CLAIM YOUR BLESSING, BELOVED
Notes from Gard Jameson's IC99 Plenary Address
University of British Columbia
August, 1999
This morning I would like to share with you some reflections on the nature of our numerous blessings in relation to what The Urantia Book calls the sum and substance of the teachings of Jesus, the love of God and the service of our brothers and sisters.
I would share two insights that have become central to my personal journey of faith:
Once we are willing to see and acknowledge the 10,000 joys and express our gratitude our hearts and minds will open, be renewed and transformed by the worshipful love of God. In one of the most amazing statements in the book, Jesus said that worship makes one increasingly like the being who is worshipped.
Once we are willing to see and acknowledge the 10,000 sorrows, really see our brokenness, our woundedness as a community, the woundedness of the planet, then we may truly become servers in the kingdom, truly enter the eternal joy of our Master. The insight that comes from the profound realization of the pain and suffering of the world is a mighty inspiration to service.
Blessings:
Blessing of Existence – For that I am thankful.
It is such a gift to be alive at this moment in time and space.
Body – which derives from Paradise itself, Mind – given to us by the Infinite Spirit,
Spirit – the gift of the most merciful Eternal Son, Personality – straight from the Universal Father himself.
The Thought Adjuster – a fragment of the Infinite God of Galaxies and Superuniverses.
The Spirit of Truth – the gift of the Creator Son, Michael of Nebadon.
The Holy Spirit – the gracious gift of Michael’s divine partner, the Creative Mother Spirit.
The Blessing of Family – For my beloved wife and my wonderful children, I am thankful.
Blessing of the Community – For that I am thankful
Blessing of the Planet – For that I am thankful
This planet and our moment of existence upon this planet are so special. We are given just an instant of time to drink in the glory of this planet and her precious history. We are given but a second of universe time to make some small contribution to the sacred shrine of our great Mother Earth, to the planet whose planetary prince is the Lord of our Universe Creation, Michael of Nebadon.
As my friend Thomas One Wolf says "step lightly, brothers and sisters, upon mother earth for it is she who supports you."
We all have an instinctual tendency to overlook our blessings and to bemoan our problems, projecting our own woundedness upon the other, without really seeing the other or ourselves.
Within the reality of God the Supreme, we must have the courage to find space for a deep gratitude for each other. I invite you to try the following exercise: whenever you meet someone with whom you think you have a problem, try bringing up your sense of gratitude for that person, however small, for all the reasons that do exist for a sense of gratitude. You will be amazed at the results when you surround that person with your sense of gratitude for them. Such gratitude opens the possibility of real dialogue. Once you have tried this exercise with those who might bother you, you might consider approaching everyone with the same attitude.
I have shared all of the blessings that are external, the blessings out there -- the deepest blessing that I am asking you to fully claim and experience is within here, the Inner Divine Family, the Living Presence of the Trinity, the sacred space of the Golden World – as the Psalmist declared "the deep calleth unto the deep", the Infinite Depth of God’s Spirit calls unto the depth of each of us, if we would but listen – as so many pioneers of soul have declared, the most interesting aspect of life, not what’s out there, but what is happening within!
Last week I stood on top of a mountain in Wyoming and encountered a little piece of our mutual history, an ocean bed at 10,000 feet that contained the remnants of clams, bryozoa, and echinoderms 450,000,000 years old, the time of Michael’s 4th bestowal. Contained within each of you is the story of 550 million years of evolutionary development. There is an amazing story within each of you, consider your arms and legs, which used to be fins, 300,000,000 years ago, the time of Michael’s 5th bestowal. Consider your brain, which used to be the size of a pea in Jurassic time, the time of Michael’s 6th bestowal, and is now a little bigger. Then, consider your heart, the almighty sacred heart through which the cells of infinite consciousness and blueprints of the cosmos pass with every beat, the heart which connects our fragile frame to the very heart of all reality, the Paradise home of the Trinity, by the power of prayer.
I want you to know that your personal belief in the teachings of The Urantia Book is no substitute for the deep inner experience which The Urantia Book calls each of us to claim as our divine blessing, our divine heritage. Without that inner experience of blessing, an awareness of what the Book calls the inherent joy of freewill existence, our belief is only so much straw.
This morning I am inviting you to fully claim your blessing, the blessing of being the Beloved, the blessing of what lies within each of you, your spiritual birthright, the right that comes of being reborn in the loving fire of God’s infinite compassion and eternal wisdom.
