© 1996 Cathy Hoffman
© 1996 International Urantia Association (IUA)
Cathy Hoffman
Melbourne, Australia
Does anyone know the meaning of “being Jewish”? I don’t. Is it racial? Religious? An attitude? A reservation? A Grudge, a ‘No!’ to the majority style, a fate? Whatever — I was that.
Because of some wilfulness about being “other”, I early embraced my mother’s racial religion as my own. It was an embrace of vigour and defiance. I defined large proud chunks of myself with it. As a kid, I liked boastfully saying, “I’m a Jew.” I liked what it did to people’s faces, the negative power of it.
As for him, poor Jesus of the Christians, well, as a young punk widgie, I liked him, despite my innate rebelliousness. He was a hero, no question. He said what he meant, meant what he said, he risked all safety, energy, vision, and died with love in his heart. He was a Mensch. Also, as some of those lascivious statues and paintings of him said, Christ Jesus was pure man, he looked real good to the eye!
But taking on Jewishness meant Jesus was the mistake of the world. He was self-delusion, mass self-deception. He was the madness of the planet. So I pointed myself to the Sinai God of the desert. I stayed on in the wrestle with him. In my 27th year two things happened. The first was, after the millionth bout, and no knockout, I threw in the towel. I decided to believe that God was God. It was just there, my love for God, without any of the “proof” I sought. That June afternoon I decided to believe I went for a shaky walk. On the footpath I found a tiny copper crucifix. I, a Jew, and who had never found a thing in my life, gawped at the ground, red with embarrassment. I didn’t believe in signs or nudges from the universe. I still don’t. But I snatched up that cross and pocketed it, hoping no one, including myself, saw me do that. Twenty years later, I still have it.
The other thing that happened was The URANTIA Book. This pony-tailed guy at the library I worked at, kept taking it out all year. “Hey what’s this thing, man?” I drawled all hip to this nice, inoffensive obsessive. I was about to stamp it for him for the ninth time, as he said, “Take a peek, just one.”
I took that peek, just one. I went light in the head.
“Not this time, pal”, I lied to poor John Lipscombe, “this book’s on reservation.” John shrugged. He didn’t care. He was moving on, onto hotter reads, Alice Bailey, I think, and a tract called “Course on Miracles”. Or was it “Curse”? Meow!
I took The URANTIA Book home. I read and read. What can I say! It blew off my head! I read and read and never stopped. For years I read from it every single day, simultaneously nodding and shaking my head, going “no, no, no” and “Yes! Yes. ! Yes!” At the end of a decade’s wrestle whose bouts and scars are not worth repeating here, I came to see that The URANTIA Book was exactly what it claimed it was.
As for any serious reader, so for me, there were lots of stumbles. The chief thorn, for a Jew, of course, was Michael of Nebadon, Jesus Christ. Accordingly, I did not concern myself with Part IV. That is, I read it, did not take it in, put it in a metal file marked “Later”, zipped it up and stashed in deep freeze. I kept on reading Parts I, II and III struck by the following qualities of it.
First, it is a document to and from the spirit. The book works by a total capture of the mind. It completely meets the intellectual requirements of coherence, organisation, logic and by a near-miraculously snagless internal consistency over 2000 pages.
Second, it is a work void of whim, flaw, contradiction or eccentricity.
Third, and this is the most dazzling quality of the book, its truth-factor, the idea-content. The reading of this book’s assertions, revelations and information was accompanied by a sense of almost mathematical necessity, a cognition that, “Yes, this alone makes sense!” The effect of it was a “Yes, of course!” and that things were so, have had to be so, and not otherwise. For example, of course planet earth is not the only one God ever thought of making; and; no, of course, we cannot be the only life and therefore the moral centre of the universe! And; if Christ was real, he couldn’t possibly have chosen the acute biological abnormality of entering the world through a virgin-birth, or put demons into poor pigs, or do show-off stunts like walk on water. Things like that.
The URANTIA Book’s logic seemed spotless and exact. Its information seems to come from the nature of reality itself. What it says appears to be a description of the way things have been made, a description of the way things do, in fact, work. What I mean about the book’s truth-factor is that its idea-content seems to be a description of reality itself. The movement, logic and organisation of the book’s information seem to ‘click’ with the mind when it is working normally. Its logic fits flush with the human mind’s working. The prime quality of The URANTLA Book is its Ring-of-Truth. However, for me, there was the problem of Christ.
I had accepted the entirety of The URANTIA Book as fact. Therefore, this was the issue: Could a work offering itself as a description of reality in one and a half thousand pages of faultlessness be in error as to the content of its last quarter? Could The URANTIA Book have got everything without exception perfectly right and be mistaken in its revelation on a matter as fundamental as Christ? You couldn’t just select the bits you liked and ditch the rest. It was not a piecemeal work but a total, integrated whole. The authority behind the lot of it was the same source. However much I didn’t want to believe in Christ, I had to bite the bullet on this one. Either the lot of The URANTIA Book was a fraud, or it was just what it said it was. Luckily, over the years, my heart and mind had been doing some work.
My grown-up’s position had become: no, Jesus was not God’s Son. But who was he?
