© 2013 Sylvère Marcoux, Line St-Pierre, Marie-Lise Renaud, Alain Cyr, Maurice Migneault, Rick Lyon
© 2013 Urantia Association of Quebec
¶ To love… is to serve!
I AM NOT GOING TO TELL YOU ABOUT THE FIFTH REVELATION. I am mainly trying to live the fourth. When I retired, I made my will, my funeral arrangements (I don’t have to think about these things anymore) and I committed to volunteering.
When asked what my motivation was, I answered: “Our only wealth is what we give without question.” I have known for a long time that here on earth, everything is lent to us. Spouse, children, material goods, health and everything else. I have some goods, but I own nothing. I own nothing and yet, I accumulate treasures!
Don’t imagine that I am a saint; progress is sometimes difficult to live with. I know that the right hand must ignore what the left is doing, but I can’t help but share my joy.
I work in two organizations whose main activity is transportation and support for the medical needs, examinations and treatments of our elders.
It goes without saying that I use the lightest possible tone to reassure them. I use a lot of teasing and light jokes as one does with old friends, which allows them to be more relaxed. For example, I tell them that a horse that was out for a walk lost a shoe and as a result, he made a misstep. The moral of this very short story is that they should not worry; or again, to the old lady who takes my arm, I tell her that I always enjoy having a pretty woman on my arm.
I strive to bring cheerfulness into their lives and at the same time point out to them that our Father loves us, his children. I treat them with courtesy and kindness, for there can be no higher nobility than to be a child of God than to be a child of a king or queen.
To love is to serve, to help, among other things, to share our time, our know-how, and it is by helping and sharing that we discover a very special love, very different from that of “falling in love”. It is with great tenderness and respect that we help an old person button their coat or put on their boots. Our actions are very different from those we mechanically dress children.
On Thursday afternoons, with four other volunteers, we go to different accommodation centres to present a play (as comical as possible) and make music, make these old hearts dance and sing.
We must see the joy, the light in the eyes of our elders when they hear old waltz or rigodon tunes. I feel that our contribution is very minimal compared to the expected results. It is true that the actions are ours and God takes care of the consequences.
Helping and sharing is very rewarding. You can probably guess that I am a happy man. We all have talents and affinities that can benefit others in need. I pray that you, who have the power to help, also have the will to get up and go out of your house and give something of yourself.
Sylvère Marcoux
Thetford Mines
¶ Urantia Book on display
IT CAN BE INTIMIDATING FOR A truth seeker to walk into a bookstore and see a display case of a cardboard box of The Urantia Book and attempt to open the box to learn what is inside.
In September 2012, in a bookstore near my home, I offered to place The Urantia Book as a demonstrator to the owner, selling her the idea that her book would sell more this way, with customers having immediate access and without having to open the box and risk damaging the book’s pages.
Since I placed the book, with a label firmly affixed and identifying it as “demonstration book, not for sale,” the bookstore has sold 7-8 Urantia books and one person has contacted us regarding the study group.
It is to the bookstores’ advantage to accept the book as a demo if they want to continue selling the UB. The interesting argument is, if people are uncomfortable opening the box and inspecting the contents, how can they be interested in buying the book?
The AUQ has a few copies to give away to place in bookstores. If you are interested in this project, contact us at: association.urantia.quebec@gmail.com or by calling 450-565-3323.
Line St-Pierre
¶ THE FORGOTTEN PROMISE
TODAY, MY NEIGHBOR, AN OLD MAN WITH BLUE EYES, greeted me for the first time. This nice gentleman, retired, goes for a walk morning and evening, accompanied by his dog. Rain or shine, his little beast follows him courageously.
So it was on a beautiful late summer evening that we showed up; me, eager to get home, and her little dog, to go and sniff the fragrant scents of a neighborhood made damp by the evening dew.