Die and Be Reborn
Until you have learned this lesson
You are but a dull guest
On a dark planet.
Goethe
The Greatest Teachers in the Cosmos of The Greatest Lesson in the universe, to be loved and to love in return, are the Inner Divine Family that indwell you, even now, the Indwelling Blessing of God the Father, God the Son and God the Spirit –
From God the Father we have received and experience by faith His Indwelling Presence, the Thought Adjuster. This indwelling presence brings with it the Infinite Love of God, making you aware, if you would humbly take the time to open the eyes of your spirit, that you are the Beloved Child of God, a child of Infinite Worth and Eternal Dignity.
From the Creative Mother Spirit we have received and experience by faith the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the guidance of Her Angels, those wonderful ministering spirits who lovingly guide our footsteps, if we are but willing, humbly by faith to enter into the glorious Adventure which God has prepared for each one of us, an Adventure of boundless opportunity, unlimited progress and endless life.
And, from Jesus we have received and experience by faith the Spirit of Truth; He called this Spiritual Blessing, the Comforter. Said Jesus, you shall know the Truth and the Truth shall set you free. In saying this Jesus told us as well that he wished for each of us to experience the inherent joy of existence, the joy of experiencing ourselves as the Beloved and the consequent joy of serving our brothers and sisters.
For so many of us, the question is how, how to claim your spiritual blessing, how to get into touch with these gifts of grace that indwell each of you, even now. Curiously, the Urantia Book does not spend much time addressing the how, but it does give us some real clues.
The most fundamental step in the Journey of How is … the humble and heartfelt desire to search for our blessing, through the story of own brokenness, through the story of the woundedness of the world.
Solitude, Stillness & Resting in God’s Spirit – These are the three key steps in claiming your blessing, in opening your heart and soul to the Presence of the Trinity within.
By faith, you can claim your deepest blessing, the blessing of being the Beloved of God. I want to ask you, now, my brothers and sisters, a most important question. I ask you to please reflect for a moment silently in your heart on your answer.
Do you truly experience yourself in the fullness of your soul as the Beloved of God? Solitude, Stillness & Resting in God’s Spirit are the essential foundation of our lives.
Reflecting for a moment on this past century, I think it could rightfully be called the Century of Alienation, the Dark Night of the Planet’s Soul. If we have learned anything during the past Century we have perhaps learned that we "cannot live by bread alone", solely by those instinctual energies which have carried us up the evolutionary ladder of millions of years of biological and psychological development.
The experiments of political Marxism in Russia and Asia have put us in touch, through immense pain and suffering, with the reality that you cannot build a community solely based upon the economic needs of people, solely around what the book calls the instinctual energy of self-preservation, solely based on the institutions of self-preservation. Security and safety, by themselves, are necessary but simply insufficient on the spiritual path.
Reflection upon the insights of Freudian psychology and our own experience has made us aware that there is more to life than our sexual nature. Our relationships consist of more than sexual complexes, as Freud suggested, that there is infinitely more depth to all of our relationships than those energies associated with the primordial instincts of self-perpetuation and the resulting institutions of self-perpetuation. Human affection, by itself, is necessary but simply insufficient on the spiritual path.
The insights of much current psychology and current culture with its focus on self-gratification, overcoming feelings of inferiority, the need of the individual for power in their relationships has taught us, again through immense pain and suffering, the great lesson of the need for spiritual humility and the spiritual connections that such humility brings.
The pride, associated with those instinctual energies of self-gratification, has brought untold human misery and suffering, divorce rates of over 50%, child abuse rates of over 25%, and an immense abuse and neglect of our elderly population. In December I will be travelling to the Parliament of World Religions in South Africa. Are you aware in that country, alone, approximately one of every two women has been the victim of rape? The excesses of the drive for self-gratification have been at the expense of our greatest human institution, the family.
And so, once again I tell you, as does our wonderful book that there is so much more to life than the instincts of self-gratification, self-perpetuation, self-preservation and the institutions fostered by those instinctual energies. Security and safety, human affection, self-esteem and power, of themselves or even together, are simply insufficient on the spiritual path of adventurous service and joy in the kingdom of God.
