© 2005 Anne-Marie Ronfet
© 2005 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
Our conception of truth, beauty and goodness never ceases to grow, from our life until our arrival before the Father. God reveals himself to us as absolute truth, absolute beauty, absolute goodness. We cannot have any other idea of him. This is our best concept of God. We imagine Paradise as a place of breathtaking beauty. We imagine the beings who surround the Father as real living intelligences and the Father himself as limitless goodness.
Because God manifests himself to us in this way.
Our mind thinks of God as truth, beauty and goodness.
Divinity is creature comprehensible as truth, beauty, and goodness; correlated in personality as love, mercy, and ministry; disclosed on impersonal levels as justice, power, and sovereignty. (UB 0:1.17)
And we can go even further. We only understand God to the extent that we are sensitive to these three values. The higher our idea of truth, the more harmonious and ethical our idea of beauty, the more our sense of goodness takes place in our life and the closer we are to God. It is therefore essential to have a clear idea of these three values and to give them a preponderant place in our daily life.
God manifests himself to us to the extent that we can understand him and we only understand him through these three values.
The divine mystery consists in the inherent difference which exists between the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, the time-space creature and the Universal Creator, the material and the spiritual, the imperfection of man and the perfection of Paradise Deity. The God of universal love unfailingly manifests himself to every one of his creatures up to the fullness of that creature’s capacity to spiritually grasp the qualities of divine truth, beauty, and goodness. (UB 1:4.5)
It is in spiritual experience that these three values unify. They cannot function separately from each other without creating imbalances.
Could you imagine someone who only thought, seeking the truth without any attraction to the harmony of the facts around him, without a little taste for art and without moral ethics, without a sense of good or evil?
Could you imagine an artist who was in love with beauty but had no interest in any intelligent concept or emotional attraction? That would be a very cold artist. There are certainly some, but their art must be very sad.
On the other hand, goodness without any attraction to the value of conceptual beauty or in life or the search for intelligence, even if many religious orders have claimed this way of living their faith, this seems very difficult and a source of certain psychological imbalances.
It is true that when it comes to goodness, things are a little different. Many religious orders are based only on this divine application. And their only vocation is to serve God through “charity”. It is perhaps because they have limited the search for God to the application of this single value that religions have lost their appeal for many people. Modern man cannot be satisfied with an ideal of goodness alone. He must also understand and admire. As magnificent as the example of a few well-known personalities who spend their lives doing good around them and in very difficult conditions, how many people are tempted by this life? This seems an ideal reserved for exceptional people, not for the ordinary mortals that we are.
The search for truth provides direction because it relies on cosmic guiding mental forces that guide us.
The balance of these three values in us are the best ways to experience God, to participate in his creation, and therefore to express with our humble means the supreme around us.
To seek God is to improve these three values in oneself and to coordinate them harmoniously in a living experience.
These values can also be a valuable help when we find ourselves in front of someone and we want to both get to know them but also communicate about essential and important things. So when we find ourselves in front of a new person why not ask ourselves what their values are:
What is your vision of truth? What seems true to you in your life? Do you like the beauty around you? Where do you find it? In people? In nature? In flowers, in art, in music???
Do you have a family?
When we talk about these things with people, we are actually also talking about divine values. When we talk about seeking truth, when we give our opinion that things are beautiful and harmonious and when people tell us how much their children for example mean to them, then it is almost as if we are talking about the Father, because these are his values.
These values are our torch. They inspire and guide us and it is on these values that spiritual influences rely to make us evolve.
They are also our measure, our points of reference to situate ourselves in our own evolution. Although our spirituality is largely unconscious (because super conscious), the way in which we experience these values can inform us about our progress).
Finally, they allow themselves to be “forgotten” in a sort of call for the unity of the whole personality, a unity towards which we tend and which we constantly desire and which will only be complete, as we know well, when we have arrived with those we love, near the Father.
Anne-Marie Ronfet