© 2022 Sophie Malicot
© 2022 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| The Wisdom of Creating Unequal Races | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 99 — September 2022 | Why I Believe in God |
Sophie Malicot
Jesus taught that faith, simple childlike belief, is the key to the gate of the kingdom, but he also taught that after entering the gate, there are successive degrees of righteousness which each believing child must climb to grow into the full stature of the sturdy sons of God.
It is in the consideration of the technique of receiving God’s forgiveness that the attainment of the righteousness of the kingdom is revealed. Faith is the price you pay for entrance into the family of God; but forgiveness is the act of God which accepts your faith as the price of admission. And the reception of the forgiveness of God by a kingdom believer involves a definite and actual experience and consists in the following four steps, the kingdom steps of inner righteousness:
- God’s forgiveness is made actually available and is personally experienced by man just in so far as he forgives his fellows.
- Man will not truly forgive his fellows unless he loves them as himself.
- To thus love your neighbor as yourself is the highest ethics.
- Moral conduct, true righteousness, becomes, then, the natural result of such love. (UB 170:3.3-7)
Perhaps there is only the experience of true forgiveness to speak worthily of forgiveness? We do not forgive with the tip of our lips or the heart, but in the entirety of our being. It calls so much to our globality that pulling on its Ariadne’s thread is to enter fully into spirituality. All the high values are contained in it. In this, forgiveness is not an act, even if it contains it, and even less the forgetting of an offense. Except amnesia, nothing is forgotten and even less that which hurts the soul to the point of having to forgive.
Let us take Ariadne’s thread. Faith is necessary and sufficient to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. A trusting faith like the trust of a child - childish but not infantile. This nuance implies without saying it the Father’s consideration for us. A child’s trust in his parents is a means of growing. They raise him, direct him towards a goal that he cannot grasp: the highest eminence of himself. Our childish faith placed in heavenly hands takes on the same simplicity of being, the simplicity of the unity of self where growing in soul is done beyond duplicities. We feel certain (how do we know this?) that this childish trust is the means by which the Father directs our spiritual growth towards the quintessence of ourselves. We let ourselves be shaped, confident that this shaping is for our good.
We give our faith to enter the Kingdom and the celestial initiation begins with this gift. Giving is a divine attribute. God takes nothing; he does not capture but offers, delegates all that he can and gives himself incessantly, infinitely, eternally. At the threshold of the Kingdom, the human gives his faith as the price of entry and God gives his forgiveness designating our price of admission. It is surprising to speak of faith and admission to the Kingdom in terms of price - repeated twice (price that you pay + price of admission). However, it is not a barter but the immediate establishment that, in the divine universe, everything is a relationship, relationships established by the gift of each protagonist. It is impossible to settle into a passive consumer; from the threshold, dynamic exchange is the law.
Once the threshold is crossed, the divine dynamic continues. There is no rest in the Kingdom; everything is alive and in movement. The divine breath blows incessantly, the being of faith finds himself caught up in an inescapable active dynamic. We would expect forgiveness to be a request made to the Father and therefore something to receive. Again it is not a question of receiving but of entering into a movement where the gift is constant, in the divine image and likeness. The Father operates a reversal of our gaze, turning it away from him to direct it towards our fellow man, and giving.
The “fellow human.” The term is generic enough to have to consider every being on earth as my fellow human. We are all body, mind, soul, spirit and personality; whoever this fellow human is and whatever he does “good” or “worse.” This places our actions - good or worse - in second place. If they remain witnesses to the fruits of the spirit, they are not the only ones to be taken into account in the Kingdom. Justice weighs actions; mercy weighs intention. Thus the thief can expect to enter the Kingdom on the very evening of the crucifixion.
The process of forgiveness converges towards loving one’s neighbor. This means that the offense considered touches on the quintessence given by the Father: love. Since forgiveness comes down to loving one’s neighbor, the need to forgive comes from the lack of love. We understand better why everyone is concerned, regardless of their actions, because we are all insufficient in love in the light of the Kingdom. Both qualitatively and quantitatively. Thus the “exact measure” of forgiveness is the exact measure of our capacity to love at the moment of forgiveness. An exponential measure with our spiritual maturity. In this way, forgiveness will endure beyond death, as a pilgrim’s staff of learning a quality of being and of relating to one another. As long as we do not love each other perfectly - as the Father loves us - we will have to forgive and be forgiven.
It is difficult to admit the equivalence between the offender and the offended, and to get out of the victim/executioner tandem. However, the experience of forgiveness leads to it. When we go through a real and profound offense experienced, wounded, bruised in our body, in our being, stages follow one another: the shock of the trauma, the revolt, the inner collapse, the progressive awareness, the disidentification of what we were and are no longer, the questioning of who we become with this experience; and also the ruminations which debase, the hatred which gnaws, the endless accusations, the dishonourable revenges, the trials, the need for reparation etc. The process is long, time is necessary, a time often very stretched to go through these stages and try to overcome them. However, overcoming is not done through trials, nor through compensation for reparation. The Father goes further.
