© 2009 Olga López
© 2009 Urantia Association of Spain
| Luz y Vida — No. 17 — Presentation | Luz y Vida — No. 17 — May 2009 — Index | Highlights of the International Conference |
For the Urantia Association of Spain, organizer of this event, it has been a long road until the celebration of the international conference. A path of hard work and learning that began as an idea in 2005, became a project in 2007 and is now a beautiful memory.
The readers of the book know that coincidences do not exist and, to demonstrate it, I would like to briefly tell you about the events that made us embark on the organization of this international conference.
The idea of organizing an international conference in Spain was on our minds in 2005. At that time, the conference in Sydney (Australia) was scheduled for 2006, and two years later, in 2008, in Mexico. We thought that maybe the next one could be in Spain. Right after the Sydney conference, in the summer of 2006, we learned that the Mexico conference was not going to take place. That news was like a warning. We ask ourselves, why don’t we offer to organize the next conference?
But “someone” still had to give us a little push. In August 2006, taking advantage of one of the board meetings, we considered offering to organize the conference, but we had no idea what would be a good place to host a conference of book readers. Spain is a very touristy country that receives several million visits a year, so there is accommodation of all kinds and that would not be a problem. But we wanted a place where the readers of the book would feel comfortable, and it seemed that big cities like Madrid and Barcelona were not going to offer that environment. We went around the matter several times and agreed to investigate a bit, but we did not reach any concrete decision.
In September, taking advantage of the fact that I was spending the summer holidays nearby, I went with my family to Malaga to visit a few reading friends. There, while we were enjoying the company of friends and a good typical Malaga meal, I told them about the idea of organizing an international conference in Spain. Just that day I met a reader who worked in a hotel as a front desk manager. As is customary among readers who meet for the first time, one of those present asked that reader how she had found the book.
Then she explained that one day a young taxi driver showed up at the reception of the hotel where she worked and asked her to show him the meeting room. She did so and asked him why he wanted to see the room, when it was a place that had nothing in particular. He replied that the name of the room had caught his attention, as it turned out that it was referring to a book that he considered very important in his life. The hall was called “Urantia Hall.”
She was curious, looked for the book and began to read it. He was so impressed that he told the hotel manager about him, with whom he was friendly. He then told her that he also read The Urantia Book and that as a tribute he had named the meeting room Urantia.
Just hearing that part of the story, a light bulb went off in my head. Without thinking twice, I asked that reader how many people the hotel could accommodate, and how far it was from the airport. After I answered those two questions, we all fell silent… right then I realized that even though we hadn’t offered to host the conference yet, we had found the hotel we were looking for.
Just the following year, in 2007, the UAI Council of Representatives decided to hold the international conferences every three years instead of every two, which meant that the next conference would be in 2009.
For our part, we planned to celebrate the national conference of Spanish readers in a convent in Toledo in May 2007. At the beginning of February of that year, when we had already sent the letters and published the announcements on the Internet to notify readers Spaniards, we received a call from the convent informing us that, with great regret, they had to cancel our reservation by express order of the Archbishop of Toledo. The archbishop’s reasons were that we were a sect and that he could not allow us to use the premises of the Catholic Church.
Our situation was desperate; we urgently had to find a place to hold the national conference. So we thought: since we know of a hotel in Malaga where the manager is a book reader, we can ask him for help and host the national conference there, and thus check if the hotel could be a good place to hold the international conference. .
And so we did. We held our national conference in the Urantia room and at the end we talked to the hotel manager about the possibility of holding the international conference in 2009. He told us that there was no problem and to decide the date. Taking into account that we are in the south of Spain, that in summer the temperature can be very high and the prices of accommodation are much more expensive, we thought that spring could be a good season to hold the conference. So we chose the week following Easter as a possible date for the celebration.
Shortly thereafter, the international association opened the window for Urantia associations to offer to host the next international conference. We introduce ourselves and the Canadian association. In the summer of 2007, during the days that the conference of the Urantia Association of the United States was being held, it was finally decided that we would be the ones in charge of organizing it. When I received the official notification, I couldn’t help but feel a very intense emotion. Finally it seemed that events had led us to be in charge of this task, and from then on it was time to get down to work and organize everything necessary.
It has been almost two years in which the international conference has taken a lot of work. There have been many details that we have had to take into account, many steps that have had to be taken, many problems that we have had to solve. But we welcome all these efforts, as we consider that this conference has served its purpose, which is none other than to bring together readers from all over the world to live a unique experience of brotherhood and to share our passion for the teachings of El Urantia Book.
Finally, and to reaffirm that coincidences do not exist, I would like to share with you an email that arrived at the association’s email address two weeks before the conference was held. It seems that somehow a cycle is closed, that The Urantia Book was indebted to Malaga.
My name is Denver Pearson. I currently live in North Carolina (USA). When I heard that a Urantia conference would be held in Malaga, Spain, I was very excited. Not because I was going to attend, which I would have liked very much, but because my first Urantia Book was the first book that was in Malaga many years ago. This is my story.
I became a student of The Urantia Book in 1970 and my first book was a second edition. I am a flamenco guitarist and at the end of 1981 I went to Seville to study guitar, teach English and meet other students of The Urantia Book. That’s where I met Antonio Moya and studied UB for almost a year.
On Monday, September 13, 1982, I boarded a DC10 plane in Malaga that was going to take me back to America. I did not leave Spain that day. The plane crashed during takeoff. He was sitting in the tail section, where 59 people lost their lives. I too was about to lose my life. I inhaled so much smoke that I almost died that day. I was in the hospital for a week in Malaga and another week in New York. My precious Urantia Book was destroyed in the accident. The first book in Malaga was my book and now the memory of that book awaits your conference.
To all who attend this conference, I send greetings and brotherly love.
In my welcome presentation, I gave a somewhat more condensed presentation of how and why the Vistamar hotel was chosen as the venue for the conference. Many of the attendees expressed their astonishment at how events unfolded. Some even told me that they knew Denver Pearson personally, but that he had not told them anything about that accident. Others who knew him while he was in Seville were happy that he came out of the accident alive and that he was well. But for me the most incredible thing was that, “by chance”, a reader from Málaga who we had lost track of had appeared at the conference site for a few years, after having attended a couple of meetings of Spanish readers. As we knew that he was a taxi driver by profession, we asked him if it had been him who had asked about the Urantia room and he acknowledged that it had been him, although he did not remember many details of how it all happened.
How true it is that the ways of the Lord are past finding out! The name of a salon triggered a series of events that have finally led to the holding of an international conference. In homage to that book that was destroyed in the plane crash, all eyes of the Urantia movement have been fixed on Malaga for four days in April.
Olga Lopez
¶ References
- Light and Life Magazine (all old issues): https://aue.urantia-association.org/numeros-antiguos-del-lyv/
| Luz y Vida — No. 17 — Presentation | Luz y Vida — No. 17 — May 2009 — Index | Highlights of the International Conference |