© 1990 Larry Mullins
© 1990 The Urantia Book Fellowship (formerly Urantia Brotherhood)
| Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Family Peace (Ha, Ha) | Winter/Spring 1991 Issue. Special Conference Issue II (1990 General Conference. Walking with God. Snowmass, Aspen, Colorado) — Index |
by Larry Mullins
They aluays forget to mention that I was mustered into the reserve corps at the age of eighteen. (It was the Marine Reserve Corps, but that was the best I could do.) Recently I was working on an evolution project with Jesusonian. I noticed that the Life Carriers had designated various ages with a descriptive term, such as the Age of Fishes or the Age of Ferns or whatever. Surely if the midwayers name this period of the Urantia movement it will be the Age of Missives.
Not Missiles-Missives!
I dearly hope that the celestial observers have a sense of humor. So many people are going to be first in the kingdom. So many reservists blowing their cover. I saw a T shirt today that said “Activated Reservist.” Another said “Approach at Own Risk-1 Am Nearing Fusion.”
The kids are picking up this attitude, too. One little girl was drawing in the nursery and I asked her what her picture was. She said, “I am drawing a picture of God.” I gently told her that no one really knew what God looked like. She replied, “Now they will.”
I think we should pause to recall that Jesus washed the feet of his apostles to demonstrate leadership. Recently I saw a movie with a great leader in it. She was a very old lady. She stood among the elite of this planet; she was stooped and clothed in a faded blue sari and worn sandals. And she accepted an award from a king in a great hall of crystal and gilded glory.
The most brilliant people on the planet were there, the richest, the most elegant, talented and gifted looked on and politely applauded. And amid all the formal black and gorgeous gowns was the tiny figure of Mother Teresa, an impoverished nun, standing modestly in her sari and sandals.
What did this servant of the poor tell us? Mother Teresa said: “We can do no great things, we can only do ordinary things with great love.”…We can do no great things, we can only do ordinary things with great love.
I think Mother Teresa walks with God. And she shows us how.
Why should we seek to walk with God?
Because we were not designed to run as closed systems-we cannot function well without God’s help. Closed systems are prone to suffer from decay within. We have seen evidence of this principle in recent events.
When I first became a member of the council, I was awed. But just as Harry Truman said he was awed by the Senate and wondered how he ever got there, after awhile he wondered how everyone else got there. I suggested in those naĩve days that the council permit a representative from every society and even large study groups to at least sit in on our meetings. This alarmed everyone. (They’ll find out what we are doing!)
I talked in Washington, D.C. several years ago and remember a big discussion about whether 533 should be called the “Soldiers of the Circles” or the “Servants of the Circles.” Can you believe it? I suggested they ought to be the Servants of the Servants. But nobody got it.
But we have grown a great deal since then. And now we can do things we could never do before. Wasn’t that collection for books for Estonia incredible? Now we can move toward openness and democracy. We can invite people to see us deliberate and function. We can establish the means for more openness and more real participation.
Now let us talk about more important things. Let’s talk about Walking with God.
The Urantia Book says we need more firsthand religion. I have only firsthand religion to offer today. I have no important theories. I told a wise man once that I felt I had made a terrible mess of my life. He replied that lives are like the history of a country. The United States, for example, has a terribly messy history. If it were someone’s life, it would read like an unbearable tragedy. But in spite of all that, we have a great country. A country that hopefully has learned from its mistakes and follies. A country with a real chance to do great service for this planet. What is true of a country is also true of a human life. Our lives are vindicated not by their episodes but rather by what we become because of these episodes.
I believe I have learned a few lessons from my life.
Someone asked me why I called my talk “Walking with Humankind.” I so named my talk because I have yet to learn how to do this. And I think we must learn to walk with each other before we presume to walk with the Creator.
