Beloveds,
During the conference on cosmic citizenship hosted by the gifted and hard-working Urantia Peru team, presentations were pre-recorded, and the Q&A was also pre-recorded. Time constraints obliged presenters to answer questions briefly. But I expanded my answers in “The Art of Cosmic Citizenship,” (To find the Q&A, scroll down about half way in the document.)
I also promised to respond today to questions that came up fresh from the conference. For various reasons, I have only one new question. I will write out—in my ongoing dialogue with this beloved sister, whose struggles I am familiar with—my fresh thoughts on the topic of patience, based on 118:1/1295. After presenting that quote and adding some comments, I paste a section of a chapter, “The facts of suffering and the truths of God’s goodness” and finally the draft of a chapter, on “Mourning as a spiritual discipline.”
Question. I have a question I would like to ask you. It’s about patience: How can one be patient in suffering? Sometimes in life you have to go through painful situations.
My response. Suffering can be awful. Prolonged suffering can be prolonged awful. The best we can do is to keep alive within ourselves the communion with the spirit of God. This will help us learn whatever lessons are there for us and act accordingly, and bravely go through what is unavoidable, knowing that we are being made God-like in the fire.
Time and eternity
It is helpful to man’s cosmic orientation to attain all possible comprehension of Deity’s relation to the cosmos. While absolute Deity is eternal in nature, the Gods are related to time as an experience in eternity. In the evolutionary universes eternity is temporal everlastingness—the everlasting now.
The personality of the mortal creature may eternalize by self-identification with the indwelling spirit through the technique of choosing to do the will of the Father. Such a consecration of will is tantamount to the realization of eternity-reality of purpose. This means that the purpose of the creature has become fixed with regard to the succession of moments; stated otherwise, that the succession of moments will witness no change in creature purpose. A million or a billion moments makes no difference. Number has ceased to have meaning with regard to the creature’s purpose. Thus does creature choice plus God’s choice eventuate in the eternal realities of the never-ending union of the spirit of God and the nature of man in the everlasting service of the children of God and of their Paradise Father.
There is a direct relationship between maturity and the unit of time consciousness in any given intellect. The time unit may be a day, a year, or a longer period, but inevitably it is the criterion by which the conscious self evaluates the circumstances of life, and by which the conceiving intellect measures and evaluates the facts of temporal existence.
Experience, wisdom, and judgment are the concomitants of the lengthening of the time unit in mortal experience. As the human mind reckons backward into the past, it is evaluating past experience for the purpose of bringing it to bear on a present situation. As mind reaches out into the future, it is attempting to evaluate the future significance of possible action. And having thus reckoned with both experience and wisdom, the human will exercises judgment-decision in the present, and the plan of action thus born of the past and the future becomes existent.
In the maturity of the developing self, the past and future are brought together to illuminate the true meaning of the present. As the self matures, it reaches further and further back into the past for experience, while its wisdom forecasts seek to penetrate deeper and deeper into the unknown future. And as the conceiving self extends this reach ever further into both past and future, so does judgment become less and less dependent on the momentary present. In this way does decision-action begin to escape from the fetters of the moving present, while it begins to take on the aspects of past-future significance.
Patience is exercised by those mortals whose time units are short; true maturity transcends patience by a forbearance born of real understanding.
To become mature is to live more intensely in the present, at the same time escaping from the limitations of the present. The plans of maturity, founded on past experience, are coming into being in the present in such manner as to enhance the values of the future.
The time unit of immaturity concentrates meaning-value into the present moment in such a way as to divorce the present of its true relationship to the not-present—the past-future. The time unit of maturity is proportioned so to reveal the co-ordinate relationship of past-present-future that the self begins to gain insight into the wholeness of events, begins to view the landscape of time from the panoramic perspective of broadened horizons, begins perhaps to suspect the nonbeginning, nonending eternal continuum, the fragments of which are called time.
On the levels of the infinite and the absolute the moment of the present contains all of the past as well as all of the future. I AM signifies also I WAS and I WILL BE. And this represents our best concept of eternity and the eternal.
On the absolute and eternal level, potential reality is just as meaningful as actual reality. Only on the finite level and to time-bound creatures does there appear to be such a vast difference. To God, as absolute, an ascending mortal who has made the eternal decision is already a Paradise finaliter. But the Universal Father, through the indwelling Thought Adjuster, is not thus limited in awareness but can also know of, and participate in, every temporal struggle with the problems of the creature ascent from animallike to Godlike levels of existence.