In all respect for truth, and in care for the spiritual realities of other people, this question had to be serious. I had to know — who do believers say Jesus is?
I went up close, close as you can formally get; for the first time in my twenties I read the four Gospels, then again the ampler work of The URANTIA Book on who Jesus was.
Well, he was stupendous! As a Jew, I fancied recognising his slant, his delivery’s style, the significance and clout of it, his whole élan. I had a snug little laugh in me at the time that went, “What a Jew —Jesus was such a Jew—only a Jew could really get him.” I hugged such vain notions to myself.
Whatever, you just had to like the man from what The URANTIA Book said of the man: the sheer guts, the clean nerve, the bull’s eye truth of what he said. He spoke, and bliss flamed from his word. He opened his mouth, and beatitude came out of it. According to both The URANTIA Book and the Gospels he came out of those Capernaum hills and turned himself into word and deed. A man of huge presence, when he spoke of God from inside of himself, his speaking like a breathing, like fish swimming, or a bird taking to the air. A free, tough, unpossessive man; thousands followed him, I suppose because of the power of independence. He needed nothing, no shelter, approval, opinion, not even his life, from anyone. He was man integral, total, intact. And when he looked at you with that truth in his eye, even if you had messed your life up, you just got better, or you would see, or stand up and walk. He went walking up and down the land and people, thousands of them, would want to see him. They would cross deserts, climb trees, go through a roof or jump into the sea, just to touch him, be changed forever, and live. People saw God’s spirit in him, he, so present to God’s spirit himself, that some thought he was like God, others, that he was God. If God could ever be in a human.
As for those pests of Judaism, the priests of the temple, well, could Jesus “nuke” them, or what! He sure put paid to their loathsome system. He died for not being the power-Messiah to confirm their love affair with themselves as God’s chosen.
Fine, fine. This was Jesus. Perhaps like quite a few Jews, I thought Jesus great; but, no matter what he said, and he did say it, he was not God’s son. I had to go into the logic of this. My denying that Jesus was what he said had a two-pronged consequence:
The first was the fact of Jesus as Christ in other people’s lives. This was the logic of denying it; if Jesus was not what he said, then a huge sector of humanity was having a mass-hallucination. Millions of good-desiring human beings had deceived themselves. Or they were the dupes of a deception of planetary extent. My refusing credence to Jesus being God’s Son meant that those millions and millions who gave it were in error about the objective reality of their subjective convictions.
How do you bite on the bullet of a conclusion like that? You’d have to be a mega-pervert to like the look of this sum. Rather than flinch it away, like I wanted to, I had to get closer to what Jesus was for others. You had to take that inner look. Over years of looking this is what I found.
“Jesus” was a name at whose utterance the greatest amount of good came to people’s hearts. The “Jesus” concept seemed to undersell out the highest ideals of people. In the rendering of Christ artists put their utmost into his imaging in dance, music, word, the visual arts. At the name of Christ people were brought to their own best by it.
Sure, there were some very good people who were not touched by him. I supposed some were left impassive by him, indifferent. But I’d describe these people as asleep, neither good nor bad, just somnolent to all sorts of crucial things, maybe just dozing a bit before God woke them up.
Then there were those who hated the word “Jesus”, (I knew them, heck. They were mostly me and my gang), but we had “done” something to ourselves.
Denying the reality of Jesus as Christ also left me at odds with the hero of the gospels. If he was the touchstone of truth, what was I saying by denying he was Christ? That he who did, said, and lived perfection was mistaken about his identity? That he, who was the epitome of sanity, had made a slip-up about who he was? That he, who was a paragon of lucidity, was confused about his origins? Too ridiculous for words, I had to keep on tracking on the harrowing logic-trail of this one.
So, on the trail; if he, the touchstone of truth, was mistaken about what he was, how could there be any truth after that? If he wasn’t the truth, there was no truth. If he was wrong, there was no right. If there was no truth or right, where was the coherence of anything at all?
Still on the trail, but right down to the fence of it now, about to hit wall, the wall of myself; for my denial to be right meant that all those who believed were cheats or mad; that there was no such thing as truth or reality, no coherence or meaning. Then what was life?
For me to be right I’d have to live in a chaos of no other rule than random power or craziness. But if I was wrong, and Jesus was who he said, I could step back into the human circle, join hands, and not be looking-down at believing humanity like at a bunch of lunatics for the rest of an anyhow meaningless existence. I weighed the odds, lightening quick.
On the next stroke, I believed.
The weird thing was, that stroke wasn’t the faith. That was just the second when I said, “Yes”. Faith got given to me in the next. For the minute I said, “Yes, he is, Jesus is who he says he is,” the whole world went “click!” and snapped into place. But it was me who had to say “yes” first.
When I was younger, surer and strong, I came to God through myself; not so young or confident anymore, I came to Jesus through believing in the reality of other people. As for The URANTIA Book, it stood right up in me, and sang.
I had made a decision. There has to come a stopping-point for the mind when evidence requirement is exhausted. A time when the demand for “proof” yields to another faculty of faith. I made the decision, not to give up the honourable mind-search, but to exercise with it the faculty of faith.
So I had faith in Christ Jesus.