When my children were toddlers, they learned important lessons and I learned important lessons. They learned about hot things. They learned that when the stove is hot you don’t touch it. And I learned that I had to teach them about hot things and not take it for granted that the kids would avoid them. Thinking about the parent / child relationship has helped me as I try to understand the difficult concept of the Supreme Being found in Papers 115 through 118.
My understanding of the Supreme Being starts with the idea that the Supreme is experiential deity. The Supreme is the unfolding finite creation. Everything that we are aware of is a part of the Supreme. This makes us children of the Supreme. This divine person encompasses all of time and space, and all beings found therein. The Supreme grows as the universe grows, and increases in experience as beings that are a part of the universe increase in experience. Our destiny seems to be interwoven with this divine person and that is what has so intrigued me. How can we understand a being who is divine and therefore so beyond our current level of comprehension and yet so intimately connected with ourselves?
One way that I have started to understand God the Supreme is to think about my experiential existence. I go through life collecting experiences that I use to try to enhance my personal living conditions. For example I have learned that speeding up when the yellow traffic light comes on is probably going to lead to an accident some day. Therefore I slow down. And my experiences also help me to understand and successfully live with the people around me. I have learned that getting angry usually doesn’t solve the problem I have with another person, and so I try to keep things under control. All of these experiences have the potential to benefit my physical life as well as my spiritual life. The Urantia Book says that all of our experiences are used in the cosmos for the benefit of all. “The parts and individuals of the grand universe evolve as a reflection of the total evolution of the Supreme, while in turn the Supreme is the synthetic cumulative total of all grand universe evolution (1278.4).” The Supreme Being sounds like a giant collector of lesser being experiences that add to the enfolding of the divine plan.
I certainly don’t understand it all but I have realized one thing. My life matters. It matters to me and it matters to God. Even the terrible experiences that I have gone through in life have eternal value. Even the little things of my life that I have not even thought much about may be like a single drop of rain that adds to the million drops that fill a river flowing towards an eternal destiny. “By thus ordaining the experience-evolution of the Supreme, the Father has made it possible for finite creatures to exist in the universes and, by experiential progression, sometime to attain the divinity of Supremacy (1266.4).” Thinking about this has encouraged me greatly. And I believe that as we develop these concepts we can develop a theology that will encourage a great many of our fellows here on earth.
A great deal more thought needs to go into this. But I believe that the metaphor above, a parent and child learning and growing together, is one simple way of getting hold of the concept of the Supreme. Just as we understand the mind numbing concept of God in the simple statement; our Father in Heaven, so we may be able to understand the Supreme Being as our Divine Parent who walks beside us (1288.1). Anyway, it gives me a great deal of hope for us and our world – especially at this time – because we are all a significant part of God’s unfolding plan for the universe.
God Bless You,
William Whitehead
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