© 2000 Gard Jameson
© 2000 International Urantia Association (IUA)
Gard Jameson
Presented at the IUA International Conference August 2000, New York USA
This afternoon I would like to share with you some thoughts on the nature of the many blessings we enjoy in connection with the teachings of Jesus, the experiential love of God, and the service of our brothers and sisters. In his report to the First Triennial Assembly of Delegates and as the first president of the Urantia Brotherhood, William Sadler stated that “The Urantia Book is not an end in itself. Fraternity is not a true end, both are means to an end… The only true End is the Universal Father. » I would like to ask each of you how deeply this call to the experiential realization of “the one true end” has penetrated within you.
I would like to share two intuitive insights that have become the focus of my personal faith journey.
When we are willing to recognize these blessings and express our gratitude, our hearts and minds will open, they will be renewed and transformed by the wonderful love of God. In one of the most astonishing statements in the book, Jesus says that worship makes the worshiper more and more like the being he worships (UB 146:2.17).
When we are willing to see and recognize that we are broken and wounded, recognize our hurt as a community and the hurt of the planet, then we can truly become servants of the kingdom and enter into the eternal joy of our Master. The insight that comes from deep awareness of the pain and suffering of the world is a powerful source of inspiration in service.
Many blessings come with each of us. We can feel the blessing of our very existence. How lucky we are to be alive on this planet at this time in history is an amazing blessing. So observe for a moment your body, which has its origins in Paradise itself, your mind which was given to you by the Infinite Spirit, your spirit which is a gift from the most merciful Eternal Son, your personality which comes to you directly from the Father . Then stop to consider this most precious gift, the Thought Adjuster, fragment of the Infinite God of the galaxies and superuniverses. Let us also remember the gift of the Spirit of Truth, granted by our Creator Son, Michael of Nebadon and the Holy Spirit, the gracious gift of Michael’s divine partner, the Creative Mother Spirit. Do you feel the immensity of the blessings bestowed upon you?
Consider for a moment the blessing of family. Consider the story of your grandfathers and grandmothers, your fathers and mothers, your brothers and sisters, your aunts and uncles, and your ancestors who brought you to this moment in eternity.
So think of our community experience as family. For me, this meeting is an experience similar to a family reunion. I am grateful for the presence of all of you.
Consider the blessings that come with being part of this global family. For this I am very grateful. As my friend Thomas One Wolf says: “Walk lightly, brothers and sisters, on Mother Earth for she is the one who sustains you. » This planet and our time of existence on this planet are so special. We only have a moment to absorb the glory of this planet and its precious history. We only have a tiny moment of the time of the universe to offer our small contribution to the holy place of our great Mother Earth, to the planet of the cross of which the Planetary Prince, Michael of Nebadon, is the Head of our universe of creation.
However, despite all these blessings, we all, as if by instinct, tend to ignore these blessings and moan about our problems, projecting our own hurt onto others, without really ever seeing either the other or ourselves. .
In the reality of God the Supreme, we must have the courage to seek these blessings, to find space for deep gratitude to one another. I invite you to try doing the following exercise: every time you encounter someone with whom you think you have a problem, try to arouse your sense of gratitude for that person, however little, for all the reasons that exist to be grateful. You will be amazed at the result produced by your sense of gratitude applied to this person. Such gratitude opens the possibility of real dialogue. Once you’ve tried this exercise with those who annoy you, you might seriously consider approaching everyone this way, even your friends. By sincerely engaging in this exercise, you will be a blessing to your brothers and sisters around you and you will be blessed. In Judaism it is clearly stated that we constantly receive blessings, this is called kabbalab. As recipients of these blessings we have received so much and that is why we are called to give. How could we be the recipients of so much and give so little? The lesson is very simple, very clear.
Last month, I stood on a mountaintop in Wyoming and came face to face with a small piece of our history, a 10,000-foot-high ocean bed that contained the remains of clams, bryozoans, and echinoderms dating back 450 million years, from the time of Michael’s fourth bestowal as a seraph. Within you is contained the history of 550 million years of evolutionary development. There is an amazing story in each of you. Observe your arms and legs which were flippers 300 million years ago, at the time of Michael’s fifth bestowal as Eventod, the unknown pilgrim of time and space. Consider your brain, which was the size of a pea in the Jurassic period, at the time of Michael’s sixth bestowal, and which is now a little larger. And then, consider your heart, this powerful and sacred heart through which the cells of infinite consciousness and the cosmic planes pass with each pulsation, this heart which connects our frail frame to the very heart of all reality, Paradise, home of the Trinity , through the power of prayer.
I want you to know that your personal belief in the teachings of The Urantia Book does not replace the deep inner experience that The Urantia Book calls each of us to claim as our divine blessing, our divine heritage. Without this inner experience, or without this awareness of our blessing, this realization of what the book calls the inherent joy of the existence of free will, our belief is but straw, or as the book says, a doctrinal fetish.