Of course, I am not known for appropriate titles. When I was invited to speak at the symposium on “Discovering Your Inner Potentials” in Tennessee, the title of my talk was: “He Who Seeks to Find His Inner Potentials Shall Lose Them.” I wasn’t kidding. After years of studying self-actualizing theories I am convinced that real growth takes place when you are busy doing something else.
Most of us need to get off of the seat of our identity. Now about twenty years ago I did not believe this. In fact, it was over twenty years ago a man named Clyde Bedell handed me a large blue book. I was destined to work with Clyde and Barry for a couple of years. In the process I became aware of The Uruntia Book."
But I did not believe this book. For ten years I read it and wanted it to go away. I could not quite get the nerve to simply dismiss it. It seemed to me rather sad that someone had gone to all this work and not included concepts like reincarnation. Also, it professed a very immature doctrine: the idea of a Father-God.
I was far beyond that. I was a big shot. I had a good job, drove a Mark IV, had a nice little wife and family and a girl friend. And, I had earned it. I had fought my way up from poverty — at least by American standards.
I had two beautiful girls, one thirteen and the other nine.
Then a nightmare began. This nightmare would become worse and worse and my arrogant philosophy would crumble before it. My thirteen-year-old, Vicki, suddenly got into drugs. The family went to pieces. Vicki, that perfect child, that wonderful artist had to go to the hospital, to the psychiatric ward. She was uncontrollable, sniffing aerosol substances among other things. Her mother virtually disowned Vicki, who was always my favorite, and I left the house.
I was putting my clothes in the car when the nine year old, Kathi, came to me and asked me what I was doing. “Oh, I’m just going on a little vacation,” I said, “I’ll be back” That lie was to torture me for years.
My plan was to take Vicki and begin a life somewhere else when she got well. I imagined that I was still in charge, still strong, still tough. Then one day I left the hospital after visiting Vicki. I waved to her as she stood there with her cowboy hat cocked to the side. And I walked down the hall unaware that I had seen Vicki alive on this planet for the last time.
The next day my wife called and said there was a problem at the hospital. When we arrived the psychiatrist met us at the door of the ward and told us: Vicki Mullins was dead. Vicki and another girl had been given a plastic bag by an attendant and left unsupervised for several hours. They sniffed deodorant. And now Vicki was dead.
I got through the funeral, but I was disintegrating, unraveling inside. The process was entropy-I was a closed system. I picked up my Urantia Book for some reason and I read it from cover to cover in the next few months. When I put the book down I believed it. And I begged God to help me. I wrote a long poem called “Penumbra” and the final lines were:
I realize now there is no master standing on the path.
I see only a terror-filled child
who is too high up the mountain.
Who dares not descend
Who dares not go higher.
And now I hear the silent cry of his abandoned human heart.
"See me God? I am faithful.
Help your barefoot boy.
He is simply alone, that’s all.
And he wants very much to come home.
I wish I could say that I became very spiritual and enlightened, but I did not. I did become involved with the Urantia study group in Tulsa. I did meet Berkeley Elliott and found a kind of second home and acceptance among Oklahoma City Urantians.
But there was no thunderbolt of insight, no great happening. The pain, the resentment, anger and guilt flourished in my heart. Within five years my first wife would be buried next to Vicki, her body riddled with cancer.
And my daughter Kathi would come to live with me and my new wife. Those were very unhappy years for all of us. But Kathi and I began to develop a relationship at last. And, instead of languishing in the guilt I felt for having left her I began to do something about it. I began to actually take some time and help her. Kathi was pronounced learning disabled at thirteen and barely graduated from high school.
But Kathi was a believer in the power of God. When the doctors said her mother would not last another week, Kathi prayed and believed her prayers gave her mother another six months of life.
Those six months permitted Kathi and myself to make amends to her mother and care for her. And Kathi believed God gave her mother a final two weeks of total rationality near the end so she could have her real mother back for just a little while. And Kathi believed that on the last day of her mother’s life, when the nurse could find no vital signs and no pulse, that God gave her mother the strength to come back for a moment and answer Kathi’s phone call and to tell her she loved her. And the instant her mother put the phone down she was dead.
