© 2022 María José Sánchez Santamaría
© 2022 Urantia Association of Spain
| Luz y Vida — December 2022 — Newsletter | Luz y Vida — December 2022 — Index | Urantia Questionnaire: Christian Figueroa |
¶ Wisdom bows down to fragility
“This is the story of a young man who could hardly ever sleep, since a ghost appeared to him in his dreams and distressed him, revealing all the most intimate secrets that he harbored. This showed him that she knew everything about him.”
“The young man was desperate, to the point that he came to hate going to bed, despite the accumulated fatigue. She had visited doctors and psychologists, she had confessed her problem to friends, she had tried everything, but without results: the ghost kept appearing every night and reminded her of all the most intimate and painful corners.”
“Already on the verge of a nervous breakdown, he decided to ask for help from a famous Zen master. After explaining the dilemma, the young man added: 'That ghost knows everything, absolutely everything about me, it even knows my thoughts! I cannot elude myself from their domain.”
“The teacher thought that the solution was not beyond the boy’s reach and suggested that he make a deal with the ghost. ‘Tonight, before going to bed, take a handful of lentils at random and do not let go. Then lie down and wait. When the ghost shows up, make a deal. Tell him that if he guesses how many lentils you have in your hand, he will be your owner forever and that if he doesn’t guess, he will have to disappear forever. Let’s see what happens’.”
“The boy proceeded as the teacher advised him. Shortly after she went to bed the ghost appeared and said: 'I know you’re trying to get rid of me. I also know that you have gone to see that fool of a Zen monk to help you throw me out, but your efforts will not help you at all.”
“‘Well,’ replied the young man, ‘I knew you would have found me out, just as I suppose you undoubtedly know how many lentils I have in my fist.’ There was silence.”
“The ghost disappeared, never to return. What the boy did not know, his ghost could not know.”
I love this short story because the ghost metaphor helps us a lot to understand the power of our mind, our thoughts and, above all, our fears. How we can drown in a sea of recurring, repetitive and exhausting emotions and thoughts. Thoughts and emotions that, due to their very close nature to the animal, will not have a spiritual development beyond this material world. How fragile we are!
We can all recognize ourselves in situations in which the mind gives us a hard time and we are not proud of the result. Who has not suffered from insomnia before an important exam? Haven’t we had arguments and fights with our parents or siblings, with the usual discomfort that this causes in coexistence? And what about a father or mother who feels overwhelmed or embarrassed by a tantrum from their son or daughter? Stressful situations, in short, that are common in material and temporary life here on Earth.
Faced with this reality, a being arrived on our planet more than two thousand years ago, presenting us with a surprising discourse and lifestyle, which breaks centuries-old, millennial paradigms of thought. It frees us from this recurrence of suffering, it saves us from ourselves, betting on Love:
Though it is hardly proper to speak of Jesus as a sacrificer, a ransomer, or a redeemer, it is wholly correct to refer to him as a savior. He forever made the way of salvation (survival) more clear and certain; he did better and more surely show the way of salvation for all the mortals of all the worlds of the universe of Nebadon. (UB 188:4.7)
The Urantia Book further specifies:
This whole concept of atonement and salvation through sacrifice is rooted in and based on selfishness. Jesus taught that service to our neighbor is the highest concept of the fellowship of believers in spirit. Those who believe in the fatherhood of God should take salvation for granted. The believer’s primary concern should not be the selfish pursuit of his own personal salvation, but rather the selfless drive to love and serve his fellow men as Jesus loved and served mortal men. UB 188:4.9
. . .Human salvation is real; it is based on two realities which may be grasped by the creature’s faith and thereby become incorporated into individual human experience: the fact of the fatherhood of God and its correlated truth, the brotherhood of man. UB 188:4.13
It is surprising that Someone informs us that we are here, on Earth, out of Love, out of the pure goodness of a Father who has thought of us and brought us into existence. It is wonderful that they explain to us what we already intuited: all human beings have the same origin, we have ties that unite and unite us, so we could feel accompanied, welcomed and united with all the inhabitants of Urantia, our like-minded people. No one is really a stranger but a fellow traveler, even if some companions are reprehensible and distant. In them, precisely, is the challenge of also glimpsing the divine hand of their origin, of overcoming the animosity, hatred, resentment or envy that they arouse in us. Can we reach a spiritual height like the one Jesus of Nazareth, our Creator and Brother, showed us in his life?
