© 2004 Jean-Claude Romeuf
© 2004 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
But all who receive it will be enlightened, purified and comforted.
Truth is a quality, it is divine. It is inseparable from beauty and goodness. These three sisters form the three pillars of love. Truth is absolute. It has always existed in the Universal Father, the Eternal Son and the Conjoint Actor. It is total in the Trinity which encompasses all its values of actuality and potentiality.
It is unity, because like God it is one, but does not engender uniformity because it presents the multiple faces of discovery.
It participates in the experience of the Supreme. At this level, it is incomplete, relative, evolutionary, progressive. It always has the clarity of pure water and the source, but is drunk from different streams.
The man who lives in the age of the Supreme knows truth only through experience. Truth begins with wisdom and is affirmed with mind and knowledge. In one who knows God and seeks it together with beauty and goodness, it is sanctified by the Holy Spirit and becomes eternal value.
The experience of truth is illuminated and purified by the Spirit of Truth, the spirit of Pentecost. This is not the truth itself, but it is the conviction of the truth. It comes from the love that Jesus left us. He who loves cannot be mistaken, he knows that the path he is on will lead him towards the light.
The Spirit of Truth is also the one who consoles and gives joy even in trials. The path that leads to God and Love is hard and bumpy. Nothing is easy. We can sometimes stumble on the stones of despair. The Spirit of Jesus is not there to smooth our path, but he then strengthens our courage. He tells us: “Go forward, do not be afraid! I am here.”
Supreme beauty, the pinnacle of finished art, is the epic of the unification of the immensity of cosmic extremes, the Creator and the creature.
Beauty is absolute and divine. Heaven is the physical archetype of material forms of beauty.
It is an attribute of beings endowed with personality. It is then in the image of God, the Father of personality.
These two origins make beauty an omnipresent quality. It is not limited by space or time. It is the quintessence of things, animals and people. It decreases in splendor as one moves away from the Central Island but retains the sweetness of its origin. In the Supreme, it becomes experience and participates in the culmination of the Supreme Being.
Beauty is a gift from heaven when it is perceived by the material senses. It is then easy to recognize: what is more beautiful than a sunset, a sea rocking a spring morning, a night dotted with stars in a scent of wet earth?
But beauty is also subject to experience and culture. It remains hidden for those who go quickly, for those who do not develop their faculties of curiosity, their artistic talents, their intellectual research, their desire to always go higher.
While the scientist can find it perfect in a DNA molecule or in a mathematical formula, it is rare that an artist considers his work finished. There is always a final touch to put on the canvas, a chord to slip into a melody, a flower to put in a bouquet. To copy identically on one’s easel the physical representation of a thing is to betray the nature of this thing, because it carries within it the harmony of the high spheres which has the original flavor of the universes. It is the divinity sublimated in each object, in each being represented which makes the masterpiece. The masterpiece is not born by chance. It is not the result of idleness, of a hobby! When the love that one has in oneself does not find the possibility of expressing itself, it becomes a mountain torrent overflowing its bed. It is this bubbling of love which concretizes the work of art. All artists are lovers.
It is possible to conceive of beauty associated with truth without the intervention of personality. Truth purifies beauty, because truth loves simplicity, it rejects make-up and everything that masks it. Truth rids beauty of all superfluity, of all embellishments. It gives it the purity and song of crystal. Four words are enough for a poem, three strokes of the pencil for a drawing. The true artist seeks first to create truth, beauty is also a gift in his work.
Unlike its two companions, goodness is always personal and remains an attribute of the spiritual world. When the three coordinate in the experience of a wise human being, the result is a growing desire for love that stabilizes the personality by endowing it with a heightened cosmic consciousness. It is then that art becomes the open door to the stars, the marriage of earth and sky, the kiss of man to his Creator.
A beam of light escapes from the earth; crossing the celestial vault, it traces the path to freedom.
“… one cannot depict goodness without depicting its inherent and divine greatness.”
“…if by grace you can become good, you become great by that very fact.”
Beauty or truth can be conceived simply in the physical universe or in the intellectual world, but goodness is always a personal reality. God, the original Father, father of personality, is distributive of himself and is the origin of all goodness. Goodness can only develop in the spiritual world of a being endowed with personality. It is, in appearance, the smallest of the qualities of divinity.
Kindness is like the flower that we don’t notice at first glance in a garden. It does not have the pride of the narcissus, nor the panache of the rose. Its perfume is delicate, difficult to recognize, it is discreet among that of the other flowers but it coordinates the whole. Its taste has the refinement of the last ingredient that we put in a cooked dish, the last pinch of salt, the subtle aroma of the last minute.
Goodness does not have the attraction of beauty, nor the consistency of truth, but it gives stability to the one in whom it develops. It brings moderation to beauty and truth so that these blossom into charm in the personality.
Goodness is patient, enduring and faithful, never showing off. It acts in the shadows with courage. It treats insignificant things with the same application as it would for others of great importance. Its action makes it acquire strength! Its greatness lies in its humility! It makes the personality strong, great and attractive by its gentleness. It is synonymous with greatness.
Goodness requires a personal mind. Only a mind with personality can be able to discriminate between good and evil. It is undoubtedly at the origin of the first moral choice, the one that allows the young child to access the spiritual life by endowing him with the spirit of the Universal Father.
It is very difficult for a human being to speak of goodness, because he can only do so about what he has experienced. Now, goodness is part of his unfinished experience, his incompleteness. It becomes more concrete in him each day, while slipping through his fingers. But the most useful and beautiful comparison or lesson he can encounter is found in The Urantia Book: “True goodness is like water, in that it blesses everything and harms nothing.”
Jean-Claude Romeuf