It’s eleven o’clock now, I’m in my bed. I had a good day’s work, I’m lying down and almost well. I say almost well, because I’m unhappy not to have shared my faith for a few years.
Alone in my big bed, I think back to a not so distant past where friendships were made and broken, where loves were revealed in shyness, where passions were lived in paroxysm. It is eleven o’clock in the afternoon, a tear runs down my cheek. My soul has been sighing for more than ten years. What has become of the beautiful promises of my Lord Jesus “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you”? (Luke, 11,9) My twenty years were spent in the study of the Bible and in a ministry with my Pentecostal brothers and sisters. We were young, there were many of us who loved God. What wonderful moments spent in the presence of all these people passionate about the “Word”.
And then a great wind came, a wind of wear and tear; a wind of habit; a wind that torments couples and makes them fall into basely materialistic temptations.
I am alone in my big bed. I lack nothing. I live in a large apartment with a view of the river. I have absolutely wonderful work colleagues. Doing neither good nor harm, my soul has nevertheless been sighing for several years. It is eleven o’clock, a tear runs down my cheek.
I remember all those nights when, before falling asleep, I repeated in my soul, for Jesus; “It’s not your fault.” How many times I repeated; “It’s not your fault.” How can we hold ourselves responsible for our own choices?
But how many times have I asked you like a soul that sighs for its loves: “Speak to me, but speak to me then!” Why do you turn away from me? And I believed myself to be condemned for some obscure faults, fallen into the disgrace of Him whom I loved so much!
Remember your promises! How can you leave me in this world where greed and lies are omnipresent?
The old man with the blue eyes says hello to me almost every day now. That look of gentleness and serenity charms me, he is always smiling. One day, he introduces me to his wife and invites me to have coffee. We chat, we get along, a new friendship has just blossomed.
Winter is coming, he has to leave the country to escape the cold. The warmth and sun of Mexico cure him of his few ailments invisible to my eyes.
That morning, before leaving, he watches me sip my coffee. He has in his hands a big blue book… The day before, I was still thinking about those wonderful promises that I have read so often in the Bible. How many times I have reread this psalm: “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will advise you and keep watch over you.”
The old man said to me: — I am not taking this book with me, it is too heavy in my luggage. And then, wherever I am going, I have it on the Internet. He looks at me and smiles at me with that quiet smile of a wise person and says to me: Marie-Lise, return to your first loves! Keep looking, you will find something!
My old blue-eyed friend has been gone for two days. I am in my bed, it is eleven o’clock, I open his big blue book. I leaf through, I look, I discover, but… how is this possible? I return to the pages “detailed table of contents.” Tears of joy flow down my cheeks and I think back to those promises of yesteryear, “I will instruct you and show you the way you should go; I will advise you, I will keep watch over you.” (Psalms 32,8)
One evening in February 1979, I committed to reading the Bible and serving as Jesus had commanded. Another evening in February 2001, I opened a second book called “The URANTIA Book” and three blue circles appeared in the middle of the page.
Since that evening, I have been learning, discovering, making new friends and sharing what is most precious to me; “my faith.”
Is it possible that such a gift is granted to me? A spirit of praise and worship arises within me. And that promise from the book of Psalms, “I will instruct you,” that promise, I had forgotten it!
I now live by attaching myself to this new teaching. I am relearning service, because how can one love without wanting to serve?
“All this concept of atonement and sacrificial salvation is rooted and grounded in selfishness. Jesus taught that service to one’s fellows is the highest concept of the brotherhood of spirit believers. Salvation should be taken for granted by those who believe in the fatherhood of God. The believer’s chief concern should not be the selfish desire for personal salvation but rather the unselfish urge to love and, therefore, serve one’s fellows even as Jesus loved and served mortal men.” (UB 188:4.9)
I have been reading The Urantia Book for a short time and already an irresistible desire to do something with my brothers and sisters is in me. There is so much to do! And for the one who lets himself be carried away by this love, there will be no difficulty in finding his ministry in the field that suits him. The difficulty will rather be to find the balance between service and simply living in love!
