© 1986 Madeline Noordzy
© 1986 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
There probably is an English proverb that means the equivalent of: ‘An ounce of experience is better than a pound of theory’, or shall we stay metric and say a gram is better than a kilo?
The whole idea for this article came to me the day a very well-meaning friend rang me and suggested that I might like to listen to a radio program about : ‘How to answer children’s questions’.
But it was when she added: ‘They probably mean questions about the facts of life’, that I became rather surprised and a little annoyed. For here was a person who never had any children, suggesting that I, a mother of three sons, the eldest one 25 , was in need of listening to such a program, or that’s the way I took it. I finished up thinking what an invaluable thing experience is.
And I thought about Mr. and Mrs. Yarby, who came to visit Peter’s family, in Judy Blume’s book: ‘Tales of a fourth grade Nothing’.
Peter’s 2½ year old brother ‘Fudge’, who, or so his Mother was wishful thinking, should have been safely asleep in his cot, comes in when they are up to the roast beef of their dinner, and offers Dribble to Mrs. Yarby. Dribble is Peter’s pet turtle.
But Mrs. Yarby can’t stand reptiles and shrieks: ‘Get that thing away from me’. Peter, who is furious with Fudge and doesn’t like Mrs. Yarby calling his beloved turtle a ‘thing’, carries Fudge tenderly back to his bedroom. Then he returns back to the dinnertable, he hears Mrs.Yarby say: ‘It must be interesting to have children. We never had any ourselves.’ ‘But if we did’, Mr.Yarby tells Peter’s father, ‘we’d teach them some manners. I’m a firm believer in old-fashioned good manners:’
Before I had children, I also might have held several theories about how to bring them up. A bit like mixing a chocolate cake with the instructions in the recipe book next to you. But after 25 years, there are very few theories left. Just plain, old-fashioned good experience. How could my friend even start to imagine what is locked up in a mother’s heart? All the anxious moments when you silently prayed that their guardian angels hadn’t dozed off on the job, while you were watching them climb a tree to pick the highest leaf, which would be presented to you with an air of great triumph.
Or the ride in the ambulance on the way to hospital after one of them had been hit by a car.
Or the time you sat in the police station when they had got themselves into a spot of trouble and you wished that the ground would open up and swallow you, because you felt a failure as a parent.
And I also thought of the ‘would-be’ hobbyist, who keeps on going to courses, buys magazines regularly and has spent a fortune on tools, but he doesn’t produce anything. He just reads and listens and admires or criticizes other people’s work. And that way he can avoid having to face the real problems of the unavoidable mishaps, which are a natural part of the learning process.
It is the same in religion. “Evolutionary man does not naturally relish hard work. To keep pace in his life experience with the impelling demands and the compelling urges of a growing religious experience means incessant activity in spiritual growth, intellectual expansion, factual enlargement, and social service. There is no real religion apart from a highly active personality. Therefore do the more indolent of men often keep to escape the rigors of truly religious activities by a species of ingerious self-deception through resorting to a retreat to the false shelter of stereotyped religious doctrines and dogmas. But true religion is alive. Intellectual crystallization of religious concepts is the equivalent of spiritual death. You cannot conceive of religion without ideas, but when religion once becomes reduced only to lan idea, it is no longer religion; it has become merely a species of human philosophy.” (UB 102:2.7) “True religion must act”. (UB 102:2.8)
Although experience is indeed invaluable in our lives, no amount of experience can give us universe insight unless we have some way of evaluating it in order to recognize the meaning and feel the value of it. “There is a spirit nucleus in the mind of man — the Adjuster of the divine presence”. (UB 196:3.6) “… this evaluator is the child of the Center and Source of all absolute values of divine and eternal reality” (UB 196:3.16). It just depends on us how much we want to go along with this “spirit-value sorter”. He leaves the choosing to us. And as we come to accept more and more this divine leading, we have the greatest experience in human existence: God. When we find God, we have found everything. The only limitation to this experience of receiving the love of the Father is the extent of our love for our fellow men.
“Man can never take the love of the Father and imprison it within his heart. The Father’s love can become real to mortal man only by passing through that man’s personality as he in turn bestows this love upon his fellows”. (UB 117:6.10)
“And when a human being does find God, there is experienced within the soul of that being such an indescribable restlessness of triumph in discovery that he is impelled to seek loving service-contact with his less illuminated fellows, not to disclose that he has found God, but rather to allow the overflow of the welling-up of eternal goodness within his ow soul to refresh and ennoble his fellows. Real religion leads to increased social service”. (UB 102:3.4)
Unless the water whel gives freely of the water it has received so abundantly, it cannot keep on turning to receive more.
Likewise we have to give in order to receive. But unlike the water wheel our capacity for receiving the love of God grows the more we love our fellow human beings.
What happens to these experiences, once we have recognized their meaning and felt the quality of them? Are they here today and gone tomorrow?
Once this transaction between the human and the divine mind takes place, something new is born. Something that has sometimes been denominated the mid mind, since it is neither material nor cosmic mind.
“This mid-mind is really a morontia phenomenon since it exists in the realm between the material and the spiritual. The potential of such a morontia evolution is inherent in the two universal urges of mind: the impulse of the finite mind of the creature to know God and attain the divinity of the Creator, and the impulse of the infinite mind of the Creator to know man and attain the experience of the creature”. (UB 111:2.8) This new child of the interaction between the divine and the human mind is the evolving and potentially immortal soul of man. “In so far as man’s evolving morontia soul becomes permeated by truth, beauty, and goodness as the value-realization of God-consciousness, such a resultant being becomes indestructable. If there is no survival of eternal values in the evolving soul of man, then mortal existence is without meaning, and life itself is a tragic illusion. But it is forever true: What you begin in time you will assuredly finish in eternity — if it is worth finishing”. (UB 111:3.7)
Madeline Noordzy, Melbourne