involved in the local Urantia community. She is a playwright and lyricist.
| Cosmic Socialization and Planetary Citizenship | Volume 11, Number 1, 2010 (Summer) — Index | The Problem of Business |