When you look into the past, you can evaluate past experience—your own experience and the experience of others—for the purpose of bringing it to bear on a present situation. When you look into the future, your potential reality is just as meaningful as your actual reality. But you need to exercise your faith in order to believe in—and actualize—your potential.
For long-term past-present-future planetary perspective, review 50:5/576 and paper 52/589. Today we are half-civilized; and the animal-origin legacy of unbeautifulness is not gone until we reach Jerusem—after fusing with the indwelling spirit of God!
Looking into your past, you see that some of your suffering comes as the consequence of our own wrong choices and misdeeds; and some suffering comes from causes beyond your control. Like Jesus, you can embrace all this. The love of Jesus absorbs evil.
God’s love and mercy rehabilitate us. The transforming work is symbolized in a film, The Green Mile, about men convicted of capital crimes, sentenced to death, and awaiting execution. A friendship develops between one of the prison guards (played by Tom Hanks) and an enormous, magnificent, compassionate black prisoner who turns out to be innocent (played by Michael Clarke Duncan). The guard was coughing and sneezing one day and chanced to walk very close to the cell of this prisoner, who suddenly grabbed hold of him, and with both arms held him against the bars of his cell, very close to his chest. Then the film showed a visualization of a warm, glowing, orange light in the prisoner’s chest, which was, as it were, inhaling black specks of disease into his own lungs, where the specks vanished into nothing. To me, this image symbolizes divine mercy absorbing evil and thereby destroying it.
Jesus went through the ups and downs of the life of an evolutionary mortal. Shortly before he was crucified, Jesus said, “I am about to experience the supreme joy, even though enduring outward sorrow, in the bestowal of my affection upon you and your fellow mortals.” He knew how to suffer. He knew how to grieve. He did not suffer as an isolated person, but by going through the consequences of living the Father’s will in love for the Father and for his family. Toward the end of his Mediterranean tour with Ganid and Gonod, “Jesus became sober and reflective as he drew nearer Palestine and the end of their journey. He visited with few people in Antioch; he seldom went about in the city.” His experience in Rome had confirmed that Palestine was, indeed, the best place for his public career; and he could anticipate how it might end. After the Nazareth rejection, where a mob wanted to throw him off a hill to his death, his sorrow lasted for many days. He spoke on “The mission of adversity and the spiritual value of disappointment.” Faced with suffering and sorrow, Jesus did not push the happy button. Jesus’ religion is not over and above but into and through.
Here’s how I do some of these things. When I give thanks before meals, I thank God for the second universe age, the age of Supreme, of evolution in time and space, the sometimes painful and difficult striving and struggling of this world and this life as it is woven into the creative design of the Universal Father. This gives me a very broad sense of the now.
I try to live in a way that promotes the spiritual renaissance. I believe that the present age, the post-Bestowal Son epoch, will unfold in a way that moves through the present difficult and dangerous transition. I believe that humankind may have to suffer more before we have a critical mass of people ready to seek truth and righteousness. When I read in the Bible the books of Jeremiah and Lamentations, I see what devastation people went through—even though it led to a spiritual renaissance with Jeremiah, Ezekiel, (second) Isaiah. The book I’m writing on now is designed to help people understand Jesus and his gospel in a way that might help to promote a spiritual renaissance which could avoid planetary desolation; but also might help people turn and be reborn if things get much worse than they are now.
I want to serve on this world as long as possible; but I am also eager for the regime of the first mansion world, where I will be guided to overcome my character defects and deficiencies of experience; I will progress in self-mastery regarding animal-origin desires, fears, and anxiety; I will learn and grow in the biological dimension, including sex life and other things connected with family life. I desire to apply for a position on the staff of a Planetary Prince, and I interpret my life as preparing me to apply for such a position. I think of how primitive the conditions are at first—and how rugged and capable and fearless I must become in order to function as a team member.
I can feel for my self—and imagine for each person—that each “present moment” is surrounded by past-future. The past includes the whole cosmic past, and the future includes the whole destiny of the master universe in the universe ages to come; I am thinking especially of the beginnings and destiny of this second universe age. The past also includes all of my past, from the very beginning of my existence to my destiny. To live intensely in the present is to cooperate with spirit in decision-action that actualizes my potentials for service to God and the brotherhood of beings.
