© 2002 Byron Belitsos
© 2002 The Urantia Book Fellowship
| A Demystification and Redefinition of Cult | Volume 4, Number 1, 2002 (Summer) — Index | The Gift of Tolerance |
We reader-believers in The Urantia Book sometimes forget that the Urantia revelation is a perfect mystery, a total unknown, to the religious believers and spiritual practitioners around us. Our religious life derives from an unacknowledged revelatory teaching with almost no practical link with the evolutionary religions of the planet. And because we as a religious movement are in our infancy, our religious identity is a deep enigma—even to ourselves. In an odd way, we are both a mystery to our-selves, and to the rest of the world.
We are a revelatory community that has been wrapped for over fifty years in a shroud of mystery and even secrecy. And thus the question arises: Seeing that we are so primitive in our own religious evolution as a group, how do we share the content of our religious life with Christians—or with others who may be practitioners within some other evolutionary religion? When asked, what would you say are the practices or beliefs that constitute the religious life of a Urantia Book reader? Is there anything that can be publicly claimed about our “religion”—as distinct from simply restating the content of the revelation itself? Or is this question a purely personal matter of which nothing definitive can be said?
My own observation over a 25-year period tells me that our religious identity is highly fragmented; there is really very little common agreement on this score among Urantia Book readers. Indeed, the text itself contains ambiguities that seem to allow for this. The Urantia revelation is vast and multisided; it appears to he designed to foster a diversity of beliefs and practices among its adherents, while providing for unifying principles. This rich ambiguity is perhaps one of the revelation’s chief strengths. Consider, for example, the openness of the text to creative interpretation, its allowance for religiocultural differences in understanding, plus its call for religious freedom and discouragement of creedal pressure on believers. Yet this very strength will likely become a source of confusion for new readers in the coming decades, who will confront a “movement” that is divided and fractional not only politically and culturally, but also as a religious body lacking a coherent identity. These factors, and the relative absence of religious leadership in our community, combined with our immaturity as a community, seem to guarantee that the question of our religious identity will for a long while abide as a source of difficulty even for veteran readers.
For the purposes of this essay, I will narrow my inquiry to a quest for the central religious practices—rather than beliefs—that may he said to be uniquely derived from the Urantia revelation, and that may possibly be constitutive of our religious identity. Religious practices may be said to derive from one’s abiding faith; beliefs are merely mental phenomena. “Faith…dominates the mode of living…Belief fixates, faith liberates.” [UB 101:8.1-2] Beliefs bind the imagination and too often restrain spontaneity and creativity—which are the lifeblood of devoted and religious living; but practices, daily religious practices, such as sincere service and ceaseless prayer, are substantive. They arise from faith itself—from the foundations of the whole personality—and they make a publicly recognizable impact in the form of discernable fruits of the spirit. They contribute to the soul’s growth and to the evolution of the Supreme. Religious practices can further be defined as our conscious attempt to live a devoted and consecrated life with a goal of Adjuster fusion followed by an eternal life of service and God-discovery. Consistent and conscious practice will crystallize in reliable religious habits; but religious practices are nearly meaningless when they are not persistently cultivated. Discovering and doing the will of God requires conscious effort, and to some extent, systematic practice as well as social support.
Assuming that we agree on these definitions, what then arc the chief practices, if any, among the highly diverse groups of Urantia Book readers? Is it as simple as saying that we are reader-believers of a rather lengthy text, and that our practice is to read and understand it? Or is there anything else one can properly say is the core set of practices of the diverse body of believers? Should we not look to Jesus, as Rodan said we should, to find this answer? But if we look there, what specifically do we find?
This question of spiritual practice and religious identity dogged me from my earliest days as a reader after I found the book in 1974. By coincidence, I was a college student in Chicago in those days, so I had the unique opportunity to attend study groups still containing a few people from the very earliest group of readers. And I was immediately stunned to discover that this group of veteran readers had no religion as such. The group lacked any of the trappings of a religious organization: there was no spiritual teacher to point out the central beliefs, no minister to lead prayers or rituals of worship, and as far as I could discern, no religious practices by the adherents. The only recurring practice that I could observe was the weekly ritual of reading the text, followed by a group recitation of the same few lines from the text at the end of the meeting.
