GOLDEN GATE CIRCLE
WEEKEND BULLETIN:
May 22, 2011
Announcing the Study Group Portal
The leaders of Urantia Foundation, The Urantia Book Fellowship, and Urantia Association International are very pleased to announce an historic achievement in cooperative service to our community. After two years of design, testing, and enthusiastic support from teams representing our three organizations, the Study Group Portal is now operational. An unprecedented joint sponsorship has been forged as we affirm that nearly everything of real value to the Urantia community has taken origin within study groups, including The Urantia Book itself, born of the original study group: The Forum.
A comprehensive database of study groups supported by the major organizations has been a cherished ideal for many years, but the vision took hold during Urantia Foundation’s Internet Strategic Meeting in the fall of 2008. This gathering drew more than a dozen tech savvy leaders, some who were affiliated with reader groups and some who were not. The model of an interactive study group website found unanimous appeal and Scott Brooks, representing UAI as its Webmaster, agreed to design and lead the project.
The Study Group Portal was built to foster the creation and growth of study groups. But as an Internet resource, the Portal is something new – a voluntary listing guide that’s always accessible for hosts to update, and a referral service that’s always available to readers searching for a study group. As hosts sign in and the database grows, those who want to study in a group setting will be able to search for one where they live or as they travel. With an interface and user protocol similar to social networking sites, the Portal is easy to navigate.
The Portal also houses an online library of study aids for The Urantia Book,including the new UAI Study Group Guide. These educational resources will tutor students in their comprehension of the teachings and help study groups flourish by sharing successful models and experiences. The site will soon feature multiple translations, making it truly a worldwide service.
If you currently host a study group that is focused on The Urantia Book, open to all readers and apolitical, please list it NOW by visiting: http://UrantiaStudyGroup.org
Beta testing has been completed so the Study Group Portal is now open to serve the Urantia community! However, it’s still new and if you encounter technical problems or have other questions, please contact the administrator. Also, study aids with proven value are needed to expand the library so please submit them.
(Andrea Barnes offered the following tip: I did not find my study group and so I would encourage ALL study group leaders to go on and make sure your group is listed. If it is not listed it is fairly easy to add. You simply register by giving your email address, name and creating a password. Then you move on to registering your group, which is about a 4 step process using the tabs along the top of the registration box. It took me less than 5 minutes.)
Alexander Valley
Quote for the Week
“Your personalities may be refreshingly diverse and markedly different, while your spiritual natures and spirit fruits of divine worship and brotherly love may be so unified that all who behold your lives will of a surety take cognizance of this spirit identity and soul unity; they will recognize that you have been with me and have thereby learned, and acceptably, how to do the will of the Father in heaven. You can achieve the unity of the service of God even while you render such service in accordance with the technique of your own original endowments of mind, body, and soul.” (UB 141:5.2, p. 1591:7)
If You Saw The PBS Special on the Freedom Riders Arrival In Anniston, Alabama …
On Mother’s Day 1961, civility disappeared. An 18-year-old Klansman sat down in front of the bus to keep it from escaping. Toughs yelled racial insults at the Freedom Riders. Windows were broken, and someone slashed the bus’ left-front tire. Police arrived, but made no arrests.
Police officers moved the mob from the front of the bus and allowed it to continue its trek westward. Patrol cars escorted the bus to the city limits. Cars carrying Klansmen and others followed behind.
Six miles outside town, near Forsyth and Son Grocery on Alabama 202, the driver of the Greyhound bus pulled over to the side of the road, his slashed tire flat. Police officers hadn’t followed that far, but the mob had.
For 45 minutes, the disabled bus starred in a scene of violence and destruction on the city’s western boundary. … More windows were broken. Through one of those windows someone tossed burning rags into the bus, which the Riders couldn’t put out.
In less than five minutes, the Riders and the other passengers had all escaped the smoking, burning bus … Some lay on the ground, wheezing, gasping for air.Read below for the amazing act of true Jesusonian heroism of the grocer’s daughter …
http://www.annistonstar.com/The South is changing. See Anniston revisit its past. Read more: Anniston Star - The day that would change Anniston’s place in history began like any other small town Sunday
The Girl Who Helped When Few Others Would
by Anthony Cook (acook@annistonstar.com)Annist
on Star excerpt from May 11, 2011 article:Janie Forsyth McKinney delivered water to the victims of the 1961 bus burning. Photo:Special to The Star
You might not know Janie McKinney, a 62-year-old communications specialist at UCLA.