“This is the day which the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” There is a “mosaic” of this age on our world. This is a plan for the sequence that unfolds of our next step toward destiny. In the art form of a mosaic, there are many component pieces, called “tesserae” with different shapes and colors. I believe that for each person, each day, there is a tessera (singular) with an agenda for our day. If we get off track, that agenda is updated—like a GPS that is constantly updating the directions of the route to follow if we failed to make the proper turn. 5:3.5/66.1: As I work out the program of my earth life and the practical details of each day I am in the hands of the Third Source family: the cosmic mind, the Mother Spirit with her adjutants, my guardian seraphim, and others. I often create a video to go along with the concept developed in the blogpost; in this case, I remembered a 2015 video that I did for Urantia University Institute: “The mosaic of history and of each day.”
I have given you an ideal description of what I try to do, forget to do, fail in doing, and succeed at. We all struggle, and every forward step that we take helps others take their next step forward, too.
Next come the two sections that I have copied into to this document. The first one is more intellectual; it comes from the end of chapter 6 in Living in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. The one that comes last is a draft from my current book manuscript: “Mourning as a spiritual discipline.”
The facts of evil and the truths of God’s goodness
When something terrible happens, it is common to ask, “Why me?” or “What did he do to deserve something like that?” or to say, “All her life she was so good to people, and look what happened to her.” Whoever rejoices in the beauty and goodness of truth also needs to deal with the shock of facts that are ugly and cruel. The question “Why?” mingles a cry of unknowing with complaint and doubt. We have an instinct for justice and fairness. We understand when destructive persons harvest the bitter consequences of their actions, but some persons suffer far beyond what they deserve. Some people react to terrible events by denying God’s existence or goodness; others turn to religion’s profound resources.
To justify injustice insults the victims. Nothing of what is said here denies the fact of evil in finite, mortal experience. For many people, life is, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”; many know cruel blows, monotony, cataclysms, galling corruption, complacent greed, culture wars and clashes of civilizations, physical and verbal abuse, agonizing disease, bad religion, sophistic philosophy, misleading science, environmental pollution, anti-art, ethnic antagonisms, overwhelming complexity of modern life, gross economic inequities, and war.
For all that, life on our world is not, on the whole, a pool of misery, despite the fact that commercial media would go out of business if they published too much good news. On balance, there is much to be thankful for; and everyone who finds a constructive way to deal with the most distressing obstacles in his or her path gains leverage in bringing a better day closer.
To respond to suffering with simplistic answers can discount the reality of the other’s pain and falsify the mystery of the Creator’s plan. Silent companionship and compassionate listening are often the best we can offer. I would normally assume that philosophical ideas about the problem of evil are not what one communicates to a person who is in the midst of suffering. But a young friend told me of his saintly mother’s longtime anguish over the assaults of a brutal adult son who would break into their home from time to time to steal from his parents. I sent her a version of the following list, and was moved to hear that it helped her profoundly.
Even with the contradictions of pain, suffering, and evil, the following thoughts can bolster faith in an eternally perfect, all-knowing, and all-powerful Creator. None of these ideas by itself—nor all of them taken together—can bear the entire weight of the problem, but they set forth a perspective that can support prayer for help from the God of unlimited love.
- The most powerful defense against being overwhelmed by suffering is personal experience of the goodness of God. “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”[1] The more deeply we know God, the less likely we are to have our faith shaken by appalling things that are part of this mortal life.
- We cannot discern how terrible things fit into the eternal wisdom of God’s plan for us and our future. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so [God’s] ways are higher than your ways.”[2] To acknowledge mystery is an essential part of the total response to suffering, the I-don’t-know part of the response. God is the First Cause, but primal causation is beyond our comprehension; science knows only secondary causes. Faith regards God as sovereign, but we cannot trace the outworking of universe law.
- Not everything is good, but faith can embrace the thought that evil gets recycled. God and those who cooperate with God so labor that all things eventually do work together for good; and we have a responsible part to play in the process.[3] The time frame of the cosmos spans billions of years; humans have walked this planet for, more or less, a million years. Having hurt one another so much, it may take millennia to achieve the practical realization of brotherhood in our world, which will show that we have learned the lessons. If all earthly phenomena are ultimately part of the outworking of a divinely governed evolutionary process, we can make ever-new discoveries that confirm faith in a friendly universe.