Marie-Lise Renaud
¶ Good news for “UB” students
RECENTLY I CONTACTED Jay Peregrine, Director of Urantia Foundation, to ask how I could help (following up on a request from them that additional translation assistance would be welcome).
How delighted I was to hear that these people were also looking for multilingual content to meet the demand of many non-English speaking readers who might also enjoy works like those of Bill Sadler Jr., for example, the UB series of study aids The Urantia Book Workbooks.
Well, now we have online and for the benefit of the French-speaking world a version of Worship and Wisdom, one of the eight small books in the series. It is called Adoration et Sagesse and for the needs of the moment, we have translated the title of the compilation under Les Cahiers d’exercices de Le Livre d’Urantia. Well, its presentation will be refined a little eventually and hyperlinks will be introduced… but the content is complete.
At the same time, we have found an electronic version of Study of the Master Universe and Appendices to a Study of the Master Universe by Sadler Jr., translated by Nicole and Chris Ragetly… and which are worth their weight in gold. All these documents are available at the following address: http://www.urantia.org/fr/le-livre-durantia/etudier
Note: If you have a penchant for translation and feel a little zeal for the retransmission of Sadler’s writings, do not hesitate to contact me if the idea of teaming up is inciting; we still have seven manuals to provide. Most recently, I undertook the Terminology manual; a great adventure for me, but… I will need to be proofread.
Friendships,
Alain Cyr
Alaincyr07@bell.net
¶ Leadership and its characteristics
WHEN A GROUP OF PEOPLE has only one specific role to play, a team leader is enough to lead them. The guidelines are already in place, they just need to be implemented, that’s all.
But when this group has a goal to achieve, when it must demonstrate creativity in a process of growth, it is no longer a team leader that it needs, but a leader who knows how to take the members of the group further than the simple execution of a task.
However, it would be risky to claim that there are leaders on one side and non-leaders on the other. We are all leaders in our own way, and to varying degrees. This explains why if we eliminate the leader of a group, another will emerge from within that group. On the other hand, there can only be one at a time; that is the way nature wants it. John the Baptist illustrated this well when he said of Jesus:
He must increase but I must decrease. (UB 135:11.2)
It is common to associate leadership with functions requiring: authority, control, command, mastery, influence, power, strength, etc. But leadership is above all an attitude, not a function. It is its specific applications that are often associated with functions. But the more competent the leader, the more he will be able to highlight all the human and divine aspects of the members of the group. There is always an overlap between its different applications, which is why they do not always seem obvious to us. But here is a brief portrait of it anyway…
1 — A good leader is vigilant in detecting potential problems and conflicts that could break the unity of the group. He knows how to maintain direction and goals.
Time, space, and experience are man’s greatest aids to relative reality perception and yet his most formidable obstacles to complete reality perception. (UB 106:9.3)
2 — The good leader quickly finds a way to use everything at his disposal to solve a problem. He is attentive to each small experience and knows how to learn from it for greater efficiency and always with economy of means.
Jesus was the perfectly unified human personality. And today, as in Galilee, he continues to unify mortal experience and to co-ordinate human endeavors. He unifies life, ennobles character, and simplifies experience. (UB 100:7.18)
3 — The good leader knows how to be a model of loyalty and moral vigor for his group. But in the heart of every adult, the child remains and this loyalty will always keep a deep value even if it is often hidden by material attractions.
Children are permanently impressed only by the loyalties of their adult associates; precept or even example is not lastingly influential. (UB 100:1.4)
4 — A good leader must know how to stimulate curiosity, renewal, the constant search for new interpretations, different ways of seeing things to constantly broaden the horizons of the group.