Over the years it became clear that something was either amiss with this Chicago group, who were otherwise lovely people, or, there was a hidden method to this apparent effort to cultivate a secular demeanor. In later years I sponsored study groups in different places and at different times; yet none of us seemed to acquire a particular religious practice as there was no particular leadership of the Urantia movement that was able or willing to point in this direction. Yet all around me—this being the early 1980s—there were friends and acquaintances who were pursuing spiritual practices in the evolutionary religions. By this time I lived in Boulder, Colorado, where there was a veritable spiritual renaissance going on with the sudden appearance of communities of Buddhists, Sufis, Hindus, and yoga practitioners. Inspired by The Urantia Book’s praise of Buddhism, I soon found myself splitting my leisure time with the nascent Tibetan Buddhist community in Boulder, while still attending Urantia Book study groups. At least there was a religious practice and a religious identity of sorts among the Buddhists! I’ll never forget the clay that I ran into a Buddhist in that Boulder group, a committed senior practitioner, who was secretly a fan of the Uantia revelation. But he told me that he had left it behind because the text and the group did not seem to lead to a specific “spiritual practice,” a genuine “how-to,” that one could actually engage with to grow spiritually.
I have had occasion to live in other areas of the country in the two decades since my time in Boulder. And in time the truth became transparent: by contrast with other religionists I knew, we Urantians were a rather secular lot. How many of us engaged in those specific religious practices that would deepen our God-consciousness? Where was the evangelism that would, like that of the apostles, turn the world upside down? Where was our Spirit of Truth?
It began to dawn on me that we had not yet come into our evolutionary moment—a thought that is rather obvious in retrospect. We had not yet developed a religious culture; our doors were in effect shut to ordinary folks thirsting for truth and righteousness, who needed more than a literary experience. Remember, “. . . every new revelation of truth has given rise to a new cult, and even the restatement of the religion of Jesus must develop a new and appropriate symbolism.” [UB 87:7.6] But we had not yet developed our “higher symbolism of a higher civilization.” [UB 87:7.6]
Rather, our profile was that of a people who were—much like the apostles in the days before Pentecost—sitting apart from ordinary society in shock and isolation. We were absorbing the trials and trauma of being the human custodians of an epochal revelation, without divine input as to how to manage it. We were that secretive and underground crowd of reader-believers in a new revelation, that epoch-making gift to all of humankind that was ironically hidden away in study groups and in the vaults of the Urantia Foundation. Some of us were actual separatists, caught up in an isolated and elitist celebration of the superiority and sublimity of our beliefs. And being a community that lacked a religious process, the faith dimension in our lives was oddly cut off. Our belief in the literal text was like a bulwark against the development of a progressive and adventurous faith. The tribulation attendant upon the reception of a radical revelation was an understandable excuse for hiding ourselves away in secularism and bureaucracy. For a test of this, just ask yourself what would have happened to the apostles had Jesus nor bestowed his Spirit on the day of Pentecost?
During those years, here’s the best we could do in the meantime: In study groups we sincerely tried to mentally fathom the meaning of that word “faith.” We were careful and thoughtful intellectuals, living a religion of the mind while awkwardly trying to fathom the religion of the spirit. We were adept scholars of the arcane corners of the revelatory text. We loved Jesus in our hearts, and were devoted to the ideals he exalted. We debated questions of religious history or theology in study groups, and yes, we fought over the future of the revelation. But our group prayers were perfunctory, our worship sessions uncomfortable and brief; and not many of us were moved to perform service in the community as individuals or Urantia Book-inspired groups, much less launch actual religious institutions or spiritual practice groups based on the revelation.
Lacking the needed socio-religious support and inspiring symbolism, we as a body also tended to eschew mysticism, the practice of the presence of God. True, many of us as individuals did seek this mystic presence. But because we were lacking in the guiding hand and inspiration of religious leaders and teachers of our own, the pursuit was an arduous and isolated one. With no dedicated religious organizations to provide shelter and succor for practice, many of us turned for support to outside religious groups where we kept a low profile in order to keep our mysterious belief system from being discovered. “They would never understand,” we whispered to ourselves.
Here we were, then, deprived of the inspiring example of religious leaders or spiritual teachers, or a class of mystics or monastic practitioners, who could assist us in deepening our religious practices through secondary works or other means. Indeed, there was very little overt support for secondary or interpretive works in any context—a condition that to my mind has still not changed. So perhaps this all meant that spiritual practices, and specific cultural and social support for them, were not really germane to our work with the revelation. Some Urantians went so far as to interpret the text to be opposed to the engagement of mystic practices. Without a doubt, we as a movement, and many of us as individuals, were caught up in the creeping secularism of Western society.
