© 2023 Gaétan G. Charland
© 2023 Urantia Association of Quebec
Gaetan G. Charland
president@urantiaqc.org
Hello members and friends of the association,
I hope you enjoyed the new version of the newsletter Reflectivity with its broader content and its various more substantial articles. I really appreciated the diversity of the articles and I thank the editor of Reflectivity, Claude Flibotte for this initiative. I was particularly sensitive to an experience lived and recounted by Gilles Bertrand. This way of highlighting through practice the teachings of the Urantia Book is very edifying and opens the way to a greater understanding of the value of experience as a method of spiritual growth.
I would like to go back a little to a point on which I based my mandate as president of the AUQ during the year 2022. I would like to talk to you here about education. As you have noticed, the association has a tab on its website entitled EDUCATION. Under this tab, several schools are promoted and each of them offers courses based on the teachings of the Urantia Book. An important feature is that each of these schools offers their courses based on different teaching methods, which has the advantage of being suitable for different personality types. Other characteristics of these four schools are that they are available in French.
Now that we have these schools available to us and in our language, we should as serious students of the fifth revelation pay particular attention to one of the directives given by the revelators and set forth in the Publication Mandate. This directive is, “An early publication of the Book has been offered so that it may be available for the training of leaders and teachers.” For many years the association has offered its members many activities to foster the training of leaders and teachers. We are now at a very important and crucial stage in the mission of The Urantia Book, that of bringing forth these leaders and teachers.
What is the next step to achieve this result? The members of the AUQ council and I have been thinking about it for many years, since 1999. During the last year, Line, my partner and I participated in weekly meetings with the group of five Senegalese educators from the Progressive Divine Wisdom school. During these two-hour meetings, a multitude of subjects were discussed, including education and the training of educators. These supported meetings based on a spiritual framework allowed our inspiration to manifest itself in a realistic way.
Following one of the last meetings and based on a deep reflection on the question of the training of educators, a decision was imposed on me. We must go further than the simple desire to train educators, we must move forward with a concrete plan and practical and effective strategies to achieve this goal.
This is what I propose to us and I ask you to think about it seriously.
I want to create a group of ten or more students who sincerely desire to become educators. These individuals will have to commit to a training program for a period of time not yet determined. This program requires determination and effort, and is intended for those ready for a serious commitment to the mission of revelation.
When the group takes shape, we will preferably meet in person and I will share the content of the curriculum and the criteria that compose it, which can be edited to suit the desired goal, that of training educators.
The association offers us this incredible opportunity to make a difference and help continue the mission of The Urantia Book. Many of us have read The Urantia Book several times, we have taken courses from different schools, we have participated in or facilitated a study group, we have made presentations or led workshops at conferences or thematic workshops, we have written articles. Isn’t it time that all these efforts contribute to the emergence of educators and leaders? Will we be forced to live our lives in a static state, either through indifference or fear of commitment, or will we make the sincere decision to invest ourselves in a project that will have repercussions in our eternal destiny?
Contact me by email if you feel you are interested in this project.
To love is to serve.