- We should not assume that this world is the best the Creator could do. There is a heaven of eternal perfection where the will of God is done, as well as this evolving realm where human beings are invited into the adventure of becoming perfect. Jesus prayed, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”[4] Some of the needed healing and justice happens after this life.
- Natural processes follow their course; accidents and mistakes have their consequences. But an earthquake should not be called an act of God. We live in a realm of everlastingly dependable causal law. It is tempting to take a limited human snapshot of a universal process and to blame God for the suffering highlighted in that snapshot. But this picture does not reflect that truth, beauty, and goodness of the cosmic and divine scale.
- We bring suffering on ourselves and others by misusing our free will when we violate—deliberately or not—laws of health, sanity, morality, or happiness.
- Suffering can result from our failure to exercise vigorous, positive attitudes. An athlete who holds back from self-forgetting, totally committed playing because of fear of injury is more likely to be injured.[5]
- Anxious craving causes suffering.[6]
- Some suffering is needed to develop a noble character.
- The powerful will of the far-seeing God upholds the gift of free will to the creature. The possibility of evil is inherent in his choice to make beings that are both free and imperfect. The Creator’s purpose is not to “balance good and evil” but to allow us to climb the ladder of goodness by making real choices between potential alternatives. The Creator is not to be blamed for our wrong choices that result in actualevil.
- It is misleading to think that God gives permission to wrongdoers to do as they please without limits. A human lifetime is over surprisingly quickly, and judgment must be faced.
- Much evil is corrected in this life. God-given moral reason and righteous indignation (as distinguished from anger, which unconsciously contains the seed of murder) rouse responsible people to bring justice to outrageous wrongdoers.[7]
- God goes through everything with us and does not leave us alone. “In all their afflictions he was afflicted.”[8]
- Once a minor but painful episode is over—really over—we look back and the suffering no longer feels substantial. If healing can take place on a small scale, it can occur on a large scale, no matter how long it takes. Evil can exist only for a time by being parasitical on realities that are good. Eventually the good will outshine and recycle the evil. “Those who sow in tears shall reap in joy.”[9]
Mourning as a spiritual discipline
Gradually or suddenly, up or down, a little or a lot, change is inevitable. When we are comfortable, we can become complacent and fall out of the family of God. When trials and testing are upon us, those of lukewarm faith tend to drop out. For decades in the desert wilderness Moses led people who were often disgruntled and often longed for the better life they had left behind them in Egypt, not realizing what a great thing God was doing with them. They did not suspect the mission of adversity. They wanted the dislocation to be over quickly so that they could get on to a better life.
God and Moses were teaching and training, organizing and disciplining the people often in harsh ways so that they would learn to survive as a people with a mission surrounded by greater powers to the south, north, and east. They went through much affliction; in other words, they suffered many blows that tend to collapse a person physically, mentally, and spiritually.
There is a way of going through affliction, a spiritual way of grieving that Jesus called mourning.
The religion of Jesus is full of joy, but his joy cannot blossom in persons who suppress authentic mourning. Jesus wept. There is a kind of toughness that sees grieving as weakness, and barricades itself against what feels like an indifferent or hostile universe. Mourning allows one to experience profound sadness. Jesus knew what consequences were coming for Jerusalem when his message of truth and love would be rejected; and he wept over the city. In Gethsemane, he went through unfathomable agony. One can mourning for self or others, and for suffering past, present, or future.
Mourning in the context of the beatitudes
To know the wisdom of Jesus, a good place to look is in the beatitudes. The first one is “Happy are the poor in spirit (the humble, those who come as little children), for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” If we truly seek, we truly find; and the assurance of welcome in the family of God brings happiness now. This beatitude is the gateway to the others. A common question is “How are you?” A believer can reply, “Happy, because I am a member in the family of God.”
“Happy are they who mourn, for they will be comforted.” This looks like a contradiction. There are phases of mourning that typically take years. Mourning and happiness at the same time? In the religion of the spirit, mourning is a way of processing anguish. Mourning is sad now, and also happy now, because it has learned to trust the one who promises that more comfort is on the way. In fact, Jesus called his Spirit of Truth the Comforter. The more traumatic the event that we are grieving, the more time and ministry, human and divine, it may take before we experiencing the happiness. But we can know that the Comforter is there and that happiness will dawn upon persistent faith.