As we all know, this default to secularism took its toll on the revelation movement. Lacking inspired evangelists, membership did not grow; youth were not easily attracted. (For example, there is an oft-noted gap in our membership in the generation just behind the boomers.) Further, there was little if any contact with other reli gionisrs around us, or with contemporary spiritual movements. We voted to not participate in the World Parliament of Religions in 1993—arguably the most important interfaith meeting in history—on the grounds that we were not a genuine religious group but only a “leavening” movement. We went totally unnoticed by the New Age movement, by theologians of every denomination, by virtually all professors of religion, by all book reviewers, and religious journalists. But then, one might say, perhaps that was a blessing. If any of them researched the Urantia movement, they would find that many local societies were little more than perfunctory administrative operations. They were certainly not inspired platforms of truth-dissemination, able to produce apostles and disciples of Jesus, proliferate interpretive secondary works, and inspire the greater society with works of art or architecture. Instead, our leaders were suing one another.
Our difficulties with conflict resolution were strong evidence of this scourge of secularism. Jesus enshrined a religious practice for dealing with offenses by congregation members upon one another, in his sermon on forgiveness. [UB 159:1.1-6] But fearing overmuch the downside consequences of institutional religion, we had no congregations who could act on this rule! Congregation or not, no existing constitution of any local society or study group that I know of incorporates this healthy and sacred practice for dealing with an errant brother or sister.
Lacking in social support for this practice, individuals who had been hurt or offended by others in a Urantian group had little choice but to turn to strictly worldly methods for resolving the problem—a resort to gossip that sometimes descended into emotional blackmail and ostracism that would lead all too often to splits in study groups and societies and to the flight of many members from participation. In the secular environment of the times, no grouping in the Urantia movement made itself subject to this requirement for resolving conflict. It is thus no surprise that this would eventually lead to the specter of brothers “going to the law against one another.” Such phenomena are the most indicting evidence we have of the cost of secularism; our famous divisions and spectacular litigations are the bitter harvest of our inability to make actual religious practices the center of our community life. Let’s remember: “When a group engages in community prayer…they are all made better because of participation. . . . Confession, repentance, and prayer have led individuals, cities, nations, and whole races to mighty efforts of reform and courageous deeds of valorous achievement.” [UB 91:5.2]
Fellowship conferences have often been a rare bright spot for such group exercises of worship and the prayer of faith. And in certain pockets, inspired individuals championed the idea of creating religious congregations that were separate from the Urantia societies and study groups. Others have engaged in fruitful interfaith activities. The evolution of the Retreat Network and of an annual Florida conference called Celestial Nights are also most encouraging in this connection.
After a generation of secularism, having learned our lesson well, the Urantia movement seems to be on the verge of exchanging a “religion of the mind”—i.e., one characterized by “feelings of authoritative certainty” in the text of the revelation, to one based on “the assurances of the spirit of adventurous and progressive faith” (see the first and second discourses on religion). UB 155:5-6
A wide variety of other religious movements on the world stage that are organized in such a way as to bring specific religious practices into the lives of their adherents have expanded to fill the vacuum left by the near-default of the carriers of the Fifth Epochal Revelation. But the pendulum is now swinging the other way, I believe. Into the religious vacuum in our own community’s spiritual life have come new, and I think promising, trends toward a full engagement with religious processes and practices similar to the way that Jesus engaged his followers. I would cite only two of these with which I am personally familiar, although there are many others in this encouraging trend. These two are the controversial Teaching Mission ™ and the nascent ministry of the evangelist Rob Crickett, now known as RCIM (Rob Crickett International Ministries). I have less direct knowledge of the new organization called the Spiritual Fellowship, founded by Meredith Sprunger, but am encouraged by its ambitious and far-seeing plan to provide suitable institutional religious settings for reader-believers.
Whatever one may think about the Teaching Mission, it is without doubt a movement of people dedicated to consistent and daily spiritual practice. Imagine approaching a TM group to observe it like an anthropologist. Here you will find a diverse collection of individuals and groups that are being led by “celestials” who instruct them in how to engage with spiritual forces through a variety of specific religious practices. As for literature, you would discover thousands of pages of transcripts from a score of locations, mostly focusing on instructions in prayer, worship, meditation (or “stillness”) and service. You would observe that each new teacher session would provide yet another tutorial on how to deepen these practices.
After participating in a TM group in Oklahoma City, I felt a deep conviction that this phenomenon needed to be documented. In 1998 I published a book that lists many of the central religious practices of the TM: 132 lessons that the coeditor Fred Harris and I believe constitute “the spiritual heart of the Urantia revelation.” Yes, this is just one interpretation of the revelation, and this approach is certainly not for everyone, but I believe it is a step in the right direction in that it staunchly emphasizes religious practice. We need many more compendiums like this book, and groups dedicated to religious practices, coming from whatever direction. It is my prayer that many such secondary works will someday flood the shelves of bookstores, articulating the rich potentials for spiritual practices that are contained in the revelation from the standpoint of a practicing group of Urantia Book-inspired individuals. It is also my hope that the Fellowship, for its part, will do much more to support the growth of the secondary works community, now that it is publishing its own edition of the revelation text.