Variety is restful; monotony is what wears and exhausts. Day after day is alike—just life or the alternative of death. (UB 48:6.37)
5 — The good leader always seeks harmony and compromise. He aims to make the group a united family and in his role as motivator, he knows how to support each member and maintain trust. He consults, favors initiative over constraint, and gives responsibility.
Our kingdom is a realm of order, and where two or more will creatures act in co-operation, there is always provided the authority of leadership. (UB 181:2.16)
6 — The good leader will stimulate the autonomy of the members while preserving the team spirit and this in a work atmosphere that calls upon spiritual resources. He knows how to communicate his vision of things while showing empathy in order to understand and feel the needs of the group. Finally, he knows how to reserve space for rest and entertainment.
Worship—contemplation of the spiritual—must alternate with service, contact with material reality. Work should alternate with play; religion should be balanced by humor. (UB 143:7.3)
7 — A good leader knows how to highlight and coordinate the differences of each person while giving them the recognition they deserve. In the event of conflict, he knows how to demonstrate wisdom in his mediations. He promotes the process of identification of the members with the group, because this strengthens the feeling of unity and belonging and this leads to much more effective cooperation. This is how good leadership manages to instill in the group a dynamism that results in growth and productivity.
Knowledge is possessed only by sharing; it is safeguarded by wisdom and socialized by love. (UB 48:7.28)
Although we have seen here the application of leadership within the group, it can also occasionally be exercised alone, and for many years. Many great thinkers and researchers have been rejected in their time while it is only today that we benefit from their thoughts and discoveries. What happens in these cases is that for them, the notion of a group is different, it can even embrace all of humanity. When the group thus takes on such magnitude, the actions or thoughts that will influence it can stretch very far into time. Let us think here of Jesus; a large part of his teachings will not have an influence until much later after his departure, here on Urantia, and throughout Nebadon.
By the end of this mission it had become evident to all Nebadon as to why their beloved ruler chose to engage in these repeated bestowals in the likeness of some subordinate order of intelligent being. (UB 119:3.5)
It is our sincere belief that the gospel of Jesus’ teaching, founded as it is on the father-child relationship, can hardly enjoy a world-wide acceptance until such a time as the home life of the modern civilized peoples embraces more of love and more of wisdom. (UB 177:2.6)
Maurice Migneault
¶ Announcing the new UAI website
AFTER MANY YEARS OF planning and development, UAI has launched its new website. The central administration is pleased to present its state-of-the-art means of communication, a website that will serve its members for years to come and the community of students of The Urantia Book.
Starting today our previous address www.urantia-uai.org will direct you to the new website. Please take a virtual tour—there are new services and much improved features that will benefit members, friends, and those new to The Urantia Book and the service organization.
The website is structured with five service areas—the UAI, the community, study groups, publications, and The Urantia Book. The main screen of the site is intentionally modest; it covers a very complex architecture designed for the immediate and growth needs of the organization.
We invite you to discover something new as well: a unique social network that allows for extensive virtual interactivity. Here you will find a secure service that allows the worldwide Urantia community to become friends, teach each other, and learn from each other, connected by a like mind and spirit, and by a mutual desire to better understand and follow the teachings of The Urantia Book.
Personal interactions will always be the best way to exchange ideas and pursue our ideals. UAI has been at the forefront of supporting real-time relationships, whether through study groups, service projects, educational meetings, and organizational volunteering. But the virtual setting has captured the world’s attention, revolutionizing the way we meet, get to know each other, and do business.
With this new website, the UAI presents services to the subscriber for certain levels of the social network as a self-financing component, allowing the expansion of the UAI services.
The future of this website includes mobile compatibility, translation into other languages, a subject index of all study aid materials, and the addition of new technologies as they arise.
Yours sincerely,
Rick Lyon
Executive Director
¶ Leather Cases for The Urantia Book
A FEW MONTHS AGO, THE FOUNDATION got rid of some 120 cases for the Little Urantia Books.
The AUQ only had to pay the shipping costs and therefore can sell them to you for $5 plus postage.