I would like to suggest to you that in claiming your personal blessing, in opening your heart to both personal and collective woundedness, you are performing a powerful act in the reclamation of your own soul, our community, and this very planet by the power of God’s most precious love.
The Great War, World War I, the War of my great uncle, Frank Gard, who was killed on Armistice Day, was supposed to be the war to end all war. That war began in Sarejevo at the beginning of this century and here we are at the end of the century in Sarejevo.
Since the end of World War II there have been over 160 wars of various sizes in every civilized continent on the planet killing over 22 million people… during the twentieth century over 100 million people, men, women, children and babies have been killed as a result of our own alienation, our unconscious obsession with the instinctual energies of self-preservation, self-perpetuation and self-gratification. I want to invite all of you in this grand auditorium to read another book someday soon, a short book, Night, by Elie Wiesel, his memory as a child of the holocaust, seeing his own family wiped out in the fires and ovens of Auschwitz. Like the Urantia Book, if you read this book, you will be changed. It will give you a brief glimpse of some of the horrors of this past century. During the last 5,600 years, what we refer to in the West as recorded history, there have been over 14,000 wars. Two to three wars every year of recorded human history.
In our own home I have a picture of our family tree that goes back to the eighth century. Virtually every generation reveals the picture either of a knight, a warrior or a soldier in the lineage. My father served in WWII, as did my mother. My grandfather and great uncle served in WWI. Virtually every generation served in war.
In thinking about our personal stories we often forget the story that has preceded us, that has led us to this present moment. A big part of our own healing is the recognition and appreciation of our own story, which includes the story of the past, of generations gone by. In Africa there is a wonderful concept of time known as Sasa, the period of our immediate predecessors, of the three to four generations behind us, a time in which memory may recall the stories of those grandfathers and grandmothers, those great grandfathers and great grandmothers, for the edification and education of the immediate moment.
With the advent of nuclear and chemical weapons we live in the generation in which we literally have no option but to turn our swords in plowshares, to become channels of the Father’s love, reflections of the Michael’s merciful wisdom and instruments of the Creative Mother Spirit’s peace. This is the great call to our generation. Do you hear that call?
We must, if for no other reason than following the instinctual energy of self-preservation, learn the lesson of rebirth that Goethe writes of in his poem, that we are more than flesh & blood. We are spiritual beings having a human experience; we are intended from birth to experience ourselves in the realm of the Supreme as the sons and daughters of God that we truly are! To claim the blessing of experiencing ourselves as the beloved children of God!
It is interesting to note that right after WWII, development began not only on the hydrogen bomb, but much more significantly there was what I call The Opening of the Gates of Spirituality. A couple of years after WWII a number of yeshivas or schools of Jewish mysticism opened in Israel to teach the inner teachings of Kabbalistic and Hasidic spirituality. Martin Buber was writing his monumental works on personal relationship and community.
In 1949 Thomas Merton wrote his best-selling book, Seven Story Mountain, the story of his own monastic odyssey. Since that time thanks in large part to Thomas Merton the cloistered teachings of Christian spirituality have become widely available. Students of Merton and many others teach the great disciplines of prayer and communion to thousands and thousands of lay people every year.
The Sufis, thanks to the work of Idries Shah and numerous others, have made their deepest teachings available to the lay person. Rumi, a Sufi poet of the 11th century, is the number one best selling poet in America today!
Wrote Rabiah, the great female Sufi poet:
O God, the stars are shining:
All eyes have closed in sleep;
The kings have locked their doors.
Each lover is alone, in secret,
With the one he loves.
And I am here too: alone,
Hidden from all of them ---
With You.
And this is to say nothing of the teachings of the East, which have had such an immense impact upon Western consciousness! The awakening of the Buddha under the Bodhi Tree, the courage of Arjuna and his brothers upon the plains of Kuru in the Bhagavad Gita and the thoughts of a wandering sage known as Lao Tzu are all beginning to inform our personal stories, our dialogue with one another, and our very understanding of the physics of the cosmos and of cellular structure.
In 1955, as you all know, a most astounding event occurred, thanks to the blessed work of the Revelatory Commission and the Contact Commission, the publication and distribution of The Fifth Epochal Revelation to our planet.
And yet,
For most instead of Silence and the Stillness of God – Endless Busyness, Distractions & Depression, the TV blares, the stereo blares, the telephone blares, the newspapers blare, and now e-mail! Our work blares, even our silence blares with frustrated thoughts, obsessive thoughts, anxious thoughts, fearful thoughts, impatient thoughts, lonely thoughts… there is very little stillness in our lives.