I invite you to claim your full blessing, the blessing of being the Beloved, the blessing of that which lies within each of you, your spiritual birthright, the right that comes to you from being born again into the loving fire of God’s infinite compassion and eternal wisdom. The great romantic poet of the 19th century, Goethe, wrote:
Die and be reborn
Until you learned your lesson
You are just a gloomy guest
On a dark planet
For many of us the question is how, how to be reborn, how to claim our spiritual blessing, how to get in touch with these gifts of grace that are within each of us, even now. Oddly enough, The Urantia Book doesn’t spend much time on the problem of how, but it does give us some real clues.
The most fundamental step in the journey of How is the humble and sincere desire, the commitment to seek our blessing through our own “brokenness,” through the hurt of the world.
This is the story of a powerful Roman senator, Arsenius, one of the most powerful men in the world of that time, and his Christian servant. Arsenius had everything one could desire materially, but he lacked joy; He is told to inquire of his Christian servant about the source of true joy. The servant told him to pray with all his heart. And thus he prayed:
“Lord, lead me in the path of your salvation”
The response was as follows:
“Arsenius, be solitary, be silent, be at rest. »
Solitude, silence and rest in the Spirit of God, these are the three essential keys when claiming your blessing, when opening your heart and your soul to the presence of the Trinitarian Family in your soul. .
By faith you can claim your deepest blessing, the blessing of being God’s Beloved. I would now like to ask you, dear brothers and sisters, a very important question. I would like you to think for a moment, silently, in your heart, about this:
Do you truly experience yourself, in the fullness of your soul, as God’s Beloved?
For most people, instead of loneliness there is the experience of isolation and alienation.
Most of us live in the cage of our instincts. These animal instincts, which have helped us by bringing us to the present moment, have also, in a curious way, created a cage. We have not learned to transcend these instincts, to embrace our spiritual nature and be embraced by it. The Urantia Book calls them the instincts of self-preservation, self-perpetuation, and selfish gratification. We go to them in our search for happiness and we don’t find it. The joy inherent in human existence comes from our recognition and awareness of being infinitely blessed, infinitely appreciated sons and daughters of God.
Pride combined with instinctive energies of selfish gratification has led to untold misery and suffering, divorce rates of more than 50 percent, child abuse rates of more than 25 percent, and abandonment of our elderly population. Last December I was in South Africa at the Parliament of World Religions with my dear friends Moussa and Doudou from Senegal. Did you know that in this country alone, approximately one in two women are victims of rape? The excesses of the need for selfish satisfaction have manifested themselves at the expense of the greatest of human institutions, the family. The incidence of AIDS in South Africa is horrific. A recent estimate puts the number of victims at more than 29 million. Can you imagine knowing that one in ten people you meet are victims of this terrible disease? I read the other day that a quarter of children in Central Africa had lost at least one of their parents to AIDS. What does such knowledge awaken in your soul? Do you feel called? It is the call to the healing of your own soul and therefore to the healing of the soul of the planet…
This is how I tell you again, as our wonderful book does, that there is more to life than the instincts of selfish satisfaction, of self-perpetuation, of self-preservation, and that the institutions favored by these energies instinctive. Security, human affection, self-love, and power, by themselves, separately or together, are necessary but insufficient on the spiritual path of adventurous service and joy in the kingdom of God.
I would like to suggest to you that by claiming your personal blessing, by opening your heart to both personal and collective hurt, you are performing a powerful act of reclaiming your own soul, our community and even this planet through the power of the most precious love of God.
The Great War, World War 1, the war where my great-uncle, Frank Gard, was killed on Armistice Day, was supposed to be the war to end all war. This war began in Sarajevo at the beginning of the century, and here we are, at the end of the century with troops once again in Sarajevo.
Since the end of World War II there have been 115 wars of varying sizes on every continent on the planet, and they have killed more than 22 million people. During the 20th century more than 100 million men, women and children were killed due to our own alienation, due to the fact that we are unconsciously obsessed with the instinctive energies of self-preservation, self-perpetuation and selfish satisfaction. Over the last 5,600 years, what we in the West call historical times, there have been more than 14,000 wars. That’s two or three wars per year of human history.
At home, I have a chart of my family tree that dates back to the 8th century. Almost every generation shows that there is a knight, warrior or soldier in their lineage. My father served in World War II, as did my mother. My grandfather and great-uncle served in the First World War. Virtually every generation has served in a war.
With the arrival of nuclear and chemical weapons, we live in a generation that has no other option than to turn its swords into plows, to become the channels of the Father’s love, the reflections of the merciful wisdom of Michael and the instruments of peace of the Creative Mother Spirit. This is the great call of our generation. Do you hear this call?