How do the other beatitudes contribute their wisdom to the process of mourning? “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” I interpret meekness as wanting to please God so much that we are constantly ready to accept a course correction. If we are proceeding along our way and then sense that we are getting off track, we can stop and seek the divine presence. For the meek to inherit the earth means that the good guys win. This refers to the eventual triumph of the plan for humankind in the future fullness of the kingdom of God. It is natural and understandable that fear and anxiety arise, but Jesus gives an alternative. “Fear not. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” We can choose to add divine attitudes into the stream of troubled thoughts and emphasize light over darkness.
“Happy are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” Righteousness motivates morally active living, but sometimes the path ahead is a steep climb; in the short run, it is easier to indulge our weaknesses. But the righteousness to which Jesus calls us is a gift of God. One thing is required: sincere, wholehearted, whole-souled hunger and thirst for it, and cooperation in the path forward. In mourning, our energy may be less, and we may reasonably expect less of ourselves. For those who are exhausted, refreshing energies are on the way.
“Happy are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. As we have seen, the divine attitude of mercy continually surrounds each person, though in practice of mercy it may take human interaction to experience that mercy. Insofar as our mourning is in response to something unbeautiful for which we ourselves are responsible, there is work for us to do to make things right with those we have wronged. And we should equally have a merciful attitude toward others; angry blaming is not the way of mourning. Mercy is required for spiritual unity.
“Happy are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” Purity of heart means that we do not rest content with mixed motives; we let go of the lesser motivation, trusting that the will of God includes a place in this life or the next for all our essential needs. The promise about seeing God will be ultimately fulfilled in heaven, but our present experience of divine friendship and affection is a kind of “seeing God” that we can enjoy in this life.
“Happy are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” When we are mourning, we need the peace that Jesus gives. The presence of Jesus dissolves fear and anxiety. When we receive that peace, we can go forward into social, interactive peacemaking. If we mourn divisions between differing groups of the professed followers of Jesus, we will be enabled to help in the peacemaking. Struggling with a tangled mess of evolving human this and that, the spiritually connected peacemaker is in contact with divine forces which are destined to triumph.
“Happy are you are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falselyon my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” At different times, Jesus prepared his followers for the worst. Those of us who do not experience persecution should make sure that is it not for lack of the courage which is available in the spirit. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection show that, if we fearlessly proclaim his message by the way we live, we can trust God to sustain us.
One can always find meaning in suffering and choose our attitude to it, as psychiatrist Viktor Frankl observed as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. As long as prisoners held on to whatever gave meaning to their life—religion, poetry, philosophy, beauties of nature, or love for a spouse in another camp who they did not know was still alive—they could endure. But whenever they gave up on that meaning, they would die within a few days.
Dark clouds may gather overhead, but above the clouds the sun is shining. At any time one can remember the light above and seek to discover divine blessing in the darkness of things that happen—the silver lining in the cloud. Two more stories of the weather. Walking south in the sunlight one afternoon in Berkeley, California, I looked east and saw dark clouds over the Berkeley hills about a mile away. It was raining intermittently, pouring down for some seconds and then stopping, then pouring and stopping in rapid cycles that continued for ten or fifteen minutes. My only evidence of the rain was that, each time it poured, a bright rainbow flashed across the sky. Another afternoon, looking west over the San Francisco Bay on a very cloudy day, I could see the sunlight pouring down at an angle through a small break in the clouds, bounce off the bottom of the lower cloud bank, back up to the higher cloud bank, only to bounce off the bottom of that cloud bank and from there come down in a wider cylinder of light to reflect off the grey waters of the Bay. The assurance, “Seek and you will find” is true regarding beauty on every level, physical or spiritual.
After compassionate thoughts about mourning, a balancing call to recover and develop the resilience of the religion of the spirit. Righteous souls who cry out to God find gifts waiting for them. In particular, one can reach in and take hold of the spiritual power needed to break through every obstacle to living the values of Jesus’ way.
[1] Ps 34:8.
[2] Isa 55:9
[3] Rom 8:28.
[4] Matt 6:9.
[5] Kyle and Hodermarsky, Object of the Game.
[6] I use “anxious craving” to translate the Buddhist concept of tanha—attachment or desire that binds us.
[7] Matt 5:21–22a.
[8] Isa 63:9 (RSV).
[9] Ps 126:5. Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