But, as 12-year-old Janie Forsyth, she became part of local civil rights lore by committing a simple act of kindness.
She took water to the victims of the 1961 Freedom Riders bus burning in Anniston.
“I wanted to know what was going on, and when I heard people suffering, I couldn’t stand it,” she said. “I’d been saved, and I believed in the idea of the Good Samaritan. You are your brother’s keeper.”
Ku Klux Klan members had attacked the bus at the station in downtown Anniston, but the driver pulled away on a slashed tire. When the bus couldn’t travel any further, the driver was forced to stop just outside of town — at the Forsyth and Son Grocery store owned by Janie’s father.
There, Klan members firebombed the bus; riders escaped from the bus to keep from being burned alive. McKinney remembers being angry that her neighbors wouldn’t help her minister to the victims.
“They were crawling on my front yard, throwing up and begging for mercy,” she said. “Not helping them was more than I could take.”
McKinney said she was driven by the words of Jesus in what has long been her favorite Bible verse, “… Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” (Matthew 25:40).
McKinney said Mother’s Day 1961 set a course for the rest of her life. “Going against my community at such a young age put me on an outward path. I didn’t feel like I belonged, like I fit in,” she said. “I believe I was headed on a course out of Anniston anyway, and that sealed it.” McKinney is returning to Anniston for this week’s events. Asked what she’d say to residents on this 50th anniversary of the bus burning, she paused in thought before offering this:
“When you get the opportunity to do the right thing against great odds, you have to do it. If you don’t, it will diminish you as a person. On the other hand, if you do it, you can know that you passed at least one hard test, and it helps define you as a stronger person.”
Anthony Cook is managing editor of the Star.
To read the whole article: Anniston Star - The girl who helped when few others wouldA Tiny Glimpse of the Immensity of the Grand Universe
http://media.skysurvey.org/
interactive360/index.html Courtesy of Hamid Mazdeh
"Christianity is being concerned about your fellow
[human], not building a million-dollar church while people are starving right around the corner. Christ was a revolutionary person, out there where it was happening. That's what God is all about, and that's where I get my strength."
~ Fannie Lou Hamer ~
In 1962, Fannie Lou Hamer volunteered to work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) registering black voters in the South. She and the rest of her family lost their jobs for her involvement, and SNCC hired her as a field secretary.
Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge.
I say to the Lord, "You are my Lord;
I have no good apart from you." Psalm 16:1-2
Thanks for tuning in and reading this far. Please
-- Stay tuned! Dave Holt, Editor/ GGC VP
GOLDEN GATE CIRCLE
WEEKEND BULLETIN:
May 14, 2011
In 1770, Serra and Portola founded the first Spanish outposts in Alta California--the missions at Carmel (above) and JolonCommunity Planning Meeting/Pat Fearey Memorial June 4th
We're set for Golden Gate Circle Society Meeting June 4th! Michelle Klimesh has warmly welcomed GGC to use her home. For directions, email her atmrklimesh@yahoo.com Our intent is to give the memorial for Pat Fearey the higher priority, the first event of the day. We hope people can arrive as early as 10:30 for Pat's event. We will gather for words of reflection and reminiscence. Over potluck lunch that will follow, our reflections and conversation can continue as an extension of the service.
We expect to begin the election of officers after lunch. We are in need of a Treasurer. Claudia Ayers has offered to continue another term as President. IF someone has been waiting until now with the cherished thought of taking a term or two, we will form a nominating committee. If other current officers are willing to go another round, our only election issue will be the Treasurer.
Please bring your checkbook if you have Society dues to pay.
We hope to handle business and be out of the host and hostess' way by 4:30 PM, at the latest.
How I Found the Urantia Book— by Pat FEAREY (1968)
Excerpted from
http://www.squarecircles.com/
UrantiaMovementHistory/hiftub/ 031pat.fearey.htm (Hundreds of individuals shared their stories to make up Square Circles publication How I Found the Urantia Book and How it Changed My Life. Pat was one of the long-time readers who penned an eloquent account of her early days discovering the UB. Her whole story is on the web site link above.)