Suffering is always a breakdown of the person, and forgiveness its rehabilitation. In this, suffering is an offense to the Kingdom. Suffering is not part of the divine plan because the breakdown of the person is not part of the divine plan. In the childlike trust devoted to the Father by our faith, we have the guarantee that nothing is done against our person. However, suffering is destructive and goes against us. The passage through forgiveness makes us aware of this. When we forgive our fellow man, and with the same gesture we are forgiven by the Father, we become aware of the destructuring we have gone through and how much it outrages Life. Whether we are the offender or the offended. This is experienced when the offended collapses at the moment of his deliverance; this is shown by the silence and the deep shame of the great persecuted (the prisoners of the concentration camps); it destructures us in the face of extreme exactions (genocides). We do not have the right, whatever our position on the battlefield. We can only be ashamed and feel the need for forgiveness in the face of so much unconsciousness and dishonesty. Even more: conscience pushes us to ask for forgiveness in place of the offenders, who are jointly responsible for the abuses.
Then the righteousness of the Kingdom becomes the ethics that love leads: more than respect, more than the honorability of the other, it is about loving one’s fellow man as the Father loves, divinely. Beyond errors and wanderings, that is to say beyond what loses being. Because it is about finding it, fully, beautifully. Forgiveness rehabilitates the person in divine glory: it is the transformation of the gaze, no longer blinded by the exaction and reducing anyone to it, but amazed by the luminous grandeur of the divine origin which inhabits every being, whatever it does.
This ethic of love increases our responsibility. Love makes us responsible. As much when we love as when we are loved. Since the forgiveness given to our fellow man is simultaneous with that received by the Father, this means that at the moment when we rehabilitate our fellow man and enter into love for him, we are rehabilitated and reintegrate the awareness of the Father’s love for us. At the moment when I access the gaze of grandeur on my fellow man, I perceive the gaze of grandeur of the Father on me. This grandeur makes us grow: we cannot be loved - and be aware of being loved - without increased awareness of what this love implies. Seeing the grandeur of the soul gives rise to the impulse to honor and respond in return to this grandeur.
Thus forgiveness is not a process of making the being feel guilty but exactly its opposite: an elevation. When it arises, it floods the person and places them in both sacred grandeur and serious humility. Joy overflows, transcends pain. As always, the Divine simultaneously gives awareness of wanderings and reintegration into celestial righteousness. The observation of error contains both judgment and mercy - always dominant. In the spiritual path, forgiveness becomes a way of being in balance between humility in imperfection and a gushing goodness because this imperfection reveals perfection.
The grace of forgiveness is neither stiff nor rigid. It is experienced at the heart of the being’s deep vulnerability, where all defense mechanisms are removed. When resentment, bitterness, outrage and judgment are exhausted, leaving behind only the hollowing out of the being, and that, despite themselves, no reparation is effective, then suddenly, an opening to one’s fellow man can be made. Beyond everything; and everything he did. If the journey to access forgiveness is a long pilgrimage, forgiveness is instantaneous. It springs forth - unexpected - even if one expected it; abrupt - even brutal - jostles and overturns the being with a breath. The gaze changes irremediably, pierces into light, restoring the fellow man in his honorability just as one’s own honorability is restored. For they are Siamese twins; they sink or return to the same yoke. Thus forgiveness is often bilateral.
“God is inherently kind, naturally compassionate, and everlastingly merciful. And never is it necessary that any influence be brought to bear upon the Father to call forth his loving-kindness. The creature’s need is wholly sufficient to insure the full flow of the Father’s tender mercies and his saving grace. Since God knows all about his children, it is easy for him to forgive. The better man understands his neighbor, the easier it will be to forgive him, even to love him.” (UB 2:4.2)
So this new look can only love. Love the other, divinely. It passes in a reverse from enemy to soul brother-sister, in a glorious dimension of accomplishment of the Kingdom, transcending the current time. Look of prefiguration of the cosmic being. The borders are abolished; forgiveness has no borders, race, color or religion. It has no age either. Where does it spring from? From what source? Self? God? Simultaneity would answer both. The journey to access it invites the integration of a level of relationships where divine values are the substance.
Sometimes, forgiveness remains unilateral. It is not our capacity or responsibility to evaluate the effect of forgiveness; and this is not asked of us. But we do not know what inner work it arouses. Thus of this man who wrote every week for years to his son-in-law, imprisoned for having killed his daughter. Without response. Without return. He had forgiven; his son-in-law could not receive this forgiveness; or rather not yet. Because accepting it implies a total inner upheaval. It is enough for us to know that the possibility of acceptance remains whole, for a long time in survival.
As for his clear refusal, like Lucifer, like Judas, he highlights that the choice of divine life is very strange: either we accept this collaboration with God - and live eternally - or we refuse it and are annihilated. Free will is not a middle alternative with or without God, but the total acceptance of this collaboration or totally nothing. God is absolute. So the question is rather: how can we choose “nothing” rather than life?
The experience of forgiveness is undoubtedly the most costly one that a being goes through (a price to pay). It is deep, powerful, striking and sufficiently trying for its content to be sealed at once and irremediably changes the consideration of all fellow human beings. It does not only require going beyond the ego and pride, but pierces the plane of matter to pierce the luminous. At our level, we can say that forgiveness is a breach opened on the morontia world. The soul cannot be resentful, vengeful, or suffering. The soul does not suffer; it loves. To forgive is to place oneself from soul to soul where all is grace.
| The Wisdom of Creating Unequal Races | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 99 — September 2022 | Why I Believe in God |