For most instead of Resting in God’s Everlasting Arms, allowing ourselves as the great nun, Hildegaard of Bingen, tells us to be "hugged by the arms of the mystery of God" – There is deep-seated fear and anxiety.
Perfect love casteth out fear, the love we experience communing with God in stillness. Solitude, Silence & Rest – Claim you Blessing, Beloved.
I would like to suggest that most do not lay claim to our greatest blessing for the most obvious of reasons – we simply do not take the time to have a relationship with God.
Make an appointment with God -- a divine appointment – we should allow our faith to lay claim to our relationship – God has perfect manners – God is not going to impose a relationship upon us… Jesus says behold I stand at the door and knock. The grace of God and of our Master is that they do stand at the door and knock; but it is for us, by a humble act of will, to invite them in, into our lives.
Do you really believe what you read in the Urantia Book? Then start living it by making your divine appointment with God, every day of your life, an appointment that will begin to inform and uplift every moment of your life, the life of our community and the very planet that we walk upon.
Jesus says "ask and you shall receive"… this is one of the most fundamental laws of the universe. Just as we would go to our brother or sister to be with them, so too the laws of relationship require that we take time with God to have a relationship with Him and all the members of the Indwelling Divine Family, that indwell you and I, even now. Many of us still live in the illusion that somehow, by coming to a study group or a conference, by reading the book, or by executing some great Urantia project we are performing God’s will… As the great swing theologian, Gershwin, says, it ain’t necessarily so….
The Divine Will is that you would each become perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect. With the insight of the Book I understand that mandate to mean that we should start loving each other even as God loves us. This journey of perfection is a circular journey, not a linear pathway. I would share again Jesus’ statement that "worship makes one increasingly like the being who is worshiped." Be you perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect. Love even as God loves us, even as the Master washes our feet and serves us, even now.
Every day we should take the time, set a Divine Appointment, more than just 20 seconds before our meals… try twenty minutes in the morning… and if you want to really step right into the relationship, try an additional twenty minutes in the evening. And, occasionally you may even want to try a spiritual retreat or what I call a vacation with God, resting in God’s ever-loving arms. If I told you that the Dalai Lama or the Pope wanted just twenty minutes of your time tomorrow morning, I think most of you might find the time…
What if I told you that your Creator, the God of the Infinite Galaxies of Time & Space, the Existential God of Eternity wants to spend some time with you, which He does, do you think you could find some time in your calendar for the Creator? Do you think you could pencil in a divine appointment for God?
And what if I told you that in making time for God you would receive the greatest of all Blessings, His Perfect Love, a Love that forever dispells Loneliness and Alienation, a Love that turns Distraction and Depression into Divine Focus and Joy, and that, as Paul tells us, a Love, a perfect love that casteth out all Fear and Anxiety. What if I told you that in making time for God you would become the person that you have always wanted to be… do you think you could find twenty minutes tomorrow morning, and every morning, for God?
I must warn you, though; you must come to your divine appointment prepared. In order to meet God tomorrow morning you need to bring four things.
God asks only the following four things of each of us as we approach our Divine appointment…
These four attitudes are the sum and substance of a dynamic faith, afaith capable of receiving and giving the divine blessing of love, the divine blessing of becoming the Beloved of God that you were intended to be!
In claiming your blessing, Beloved, lies your healing and the healing of the world…
And so I return to my first two thoughts:
In sharing these two insights, I am giving you, my brothers and
sisters, what is called in the building profession, a two by four -- two impulses that lead to the love of God and the service of God’s creation -- two impulses informed by the four attitudes of faith. With this two by four may we each have the courage to build a Kingdom of Light and Life within our own hearts, in order that a Kingdom of Light and Life may reign on this devastated and yet most precious home of our Planetary Prince, the blessed Michael of Nebadon.
And so Michael invites us to claim our blessing, Behold I stand at the door and knock!
MAY THE LOVE OF GOD THE FATHER, THE MERCY OF GOD THE SON, AND TENDER MINISTRY OF GOD THE SPIRIT ENCIRCLE AND FILL YOUR LIVES TO OVERFLOWING THAT YOU, TOO, MAY BE KNOWN AS A FRIEND OF GOD!