Kathi believed that God could do anything. So Kathi decided to go to college. And she decided to study engineering. Now the dropout rate for engineers is about 95 %.
It took Kathi a while, she quit for a couple of years to go on the road with a fundamentalist religious program as a dancer in a dramatization of the atonement doctrine. Then she went back to school and struggled with the incredibly difficult engineering program. Kathi calmly listened to God and trusted him. She did not give up.
And this May, Michelle and I proudly watched her graduate from Oklahoma University as an engineer. Kathi got special recognition because she had been elected president of the engineering club in her senior year. Kathi has landed a great job in Dallas. She is a beautiful woman, inside and out. Her mother is very proud, I am sure.
Kathi and God accomplished this. But let me give you a hint or two if you want to help your children. First, tell them uplifting stories. Children who hear stories from an adult they trust learn to set goals and overcome obstacles. Do as Jesus did: tell your children stories.
Second, answer their questions carefully, and never give advice unless they ask for if.
But now I want to tell you of another miracle. And I must backtrack to tell you of it.
Kathi’s mother was still alive when our lawsuit against the hospital where Vicki died came to trial. It was an ordeal. And the hospital had two brilliant attorneys who managed to confuse things enough to defeat us. Big stories ran in the Tulsa paper. It was I who was guilty. My alternate oppressive controlling and wanton neglect of my family caused Vicki to turn to drugs and eventually to die. I went to work the next day in utter humiliation. Later one of the hospital attorneys was appointed a federal judge. The trial cost me all of my savings and put me into debt.
I tried to put all that behind me and began my own business.
Eventually I moved to Oklahoma City to be close to more of my Urantia friends and business associates. The next thing I knew I was in a bitter divorce that dragged on and on. The business went sour when the stock market crashed and I very nearly went bankrupt.
Harry McMullan had a nickname for me back then. It was based upon a little cartoon of a mangled dog that said:
“Lost: Little dog, one eye, most of his hair has been burnt off, three legs, and his tail has been cut off. Answers to the name of Lucky.”
But, you know, I really was lucky. I was to find out that God did not need my poems or writing or things I tried to do for the Urantia movement. I was fortunate enough to discover that he wanted me. That was all. Without me nothing I did for him mattered. God wants us first of all and primarily, not our works.
So it was that apparent circumstance was to allure me into a program, an organization that must remain anonymous. It is a program that has twelve steps in it.
One of those steps requires the reciting of all the wrongs we have inflicted and all the resentments we carry against others.
This soul baring must be done to another human being. I wanted a total stranger to talk to, so I arranged through an individual in the program to talk to someone I had never met in Tulsa. Berkeley Elliott and Susan Cook went with me to Tulsa, but I was to learn that there was another presence with me that day. By chance we listened to a tape in which the speaker declared that we could not prove the existence of God, but we could set up the circumstances by which God could prove his existence to us.
We drove past St. Francis, the huge hospital in Tulsa where Vicki had died, and the anger rose in me as I thought “That’s where they killed my little girl.”
When I was finally alone with the man who was to listen to my confession, it was early afternoon. He was a retired doctor with a very nice house. I told him I had a fourteen-year-old resentment that I had that even God could not remove.
I told him the story of Vicki and the terrible aftermath. His face grew pale. I thought his concern was because he had no ready cliche or soothing words that could heal my heart. But when I finished the story he looked at me for minutes with deep sad eyes and I will never, never forget his words: “You know, there is no place on earth you should be today but here, and no one you should be talking to but me.” I asked why.
He said: “I am the doctor who led the team that tried to save Vicki’s life that night. I’Il never forget her. I thought we had succeeded in saving her, but then her heart went into fibrillations and she slipped away. For months I searched my soul and asked myself if anything could have been done. I can assure you that we did everything, we did our very best. I am glad to tell you this at last face to face.”