Although it may appear so from the outside, the religious practice of the Teaching Mission is not the activity of receiving transmissions from teachers and the dissemination of transcripts. Rather, the “teachers” have consistently and in thousands of teaching situations over the past ten years enshrined a particular daily practice as central. This is the practice of stillness—a relaxed, conscious and meditative submergence of the whole personality in the consciousness of divinity. Without this sacred practice of daily contact with the indwelling spirit, according to the celestial teachers, it is difficult to bear spiritual fruit. Indeed, without such practices that transcend the intellect and go beyond a mentally controlled religion of the mind, it is unlikely that we could ever shake the secular mindset. A variety of TM adherents have started organizations to promote the practice of the new teachings. The pure essence and real intent of the Teaching Mission, as I understand it, is to produce self-reliant practitioners of a mighty religion in the exalted lineage of our master, Jesus of Nazareth.
And now, the New Zealand-born spiritual teacher Rob Crickett has injected a different set of practices into the still-gaping vacuum left by the secularization of the Urantia movement. His innovative approach shows the diversity of religious expressions that are possible. His teaching on religious practice draws from a wide range of sources: his own deep experiences of sonship, the praise-filled Pentecostal Christian movement in which he has been a participant, and possibly his earlier practices as a Chaan Buddhist monk living in Asian monasteries. A number of new congregations have quickly evolved from the weekend Sonship Conferences that he has been presenting all over the U.S. and even in many foreign countries.
As a founding member of one of these congregations, the Church of Christ Michael of San Rafael, California, I have come to see Rob’s work as an important part of the answer to my own prayer for the spiritualization of the Urantia movement and its further expansion out of its elitist isolation. For me, the motivation for outreach is crucial. Rodan is represented as saying: “If you are not a positive and missionary evangel of your religion, you are self-deceived in that what you call a religion is only a traditional belief or a mere system of intellectual philosophy.” [UB 160:5.3] Sane and spirit-inspired evangelism is a crucial religious practice in itself, as well as a fruit of religious practice.
Our congregation in San Rafael is experimental and progressive. A core group meets weekly to seek divine guidance for the purpose of expanding and improving the religious practice of each individual in the congregation; it also provides moral support for our minister Elianne Obadia and assistant ministers Peter Hayman and Doug Childers as they look toward the next Sunday’s service. Peter runs a study group that is sponsored by the church; his mission as leader is to help set the tone for a spiritualized approach to the study of the text, beginning and ending each meeting with singing and prayer, and relating the readings back to the spiritual path of participants. The church is also planning to initiate “home cell groups” to help reinforce the spiritual practice of congregants at the neighborhood level.
The liturgy of our church varies each week, but the emphasis is almost always on singing and prayer as a gateway to silent worship and moments of group praise and thanksgiving. There are readings from the text and a short homily. We immediately follow the service with a time specially set aside for spiritual healing. This is led by the ministers; but it is in essence a refreshing group exercise for experiencing in a variety of ways a sacred energy field of healing and blessing. We invoke and we sense the profound presence of our divine parents.
I cite this as just another instance of the way religious practices are entering the Urantia movement in unprecedented ways. “There is a real purpose in the social, ;nation of religion.” [UB 99:6.2] But the practices of the religious groups, though indispensable as a support structure for individual spiritual practice, should never substitute for personal religious experience, personal progress toward Adjuster fusion, and the enhancement of individual soul-powers for self-transcending service to humankind. It is my prayer that our little church be little more than a means toward that end.
It all really does come down to the truth-hungry individual standing nakedly before God. As the archetype of our religious practice, we can do no better than to remember that “the greatest of all methods of problem solving,” according to Rodan is: “that which [Jesus] so consistently practices. . . the isolation of worshipful meditation, this habit of going off so frequently by himself to commune with the Father in heaven. . .” [UB 160:1.10] It is this sort of consistent religious practice, varying no doubt in accord with the presence of courageous religious leadership, and in line with the culture and the temperament of an individual, that will lead us reader-believers into that efflorescence of service, love, and truth-dissemination that befits the Fifth Epochal Revelation.
Byron Belitsos has been a student of The Urantia Book since 1974. He works as a writer, editor, and book publisher and lives in San Rafael, CA.
The characteristic difference between a social occasion and a religious gathering is that in contrast with the secular the religious is pervaded by the atmosphere of communion. [UB 103:4.1]
| A Demystification and Redefinition of Cult | Volume 4, Number 1, 2002 (Summer) — Index | The Gift of Tolerance |