The cross forever shows that the attitude of Jesus toward sinners was neither condemnation nor condonation, but rather eternal and loving salvation. Jesus is truly a savior in the sense that his life and death do win men over to goodness and righteous survival. Jesus loves men so much that his love awakens the response of love in the human heart. Love is truly contagious and eternally creative. Jesus’ death on the cross exemplifies a love which is sufficiently strong and divine to forgive sin and swallow up all evil-doing. (UB 188:5.2)
The triumph of the death on the cross is all summed up in the spirit of Jesus’ attitude toward those who assailed him. He made the cross an eternal symbol of the triumph of love over hate and the victory of truth over evil when he prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” That devotion of love was contagious throughout a vast universe; the disciples caught it from their Master. The very first teacher of his gospel who was called upon to lay down his life in this service, said, as they stoned him to death, “Lay not this sin to their charge.”
The cross makes a supreme appeal to the best in man because it discloses one who was willing to lay down his life in the service of his fellow men. Greater love no man can have than this: that he would be willing to lay down his life for his friends—and Jesus had such a love that he was willing to lay down his life for his enemies, a love greater than any which had hitherto been known on earth. (UB 188:5.6-7)
That little reflection about our Creator Father and, of course, Saviour, and his way of behaving so dazzling and surprising comes up for the celebration of the upcoming Christmas holidays. A social excuse that can help us to refresh the readers of The Urantia Book the fact that a wonderful being is born to us, a being that will enjoy joys and sufferings like us, that will be fragile but also extraordinarily powerful and, above all, everything, a being imbued with Love in his behavior.
Now, this Christmas, a window of reflection opens up for us. A moment of closure and recapitulation. Let’s not miss the raw gold of an intense experience of 365 days already gone by. Let 2022 not leave without us reviewing and recapitulating it in detail. Limit situations are approaching to measure us. The year that is already expiring has graduated us like few others. It has questioned our physical health, but above all our mental, emotional and spiritual health.
The Urantia Book can help us to do so. Let’s see an anecdote of his birth on Earth:
These priests from Mesopotamia had been told sometime before by a strange religious teacher of their country that he had had a dream in which he was informed that “the light of life” was about to appear on earth as a babe and among the Jews. And thither went these three teachers looking for this “light of life.” After many weeks of futile search in Jerusalem, they were about to return to Ur when Zacharias met them and disclosed his belief that Jesus was the object of their quest and sent them on to Bethlehem, where they found the babe and left their gifts with Mary, his earth mother. (UB 122:8.6)
What can we extract from this well-known story? These priests, these “wizards”, represent the spiritual search of all peoples. They are pagans, not Jews, who show the incessant search for the Truth that many of us want to find.
Can we imagine a little how that situation happened? As soon as they are before the Child, the “wizards” from the East recognize him and exclaim: Wonder of wonders! And they fall to their knees, surrendered to the evidence. For them, there is no doubt that they have finally found what they were looking for so eagerly. But what was that wonder? Why are they on their knees?
In that encounter we see how Wisdom prostrates itself before Fragility and recognizes that only there is the “light of life”. These priests are not mere intellectuals seeking to understand; they are wise, that is, people who know how to see and receive. They are receptive, permeable; that is why we can qualify them as wise. They are open to life.
We clothe the lighting with such solemnity and grandiloquence that it is hardly believable that it would happen before the sight of something as small and everyday as a newborn child. A child seems small, right? Well, enlightenment can happen thanks to even smaller realities: a drop that falls from the faucet, for example, the blink of an eye, a phone call…
These three priests were men of knowledge, so they understood everything right away. Because enlightenment is not given by power, but by knowledge, co-birth: being born with what we have before us, always being born to ourselves before any reality. So a life devoted entirely to study and research culminated for them at that moment. All the unfathomable mystery about which they had read and talked so much was now condensed, in a small house in Bethlehem, before a baby. Everything was and is in the love of a man and a woman. That was the true temple: a woman, a man and their child, the mystery of the family.
Life is always there, although we rarely recognize it. Life was throbbing: José excited with his firstborn; Maria surprised and full of love for her son; the Child, like all babies, moving non-stop, discovering the miracle of being alive in a body.
Does this beautiful picture of a family, which we recognize every Christmas, move us like those three priests who walked from Ur and did not give up until they found their search object? Do we let life escape without learning the incalculable value of the fragility in which we live? For the hope of the “light of life” comes to us, it approaches us in our daily lives and wants to dazzle us to leave us prostrate before Life.
It is the wish of the Urantia Association of Spain that in 2023 we can play a higher note in the melody of life, strum a more sublime “C”. Hopefully the new year will bring us closer to the “light of life”, to discover incalculable treasures in our day to day, in our frailties. The less we go for it…
Happy and profitable reading of our newsletter.
Merry christmas.
Happy New Year 2023.
¶ References
- Article of the Magazine Light and Life Online: https://aue.urantia-association.org/2022/11/29/editorial-diciembre-2022/
| Luz y Vida — December 2022 — Newsletter | Luz y Vida — December 2022 — Index | Urantia Questionnaire: Christian Figueroa |