We held hands for a long time after that. I don’t remember what we said.
But I do remember driving back to Oklahoma City with Susan and Berkeley and when we passed St. Francis hospital I thought: “That is where they tried to save my daughter’s life.” These two dear friends listened to my story with awe. And God put his hand upon my shoulder and said to me in the silence of my heart, “Arise now my son and walk with me.”
That command I hope someday to be able to fulfill.
I wish I could say that my life became a wonderful spiritual flow after that, but it did not. I was only at a starting point. I had to grieve Vicki’s death. I had to griove the death of my first wife. And then I had to sacrifice the soap opera I had been living all my life. But I was at a starting point at last.
In most lives this crisis occurs, this starting point. Usually it is later in life. I recently read a book called Flow in which the author likened this realization to having a dinner in a nice restaurant when the waiters begin to suddenly clear the tables and put the chairs atop them. One day we look in the mirror and realize the party is winding down. And we think, “Wait a minute. I’m not finished. Where is all the money I was supposed to make? Whereare all the great things I was supposed to do?”
The first thing I learned was that we cannot do great things, but we can do ordinary things with great love. And the next thing I learned destroyed my soap opera: we creafe our oun experience. We create our own experience.
This ability is the key to the never ending process of spiritual transformation. It is this ability that gives the believer dominion over the kingdom of the mind. We create our own experience.
Thus it was that Lou Gehrig, barely able to stand on his wasted legs, his life and career curtailed by multiple sclerosis, could tell a crowd at Yankee Stadium: “There are those who say I got a bad break. But I can tell you today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
And thus Saul of Tarsus would fall to his knees on the road to Damascus and sway in the dust with blinded eyes, and then rise again to walk with God as Paul.
And, yes, Wilma Rudolph, born with afflicted legs and confined to braces, would discard those braces and learn to walk. And then to play basketball. And then to run. And then to make the olympic team and to win a bronze medal. But she would return again and win three gold medals because Wilma Rudolph created experiences that empowered her.
Adversity? How about Viktor Frankl, who made two momentous decisions standing in the freezing rain at Dachau at three in the morning. Frankl was in a Nazi death camp, and his odds of surviving were very small. His family was gone- dead. And his belongings and his business and his home were all gone.
Frankl realized that he had a single dignity left-one that no being in the universe could abridge. He had the right to choose his own attitude toward the situation he was in. And with this decision came a vision of himself in a comfortable auditorium telling his experiences at Dachau. This vision sustained him.
Frankl knew he would have to survive to make his dream come true. He thought of others who had given up and died. In each case they began to say the same thing: “Life has nothing to offer me anymore. There is no meaning to it.” Frankl’s second decision was based upon another insight. He decided that the question: “What is the meaning of Life?” is not a question we should ask. It is a question that life asks of us. We must answer it. He decided that his death camp experience would have profound meaning.
Viktor Frankl began to create a positive experience for himself. He began to walk with God. Where some saw only brutality and terror, Frankl saw nobility and selflessness. He saw people with one crust of bread share it with others. He chose to love his captors.
So our ultimate human dignity is our right to create our own experience. And the ultimate question is asked by life of us. Life asks us, “What is the meaning of life?” And we live our answer day by day.
C.S. Lewis said that if you seek peace, you will find neither truth nor peace, but if you seek truth you will find truth and peace.
We learn to walk with God by learning to walk with humankind. This I am trying to begin to learn to do. At last. I watch the few Urantians like Susan Cook who work with ordinary people-people no one else wants. These Urantians work without recognition. And their victories are ordinary. Simple victories like learning to love one more person each day, Not great things, but ordinary things done with great love.
We here are at a starting point. We have an opportunity to serve humankind. We have an opportunity to do some ordinary things with great love.
Yes, I know these are wondrous days here at Snowmass, days we shall not forget. Let’s go back and tell people what happened here.
