© 1995 Jeffrey Wattles
© 1995 International Urantia Association (IUA)
By Jeffrey Wattles,
Stow, Ohio, U.S.A.
Worship is to be a natural and spontaneous reaction to the recognition of the Father’s matchless personality and because of his lovable nature and adorable attributes UB 5:3.3. These three themes are the foci of Papers 1,2 , and 3 . Let us begin to inquire how these Papers conduce to worship.
As a first approximation, Paper I is a crystalline prism, Paper 2 filled with warm colors, and Paper 3 completes the spectrum on the cool side. The cool attributes of God’s everywhereness, infinite power, universal knowledge, limitlessness, the Father’s supreme rule and primacy, however, are discovered to be extensions of the warm love and goodness of God at the center of the portrait of the divine nature. Nor are the qualities of God’s nature offered to the mortal intellect except as an unfolding of the Father personality introduced in Paper I.
How could we find the universe friendly without such a coordinated realization? How else can we put the evils of this world in perspective so that the mind can move beyond sublime thinking and consent to worship? And if we do not transcend creature concerns in worship, how shall the motivation for unselfish service prevail in us?
Each Paper has its own sequence of thoughts, its own movement, as it leads the mind according to the author’s design; and as we study the sequence of teachings, we come alive with the gesture, the dance, of the Paper. Jesus’ word helps us understand the author’s way of beginning in the introductory paragraphs of Paper 1. Do not undertake to show men the beauties of the temple until you have first taken them into the temple. Introduce men to God and as the sons of God before you discourse on the doctrines of the fatherhood of God and the sonship of men (UB 141:6.4). Accordingly, we are introduced: The Universal Father is the God of all creation, the First Source and Center of all things and beings. UB 1:0.1. There follows a lesson on thinking of God as a creator, controller, and infinite upholder. The next paragraph gives a tacit lesson on feeling: we are beings who can know God, receive the divine affection, and love him in return. UB 1:0.2 The next paragraphs give the fundamental lesson on doing (cf UB 48:5.6)-about our transcendent goal and our supreme ambition, our first duty and our destiny. (To compress an account of the movement of the following sections would be like running through an art gallery.)
We who aspire to spiritual brotherhood, even to spiritual unity, are ashamed when our relation to the Father is too faint to outshine the shadows of evil that obscure our relationships with one another. As we slowly grow from being spirit-born and spirit-taught to being spirit-led and finally spirit-filled, worship is our way to strike step with eternity. Brotherhood has its complex social dimensions as well as its spiritual core; the more that core is realized, the greater is the hope that study and dialogue can further illumine social difficulties. Returning as one poor in spirit to where no knowledge or wisdom or art can lead us forward, not resisting even the evil within, the soul’s craving can initiate a call beyond the mind’s ambition, and with the wings of the spirit, we take flight. Are we solitary individuals as we worship the one we call our…? Prayer, unfolding the heart’s needs before the one who transforms and answers them, prepares our worship. But only when concerns for book and brotherhood relax into a flourishing primary relationship with God are the destinies of book and brotherhood secure.