No Longer an Orphan
Rob Crickett, a minister from Australia.
The Urantia papers afforded me a rational map of spiritual excellence whose starting point was beyond both the Eastern obsession with reincarnation and helplessness and the Western bondage to materiality, competitiveness and Satan. Both are orphans in a dreadful spiritual plight. From my youngest days I was attracted to God and his willing, personal, good and magnificent presence. We were friends from the first; and it was in a sense inevitable that as I grew in his ways we would meet in The Urantia Papers at a place, which resides beyond these confounding burdens that so stifle man’s abilities to live a complete and true spiritual life.
The Urantia papers became the greatest literary influence in my adult spiritual life. Other writings, teachings, meditations, reflections and biographies have moved me deeply, as has the company of men and women who actively pushed the envelope of righteousness. The Urantia papers, however, provided me with a full and adequate map within which the highest ideals of my relatively insignificant and brief life could be located. No other writing and no other human life gave so much to me with such consistency, depth and breadth.
What impressed me was the book’s explanation of the historic context into which I had been born. That context included the history of God; the history of the universe and its inhabitants; the history of mankind and of spirituality on earth; the history of sin and iniquity; and the history of Jesus as Christ Michael the Son of God. Just as impressive was the destiny into which I would live out my existence in this world and beyond: never separate from my Paradise father; not only to be equipped for but expected to achieve a most wonderful finality of spiritual perfection, actual fusion with God.
I had sought a teaching that would educate me beyond the wholly subjective and non-scientific enlightenment experience of the Buddhists, and I found it in the Urantia Papers.
Buddhism helped me to find the God of an individual. Christianity helped me to find the God of a people. Both are magnificent but it was the Father who personally bridged the gulf between He and my earthly position. It was Christ Jesus who delivered me into personal fellowship with the divine, and later into the power from on high, the baptism of the Holy Spirit. It was in friendliness and service that I found God in action in me, impeccably caring for his son or his daughter, even in death.
It was the Urantia Papers alone however that gave my soul the language to desire an absolute, unbreakable, incorruptible, and eternal fusion with the heart, mind, purpose and power of God: a fusion in which both the human and the divine were equally present, as they were in Jesus of Nazareth, the perfect example.
It was the Urantia Papers alone that gave me the wings to appropriate sonship with the Michael and Mother Spirit, the creative parents of this universe, a spiritual reality that is difficult of comprehensive explanation in any other scripture. The Urantia Papers alone provided the platform of understanding that later enabled my heavenly parents, by their own grace, to deliver me from a spiritual orphanhood, which strikes at the heart of this world and restricts the scope of every religion on it. Have you sonship with the persons who are God? Then you have transcended the heart of every religion on earth in a single step. That is the eternal and spiritual and saving gift of the Urantia Papers as I have experienced them.
Man divides himself by not knowing his past. He stresses himself by not knowing where he is destined. With no known past or future he is an orphan; and an orphan at war: he belongs only to himself, and he destroys himself. No matter how hard the orphan tries to bring about unity among other orphans, he is powerless to bring anything but the further effects of orphanhood. The Urantia Papers alone, from start to finish, herald the scriptural dawn of the breaking of this great blindness and burden on humanity. The world will benefit much from the message of freedom from orphanhood of the Urantia Papers. As the resurrected Jesus said: “Do you not perceive how great a salvation has come upon you?”
