© 2000 Rosey Lieske
© 2000 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
“But the great difficulty of finding a new and satisfying symbolism is because modern men, as a group, adhere to the scientific attitude, eschew superstition, and abhor ignorance, while as individuals they all crave mystery and venerate the unknown.” (UB 87:7.9)
Every person must decide for themselves what the central message of the revelation really is. Some point to The Urantia Book as the potential bridge between science and religion, and others to the awesome map that provides us with our first real glimpse of the length and breadth of creation. For me, the central message is much simpler than any of these. It’s the message of the aborted gospel of the Master — of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man — and of their realization through worship and service.
At first, being the refugee of a confusing religious upbringing, that message was too couched in religious terms. I preferred to embrace God as an intellectual. In fact, after a long and fruitless search, the Urantia material had finally presented me with concepts that were worthy of God-and God as an idea was welcome enough for a long time.
I came across the Urantia Papers as a young girl. I was twenty-three. Now, twenty-five years into my experience as a Urantian, more than half my life has been spent pursuing and serving both God and revelation. After all this time, I find myself in a kind of crisis, as my purely religious experience is seeming to veer from the trajectory of the movement as a whole.
Like a lot of people, I’m finding it harder and harder to relate to the current trappings of the Urantia movement. Time spent in the presence of the Father, stripped down to my essential self in his loving and infinite presence, has made me less interested in conjecturing about the Father-and more interested in pursuing a relationship. He’s also brought the Master into my life and made him real. The true gospel is full of new dimensions and promise now. I no longer hear the “religious” voice as a negative one. In fact, it is the only real directive — from any corner of the spectrum of the movement-that I’m either interested in or capable of hearing.
Yet I feel myself surrounded by an atmosphere that seems unrelated, if not subtly hostile, to these more universal religious tendencies. Why? If the religious life is a struggle between faith and fear — then what fears have conspired to create a movement so subversively at odds to the natural outworking of religion-of simple worship and service — among us? Why all the jaded Urantians who appear to occupy center stage and scoff at “the peace and love stuff?” Why the free use of the word “politics” in all our collective pondering? Why the current doldrums as the voices of dissent and criticism grow louder and more shrill? Where, exactly, is our collective faith? Why is our sense of spiritual community so elusive?
These are questions I’ve sincerely been posing, not only to myself but to others. What has emerged is a kind of grocery list of fears. Though the human powers that be have carefully kept “religion” at arm’s length, allowing the movement proper to remain secularly and socially self-defined, these are fears that definitely pertain to ourselves as religionists.
We’ve honestly thought that by adhering to more objective, organizational formats we could avoid these pitfalls. We’ve thought that if we kept the focus of the movement on the fact of the book and its importance to the world, we’d avoid religious extremes and failure.
The problem with all this is that it forces our truer religious drives underground. It subverts all the drives pertaining to our genuine spiritual hunger to experience God at our center — to put him first and to collectively, as well as individually, come to him. Even to know ourselves as a community that can follow Michael to God and service on more universal levels.
Our determination to leave religion out of it, so to speak, and put the book itself in the middle has created a very strange situation. Because our religious fears cannot be examined in the light of collective faith, we’ve become stalled and stilted, prone to some of the very religious bugaboos we fear. “Bad religion” has come our way, regardless. It turns out that we don’t even need to create a church to experience it, because bad religion has everything to do with unreligious activities being done within a spiritual community. “To become fetishes, words had to be considered inspired, and the invocation of supposed divinely inspired writings led directly to the establishment of the authority of the church, while the evolution of civil forms led to the fruition of the authority of the state.” (UB 88:2.10)
The revelators themselves tried to save us from the misstep of giving birth to a Urantian religion of authority by emphasizing that the book is not a divinely inspired work. Yet our own deeply embedded fear of default has led many of us to imbue the Foundation’s “mandates” with the quality of divinity. The book tells us, in the quote above, that this kind of religious psychology is fetishism. But since we’ve thought ourselves immune to such things by virtue of investing in organizations rather than churches, we’ve unintentionally fallen victim and enabled a small group of individuals to invoke these “divine mandates,” subsequently forming a very effective little orthodoxy, an orthodoxy which lost no time in attaching itself to the secular institution of the government. Now, we have one of the oldest religious bugaboos of all in our midst a conservative and fearful minority empowered by secular law to control other religionists — a Urantian religion of authority. (Look Ma-no church!)
We’ve invited other potential disasters into the mix as well. The beautiful glimpse that the book has given us into the workings of celestial governments has subtly invited a notion of imitating this celestial democracy. And while it may be perfectly acceptable to utilize democratic processes in a religious group, and most certainly to advocate for the growth of democracy as a method of government in the secular world, it would be terribly unwise to unconsciously fall back into our evolutionary tendency to enjoin sociopolitical patterns with religion, thereby fomenting the notion of “holy democracy.” We humans have a real tendency to do that and there’s a distinct reason why the Master worked so hard to promote attachment to transcendental, spiritual action — worship and service — above attachment to sociopolitical philosophies regarding the outworking of religion.
