The Universal Father, Mother, and Son are the First Family of the Earth and of the Worlds of Time and Space; They Are the First Environmentalists of the Master Universe, the First Green Team

In April 2002 many of us enjoyed an inspiring slide show with music, photos, and poetry that focused mainly on the beauty of nature. There were four parts—the first a series of pictures of persons and landscape accompanied by a song that praised the presence of God seen and experienced in so many places in life. The second vignette was composed of photos of Yosemite Park with classical music that enhanced our appreciation of the beauty of divine pattern that can be seen in natural settings as well as heard in the notes of music created by one of nature's products—human beings. Framing the scenes and music were the words of the great naturalist and environmentalist, John Muir, who with his words painted pictures of the natural world which a blind person could have seen in his or her mind's eye while we with sight saw it on the screen. The third section was a result of the "9/11" tragedy and was a plea in music, photos of people in love and in war, and verbal expression for peaceful avenues in solving the problems of terrorism rather than the violent methods presently being used. The fourth was more personal, with photos of the red rocks of Sedona, works of art found at Cathedral Rock Lodge done by the CosmoArtists of Global Community Communications Alliance, and pictures of some of the community members. These local scenes on screen were accompanied by the live flute playing of our own ShaRu and a poem read that was written by another of our family, Tarenta. The poem spoke of: love for God; a relationship with Him as a divine Father; joyful appreciation for life and destiny He has given us human beings; and the desire to continually grow in compassion and stewardship for all of life, especially other human beings.

It was fitting that the show ended with the reading of this poem that reflected the basic values and attitudes of the individuals who are aligned with Divine Administration. In fact, that entire slide show encompassed what true environmentalism within divine administration principles is about—acknowledgment of the Universal Father as the First Source and Center; appreciation for the beauty of divine pattern as seen in nature and in human personalities; human expression of the many facets of divine pattern through art, music, and literature; and daily acts of love and stewardship for the natural world as well as for human beings and their societies. In other words, an environmentalist in Divine Administration is actively participating in living and expressing the beauty, truth, and goodness of God, the Universal Father.

We refer to God as Father, not just as "First Source" or "Spirit" or "the Universe" or "the Creator" or "Light." God is all of those and so much more. In the Fifth Epochal Revelation (FER) found in The URANTIA Book, the first five papers have to do with God and Paper 1 is entitled "The Universal Father," establishing immediately the nature of God as a person, a parent. It is stated in that paper,

The eternal God is infinitely more than reality idealized or the universe personalized. God is not simply the supreme desire of men and women, the mortal quest objectified. Neither is God merely a concept, the power-potential of righteousness. The Universal Father is not a synonym for nature, neither is he natural law personified. God is a transcendent reality, not merely human's traditional concept of supreme values. God is not a psychological focalization of spiritual meanings, neither is he ‘the noblest work of humankind.' God may be any or all of these concepts in the minds of men and women, but he is more. He is a saving person and a loving Father to all who enjoy spiritual peace on earth, and who crave to experience personality survival in death. (p. 23:05-24:00)

Though we can see an aspect of God, a faint reflection of His beauty in nature, we cannot find Him completely in the physical world of nature. He is found in all levels of universe reality—the physical, the mindal, and the spiritual—and He is expressed in personality.

The second paper in The URANTIA Book is entitled "The Nature of God," and on page 35 we are told, "Even your olden prophets understood the eternal, never-beginning, never-ending, circular nature of the Universal Father." We students of The URANTIA Book know that within that circular nature of God is a complex network of circuitry that has its foundation on the physical circuits of Paradise, the mind circuits of the Paradise Third Source Mother, and the spirit circuits of the Paradise Second Source Son, all unified through the Paradise First Source circuits of personality.

Papers 85 through 92 of The URANTIA Book deal with how religion has evolved on this world through primitive human understanding of reality. Religion starts out as a worship of nature and gradually evolves into a realization that God is not nature, that nature is a creation of God. Eventually, with the help of revelation, religion evolves into a realization that God is a loving personality who does not demand an eye for an eye, or sacrifices, or punishment, or mindless obedience to His law through rote ceremony and ritual.

