© 2012 Saskia Praamsma Raevouri
© 2012 Urantia Foundation
| Reflections on the 11th meeting of Urantia Book readers in Spain | Volume 6, Issue 2, June 2012 — Index | How I found The Urantia Book |
By Saskia Raevouri, Holland
Dr. Meredith Sprunger was the president of Urantia Brotherhood when I got involved with the Urantia movement in 1977. His printed pamphlets describing The Urantia Book were mailed out to new readers by “headquarters”; so to me he was a big name. As I was never able to attend Urantia conferences, I did not become acquainted with Meredith until 2000 when he contacted me with his “How I Found The Urantia Book” story for the revised version of HIFTUB. We exchanged a few emails, but I didn’t meet him in person until 2006, when my partner Matthew Block and I visited him and Irene in their home in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
During that visit Meredith mentioned that he had abridged the entire Urantia Book, and I offered to turn it into a book for him if he sent it to me in Word format. I heard no more about it and assumed we had simply had a polite exchange. Then, sometime late in 2006 , I received an email from Meredith with a large Word attachment and the message, “Here it is!”
Upon reading over Meredith’s abridgment, Matthew and I found that we needed to collaborate with him, carefully going through the book paper by paper, before committing his work to print. For almost a year we corresponded regularly. Starting with the Foreword, we studied and discussed each paper together, section by section, helping Meredith finetune what he had written. On his end Meredith also consulted with a fellow reader/ minister named Merlyn Cox; so we became a team of four. In most cases they agreed with our suggestions, but when Meredith insisted on keeping his original statements, we deferred to his judgment, as it was, after all, his book, not ours.
During this time Meredith’s wife, Irene, became ill and passed away. So we suspended the work until he was ready to continue. I am certain that having The Abridged Urantia Papers project to work on helped Meredith immensely in coping with the loss of Irene after so many years of partnership. Since our emails also included personal issues from time to time, we got to know Meredith on several levels, but mainly as a man with truly spiritual qualities and a devoted servant of the Urantia Revelation. We felt honored to have the opportunity for such a private, indepth “study group” with such a long-time student of The Urantia Book.
Because Meredith was already in his early nineties at the time, we felt somewhat rushed to print his book. We printed a quick version for the Fellowship’s international conference in 2008. Since then we have reformatted the book, and it is now available both in the Amazon Kindle store and via Amazon’s printon-demand service.
By now Meredith will have settled in on the mansion worlds, reunited with his loved ones, and familiarized himself with his surroundings. We look forward to seeing him again when our time comes.
The following (in next article) is Meredith’s story of how he found The Urantia Book.
¶ References
| Reflections on the 11th meeting of Urantia Book readers in Spain | Volume 6, Issue 2, June 2012 — Index | How I found The Urantia Book |