It’s only through the act of worship, as individuals, groups, or organizations, that we enjoin God in either our individual or collective processes. Creature will must be free to approach God spontaneously. The Father always waits for an invitation and will only act upon it. Government and governmental processes, even in heaven, pertain to temporal problem solving and are designed to fade as Spirit gains dominion. They cannot be relied upon to initiate the perfecting dynamic of the Father himself. That must always start with the individual. Even in our collective formations, the Father responds to us as an aggregate of individual believers. He’s that respectful of our will.
The Urantia Papers tell us to keep church and state separate. They say that church and state separation on earth was “the peace move of the ages.” Nowhere in the book do they tell us to ape the governments on high in our religious groups, or to put the emphasis among us on political forms and processes — while in dozens of places we’re told to put the emphasis instead on worship and service. Worship and service is “church” — and just because we’ve adopted organizational formats doesn’t mean we’re immune to the birthing of sociopolitical forms inappropriately wed to spiritual principle. We really need to watch it.
The fact that we hear so much about “politics” in the movement only means we’ve already gotten off on the wrong foot in terms of attaching these temporal means to spiritual ends. The presence of this political psychology inappropriately wed to a religious subtext has defined much of our group experience. While the words “church,” “religion,” and “ministry” strike fear in our hearts, “politics” and “power plays” barely register a flinch. We don’t see the trap we’ve fallen into. It all feels so natural. Of course it does! It arose from the very evolutionary muck and mire we’ve come from!
We tend to forget that the Master was neither surprised or upset by the formation of a church or a religion in the wake of his bestowal. The unpleasant surprise for him was that the organized church, with him as its “head,” became such a complete substitution for the spiritual kingdom. Surely, the further substitution of our strangely secular organizations — contaminated by an acceptance of “religious politics” and with The Urantia Book itself as our sole focus — would hardly relieve him of his 2000 year old burden, the undelivered message of the gospel.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not in the business of promoting an idea of Urantian churches — but neither do I desire to suppress it. Nor do I want to see the organizations disappear, though I would like to see those of us involved in them rethink our emphasis. A lot of good has been done through them and will continue to be. Let God be in charge. What I do want to see, though, is a broader community that will open itself up to an honest examination of how the movement has developed and why. And to an exploration of real worship and service across “political” boundaries — even in the presence of all these fears pertaining to religion.
Worship may be at the heart of religion — but it isn’t the thing that causes religious warring. Worship on everbroadening levels is the only real antidote. If I were a doctor, writing a prescription for spiritual health and unity to improve relations between our most divided family members, I’d first prescribe a full two to three years of focus solely on shared worship. I’d then prescribe, again, between those most divided, along with shared worship and service together in pathways having nothing to do with Urantia outreach. Urantia outreach needs to be done in the company of those who have earned your trust. But other pathways could provide us all with the opportunity to exercise sincerity and earn trust, provided we can expand our thinking regarding service itself.
We also need to be more willing to accept responsibility regarding the gospel message of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. This message is universal, potent, and, according to the Urantia Papers, still undelivered. We really need to become interested in surrounding ourselves and our outreach efforts with the essential spirit of this message and to allow the Fourth and Fifth Epochal Revelations to work together. The gospel, still dormant after 2000 years, actually needs to precede the revelation in many parts of the world. “What you can do or dream you can do, begin it! Boldness has vision, power, and magic in it!” (Goethe)
We are told that someday “goals not creeds” will unify religionists. The main problem with the gospel is that it’s deceptively simple. We agree with it; therefore we think we’ve already explored it. Worship and service, emphasized and truly put into action among us, would dynamically shift our focus. For one thing, we might begin to see how far from the mark we really are in terms of connecting with its potential. Yes, it’s a simple two-part approach — but the Master wasn’t stupid. He knew that the simpler the approach, the more universally it could be applied. He wants it to be universally applied, starting with us. We’d have a lot to learn. We’d need to leave room for the Father to put people together for service. We couldn’t have it all worked out ahead of time, with ourselves pre-aligned according to shared opinions. We do need to broaden our outlook on service, too. The Master viewed all service as valuable-not merely that which pertained specifically to spiritual or religious work.
Look how the angels are organized for planetary service on UB 114:6.1-20. The universe concept of service is truly broad. What would it mean to us and the revelation to consciously embrace this more universal approach to both worship and service and align with it. It would open us up! People in the movement proper, struggling to serve God just as they are, would receive much more familial support. People on the outside would come to associate all kinds of lovely efforts with the Urantia movement, coming in droves to see what is inspiring us, instead of witnessing the vicious little family squabble we’re into now, and therefore staying away.
We need an emphasis on goals and more goals, as individuals, small groups, and organizations, as a spiritual family. We need worship, meditation, and prayer goals, along with service goals, made and met in a million combinations among us, with the Father smack in the center and in the broad light of day. We need worship and service bulletin boards for the public posting of these goals. We need worship and service resources also, listings of the myriad of efforts already in motion in the world, to aid us in connecting with our larger family of spiritual siblings.
We need not wait for an artificial alignment between organizations to initiate the birth of spiritual community among us. Human organizations can never do what the Father can. We only need to give ourselves permission to come together in the midst of our mess and put the emphasis on these deceptively simple lines — listening to the Father to guide us. It’s already starting to happen among us anyway: in spite of all our limitations, prejudices, and immaturities; in spite of our history and preconditioning — and even in spite of our morbid fear of messing up. (We will mess up!) It’s already happening. We just need to help it happen more.