André Malraux, the French author, wrote that the 21st century would be spiritual or it would not be. I completely agree with this observation.
It is interesting to note that just after the Second World War, not only was the hydrogen bomb developed, but much more significantly it was, what I call, the opening of the doors of spirituality . Some two years after the Second World War, a certain number of “yeshivas”, or schools of Jewish mysticism, opened in Israel, which taught Kabbalah and Hassidic spirituality. Martin Buber, the great Jewish prophet of the 20th century continued to write his monumental work on personal relationships and community;
In 1949 Thomas Merton wrote his bestseller The Seven Floors of the Mountain, the story of his own monastic odyssey. Since that time, thanks in large part to Merton and Vatican II, the teachings of cloistered Christian spirituality have become widely available. Merton students, and many others, teach the great disciplines of prayer and communion to thousands and thousands of lay people each year.
The Sufis of Islam, through the works of Idries Shah and many others, have made their deepest teachings available to the laity. Rumi, an 11th century poet, is the best-selling poet in America today.
Rabiah, the great Sufi poetess, wrote:
O God, the stars shine;
All eyes are closed in sleep;
Kings have locked their doors.
Every lover is alone, in secret,
With the one he loves.
And I too am here: alone, Hidden from everyone —
With you.
In 1955, as you all know, a truly astonishing event took place, thanks to the blessed work of the Commission of Revelation and the Commission of Contact, that was the publication and distribution of the fifth epochal revelation to our planet, The Urantia Book.
And yet, for most of us, instead of loneliness there is isolation and alienation.
Because, for the most part, we continue to stay in the cage of our instincts, without hearing the music, without hearing the call for transformation, without taking it seriously.
For most, instead of the silence and tranquility of God, there are busyness, distractions, depression: the noise of the TV, the noise of the stereo, the noise of the newspapers and now the noise of emails. All our work is noise, even our silence makes noise with its frustrated thoughts, its obsessed thoughts, its anxious thoughts, its fearful thoughts, its impatient thoughts, its thoughts of isolation—there is very little quiet in our lives.
For most of us, instead of resting in the eternal arms of God, allowing ourselves, as the great mystical nun Hildegard of Bingen encourages us to “embrace, by the mystery of God”, there is a fear and deep-seated anxiety.
As Paul said, perfect love casts out fear; love, which we experience in quiet communion with God, constantly renews our soul.
I would like to suggest that most of us fail to claim our greatest blessing for the most obvious of reasons: we simply don’t take the time to have a relationship with God.
What is needed is a divine appointment. We should allow our faith to reclaim our relationship with the Divine. Realize, however, that God has perfect ways. God is not going to force relationships on us. Jesus said, “See, I stand at the door and knock. » The grace of God and our Master is to actually stand at the door and knock, and it is up to us, through a humble act of will, to invite them in, into our lives. Everything we bring for the journey is our sincere intention.
Do you really believe what you read in The Urantia Book? So, begin to live it fully by making your divine appointment with God, every day of your life, an appointment that will begin to inform and elevate every moment of your life, the life of the community and the very planet we walk on.
It is God’s will that each of you become perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. With the discernment the book gives us I understand that this mandate means that we should begin by loving one another as God loves us. To do this, we must let ourselves be loved by God. The journey of perfecting love is a circular journey, it does not follow a straight line. This circular journey requires a “circumambulation” from each of our relationships, going inward, deeper and deeper, beginning with our relationship with God. I would like to share with you again this statement of Jesus according to which adoration makes the worshiper more and more like the being he adores [UB 146:2.17]. Love as God loves us, as the Master washes our feet and serves us, even now.
Every day we should take the time, make a divine appointment, a little more than the 20 seconds before meals. Try twenty minutes in the morning, and if you want to settle into the relationship, try another twenty minutes in the evening. And, sometimes, you might even want to try a spiritual retreat, or what I call a vacation with God, a rest in the ever-loving arms of God. If I told you that the Dalai Lama, or the Pope, was asking for 20 minutes of your time tomorrow, I think most of you could find that time.
So, if I told you that your Creator, the God of the infinite galaxies of time and space, the existential God of eternity, wants to spend some time with you, what He truly desires, do you think you could find a little time in your schedule for the Creator? Do you think you can register a divine appointment with God? What if I told you that by taking time for God, you will receive the greatest blessing of all, His perfect love, a love that forever disperses the feeling of isolation and alienation, a love that changes distraction and depression into divine focus and joy! As Paul tells us, this love, a perfect love, chases away all the fear and anxiety that continues to invest our little community. What if I told you that by taking a little time for God you will become the person you always wanted to be? Do you think you could find 20 minutes tomorrow morning and every morning after that for God?
May the God of Infinite Galaxies and Perfect Love bless your journey!