Let me know your interest, either by email at line.stpierre@gmail.com or by phone at 450-565-3323.
¶ STUDY GROUPS
THIS ACTIVITY ALLOWS MULTIPLE READERS OF DIFFERENT LEVELS OF UNDERSTANDING to share and study together the teachings of The Urantia Book. It promotes spiritual progress by allowing its participants to find practical applications to the teachings of The Urantia Book in their daily lives. This important practice helps to maintain a broad perspective on concepts of truth.
You wish to participate or form a study group; we will be happy to assist you. If you wish to have your study group appear in this list, contact the person in charge, via email association.urantia.quebec@gmail.com or at 450-565-3323.
Group: Découverte
Every Monday from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Laurentians Region Gaétan Charland and Line St-Pierre
Tel.: 450-565-3323
Group: Étoile du Soir
Every Wednesday from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Laurentides region
Carmen Charland
Tel.: 450-553-3601
Group: Le Pont
Every Thursday from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
South Shore of Montreal
Guy Vachon
Tel.: 450-465-7049
Group: Mauricie Readers
Every Monday from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Three Rivers Region
Madeleine Boisvert and
Tel: 819-376-8850
Roger Perigny
819-379-5768
Group: Veritas
Every Tuesday from 7:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Montreal area, near the Church metro station
Lise and Pierre Routhier
Tel.: 514-761-2378
Sherbrooke Group
Every two weeks, Tuesday or Wednesday (to be confirmed)
From 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Helene Boisvenue or Denis Gravelle
Tel.: 819 569-6416
Group: The Ascendants
Every two weeks on Sunday from 13 h 00 to 3:30 p.m.
South Shore of Quebec
Guy LeBlanc
Tel: 418-835-1809
Group: The Agondontarians
Every two weeks on Sunday from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. North Shore of Quebec
Guy & Rolande L. Martin
Tel: 418-651-3851
Group: Les Débonnaires
Wednesdays from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Montreal region
Julien Audet
Tel: 514-315-9871
Group: Urantia Fraternity
Wednesdays from 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Lanaudière region
Richard Landry & Gisèle Boisjoly
Tel: 450-589-6922
Group: Vers les Sommets
Friday from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Regions Ormstown & Valleyfield
Louise Sauve
Tel: 450-829-3631
Group: The United Urantia Family
Monday from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Montreal region
Mrs. Diane Labrecque
Tel: 514-277-2308
The Partners of the Supreme
Monday from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Quebec region
Richard Lachance
Tel: (418) 614-2520 or (418) 933-0244 (cell)
At Maisonia
Every two weeks on Monday from 7:15 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Quebec region
Gilles Bertrand & Louise Renaud
Tel: 418-871-4564
Group: Uni-Terre
Every Sunday from 9:00 a.m.
Lanaudière region
Eric Martel
Tel: 450-756-9387
Group: Laurantia
Every Sunday from 9:00 a.m.
Petite Nation region in Outaouais
Denise Charron & Jean-Claude Lafreniere
Tel: 819-983-2113
Group: The Precursors of Divine Reality
Every two weeks on Tuesday from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Laurentides region
Mrs. Johanne Séguin
Tel: 819-327-3237
Group: Sans Frontiére
Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 a.m.
Hawkesbury region
Yvon and Irene Belle-Isle
Tel: 613-632-5706
Group: from Outaouais
Sunday from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Ottawa Region
Maurice Migneault
Tel: 613-789-6833
Group: The Alphée Brothers
Sunday
Thetford Mines region
Sylvère Marcoux
Tel: 418-332-3560
Group: The South Shore Lighthouse
Every Monday from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
South Shore region of Montreal
Luciano Camellini and Dominique Marchessault
Disclaimer: Any interpretations, opinions, conclusions or artistic representations, stated or implied, are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of Urantia Association International or local and national level associations.