In the musical play Camelot there is a scene that was a favorite of John F. Kennedy’s. The last time I mentioned it was at the World Peace conference Oklahoma City presented at Lake Murray a few years ago. In this play King Arthur sees the destruction of his beloved Camelot. He is forced to go to war with those he loves. Just before the battle a young boy appears and tells Arthur he wants to be a knight, he wants to fight. “And what do you know of Knighthood?” “Oh, everything. I know the stories people tell.” “From the stories people tell, you want to be a knight?”
Arthur commands the boy: "You will not fight in the battle. You will hide behind the lines and when it is over you will return home to England alive- to grow up and grow old. And you will do as I the King command you:
"Each evening from December to December,
Before you drift to sleep upon your cot,
Think back on all the tales that you remember, of Camelot.
"Ask every person if he’s heard the story,
And tell it strong and clear if he has not,
That once there was a fleeting wisp of glory, called Camelot.
"Now say it out with love and joy:
"Camelot! Camelot!’
Yes, Camelot, my boy.
Where the rain it never fell till after sundown.
By eight AM the morning fog had flown.
Don’t let it be forgot,
That once there was a spot,
For one brief shining moment,
That was known as Camelot!"
Let us remember these bright and shining days. They foretaste light and life. They are a prelude to what ought to be, what will be one day.
I have long believed that the reason we have two brains is that one brain is to see things the way they are, to see the facts, so to speak. The other brain sees things the way they ought to be. And between these two perceptions we are empowered to bring into being God’s glorious patterns — his will.
So perhaps Don Quixote was not so mad after all.
He roamed the parched lands of Spain seeing only good. He was obviously mad and a doctor and a priest were sent to bring him back home to his embarrassed family. In the ensuing discussion the doctor admonishes Quixote: “You must come to terms with life as it is.” Quixote’s reply is unforgettable:
I have lived nearly fifty years, and I have seen life as it is. Misery, pain, hunger-cruelty beyond belief. I have heard the singing from taverns and the moans from bundles of filth in the streets. I have been a soldier and seen my comrades fall in battle or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I have held them in my arms at the final moment. These were men who saw life as it is, and yet they died despairing. No brave last words, no gallant sayings. Only in their eyes a confusion, and whimpering the question: “WHY?” I do not think they asked why they were dying, but why they had lived.
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Too much sanity may be madness. To surrender dreams, this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. But maddest of all-to see life as it is, and not as it ought to bel"
It is not an issue of a Book, but an issue of a task that has not yet been completed. It was begun billions of years ago, and it was carried forth on the hot and dusty roads of Istael. It was a task that was pushed forward on a terrible hill called Golgotha. And now this task is in our hands.
It is not an issue of who owns the Circles. It is not an issue of who will feed the flock, but rather who will serve the flock. Perhaps Jesus would tell this generation today: “Serve my flock.”
One final bit of advice, not from Goethe or Dante, but from a contemporary book called All I Ever Needed to Know I Lamed in Kindergarten:
When you go out in the world watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
Be aware of wonder.
Now we must leave Snowmass. Let’s hold hands and stick together.
At the end of Camelot, King Arthur knights the little boy and a general approached him. “What are you doing Arthur? You have a battle to fight!” Arthur replies, “Thave won my battle! And here is my victory! What we did will be remembered.” And off scampers the little boy.
The general asked Arthur: “Who was that?” And
Arthur says: “One of what we all are. Less than a drop in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea. But it seems that some of the drops sparkle! Some of them do sparkle!”
Let us go now and sparkle the best we can. Let us go out and create our own experience. Let us answer the question with elegance and grace: What is the meaning of life?
Above all, let us learn to serve, to do ordinary things with great love. Dear God, please teach us to do ordinary things with great love.
God bless all of you. I love all of you.
Via con Dios-walk with God.
| Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Family Peace (Ha, Ha) | Winter/Spring 1991 Issue. Special Conference Issue II (1990 General Conference. Walking with God. Snowmass, Aspen, Colorado) — Index |