TO ONE WHO has been many, the gathering of every multicolored thread of experience to make a tapestry seemed only natural. To one who had peeled layers of insight from many a spiritual onion, a bouillabaisse of many flavors was the obvious next course. To one who had wondered about a music not-quite-heard in the silence of a starry night, a universe-as-symphony seemed not only glorious but logical.
I was ready for the Urantia Book to find me. It was 1968. A metaphysical bookshop in Berkeley had a copy on its top shelf, way up high. I promptly bought it, knowing nothing about it. And, despite good intentions, I read the Jesus papers and little else.
If the Urantia Book found me, did I then find it? Decidedly not. I was not ready to see the love of my life in that guise. I thought I knew how the universe worked after walking down numerous religious paths. I lumped all avatars together, including Jesus. I hated anything that seemed gender-exclusive, after a childhood oppressed by heavy patriarchal assumptions and a young adulthood rich in the finest women’s educational opportunities available. Names like “Salvington” made me wince; they seemed so specifically (even suspiciously) Anglo-Saxon, when my ear delighted in the poetry of Sanskrit and in liquid Polynesian syllables.
And though I did not know it then, I had preliminary work to do before I could fully embrace the Urantia Book. I was a student of Hindu psychology at the time, learning from a beloved teacher—a non-guru guru whose message was always balance. His proclamation, in the face of an influx of orange robes, beads and sandals in the California of the ’60s and ’70s, was always: The only real teacher is inside oneself.
I did not, therefore, have the Eureka! experience when I first discovered the Urantia Book. I see now that I needed to continue learning from my Hindu mentor and to go to the spiritual community of Findhorn in northern Scotland in 1971 to experience a flowering within myself. (continues on link ...)
“You do not have to struggle to reach God, but you do have to struggle to tear away
the self-created veil that hides him from you.”~ Paramahansa Yogananda ~
Can anybody expand on the concept of the technique of living progress?
Cristina Seaborn asked the Fellowship society communications list her question about157:6.4: <http://www.truthbook.com/
index.cfm?linkID=1409#U157_6_4 > or http://urantiabook.org/
newbook/papers/p157.htm
“Thus did Jesus exemplify in his life what he taught in his religion: the growth of the spiritual nature by the technique of living progress. He did not place emphasis, as did his later followers, upon the incessant struggle between the soul and the body. He rather taught that the spirit was easy victor over both and effective in the profitable reconciliation of much of this intellectual and instinctual warfare.”
Matthew Block responded: Some of 157:6 is inspired from J. Middleton Murray's 1926 book, Jesus - Man of Genius.
You can read the whole book here: http://www.archive.org/stream/
jesusmanofgenius028072mbp# page/n7/mode/2up
A passage on p. 208 parallels the second sentence of the passage you cite:
“The Pauline conception of unsleeping war between the soul and the body would have been abhorrent to [Jesus]. Wholeness and spontaneity—these were the marks of the member of the Kingdom.”
As I see it, the "technique of living progress" means to "de-problematize" your spiritual life. If you're already oriented to the spiritual life, just keep living and you'll grow. Be whole and spontaneous. Don't create problems, and don't magnify problems that are small.
The parallels with 157:6 occur from p. 199 to p. 231, though only a few pages were actually used, as far as I can tell (after having read it only once).
“The important thing is not to think much, but to love much; and
so, do that which best stirs you to love.” ~ Saint Teresa of Avila ~
Study group Portal for Readers of the Urantia Book is Under Construction
Please everyone start signing up your study group on the united study group portal at:http://urantiabookstudygroups.
org/home.php . Happy weekend to you. Mo Siegel
The Secret Place
There's a place I go, inside myself,
Where nobody else can be,
And none of my friends can tell it's there—
Nobody knows but me.
It's hard to explain the way it feels,
Or even where I go.
It isn't a place in time or space,
But once I'm there, I know.
It's tiny, it's shiny, it can't be seen,
But it's big as the sky at night . . .
I try to explain and it hurts my brain,
But once I'm there, it's right.
There's a place I know inside myself,
And it's neither big nor small,
And whenever I go, it feels as though
I never left at all.
Dennis Lee (pictured below), From: The Ice Cream Store. Toronto
Thanks for tuning in and reading this far. Please -- Stay tuned!
Dave Holt, Editor/ GGC VP