In Paper 4 entitled "God's Relation to the Universe," there is a section called God and Nature which states,

Nature is a time-space resultant of two cosmic factors: first, the immutability, perfection, and rectitude of Paradise Deity, and second, the experimental plans, executive blunders, insurrectionary errors, incompleteness of development, and imperfection of wisdom of the extra-Paradise creatures, from the highest to the lowest. Nature therefore carries a uniform, unchanging, majestic, and marvelous thread of perfection from the circle of eternity; but in each universe, on each planet, and in each individual life, this nature is modified, qualified, and perchance marred by the acts, the mistakes, and the disloyalties of the creatures of the evolutionary systems and universes; and therefore must nature ever be of a changing mood, whimsical withal, though stable underneath, and varied in accordance with the operating procedures of a local universe. (p. 56:06-57:00)

We environmentalists see the beauty of divine pattern in nature, but we also see its harshness and unpredictability. The earth changes are simply the results of the acts and mistakes of humans and spirit beings who have been out of divine pattern for the last 200,000 years as a result of the Lucifer rebellion. So, in these times of world-wide adjudication we recognize the underlying order of divine pattern in nature, but we also see the chaos of evil manifesting in the natural world as humans continue to act in ways that are ungodly, unlike the ways of the Universal Father.

On page 57 we are informed,

God is not personally present in nature or in any of the forces of nature, for the phenomenon of nature is the superimposition of the imperfections of progressive evolution and, sometimes, the consequences of insurrectionary rebellion, upon the Paradise foundations of God's universal law. As it appears on such a world as Urantia, nature can never be the adequate expression, the true representation, the faithful portrayal, of an all-wise and infinite God.Nature, on your world, is a qualification of the laws of perfection by the evolutionary plans of the local universe. What a travesty to worship nature because it is in a limited, qualified sense pervaded by God; because it is a phase of the universal and, therefore, divine power! Nature also is a manifestation of the unfinished, the incomplete, the imperfect outworkings of the development, growth, and progress of a universe experiment in cosmic evolution.

The apparent defects of the natural world are not indicative of any such corresponding defects in the character of God. Rather are such observed imperfections merely the inevitable stop-moments in the exhibition of the ever-moving reel of infinity picturization. It is these very defect-interruptions of perfection-continuity which make it possible for the finite mind of material man to catch a fleeting glimpse of divine reality in time and space. The material manifestations of divinity appear defective to the evolutionary mind of man only because mortal man persists in viewing the phenomena of nature through natural eyes, human vision unaided by morontia mota or by revelation, its compensatory substitute on the worlds of time.

Nature is marred, her beautiful face is scarred, her features are seared, by the rebellion, the misconduct, the misthinking of the myriads of creatures who are a part of nature, but who have contributed to her disfigurement in time. No, nature is not God.. Nature is not an object of worship.

God is not personally present in nature, though the beauty of His physical pattern is. In Paper 5 "God's Relation to the Individual" in a section called The Presence of God, we're told,

The divine presence cannot, however, be discovered anywhere in nature or even in the lives of God-knowing mortals so fully and so certainly as in your attempted communion with the indwelling Mystery Monitor, the Paradise Thought Adjuster [a fragment of God in each of us]. What a mistake to dream of God far off in the skies when the spirit of the Universal Father lives within your own mind. (ibid., p. 64:06)

Papers 100 through 103 explain what true religion is, and in Paper 101 "The Real Nature of Religion" it is stated,

The contemplation of nature can only reveal a God of nature, a God of motion. Nature exhibits only matter, motion, and animation—life. Matter plus energy, and under certain conditions, is manifested in living forms, but while natural life is thus relatively continuous as a phenomenon, it is wholly transient as to individualities. Nature does not afford ground for logical belief in human-personality survival. The religious person who finds God in nature has already and first found this same personal God in his or her own soul. [Emphasis mine.] Faith reveals God in the soul. Revelation, the substitute for morontia insight on an evolutionary world, enables a person to see the same God in nature that faith exhibits in his or her soul. Thus does revelation successfully bridge the gulf between the material and the spiritual, even between the creature and the Creator, between a human being and God. (ibid., p. 1106:09-1107:00)

Further on in that same paper we are told,

Intelligent people know that they are children of nature, a part of the material universe; they likewise discern no survival of individual personality in the motions and tensions of the mathematical level of the energy universe. Nor can persons ever discern spiritual reality through the examination of physical causes and effects. (ibid., p. 1116:02)

Mathematicians and scientists appreciate the order and beauty of a physical pattern that they observe in the dances of the stars in the skies, in the inter-relatedness and harmony in diverse ecosystems on earth, and in the complex particle patterns seen through a microscope. But many do not see intelligence behind that order and out of those who do, many do not acknowledge a personal God, a Universal Father Creator as the source of the beauty. As a result, most mathematicians and scientists are not real environmentalists according to the standards I mentioned previously. Within Divine Administration an environmentalist must first experience God as a personal loving Father and he or she as His child before any long-reaching, wise action in accordance with divine mind and pattern can be taken.

When you experience such a transformation of faith, you are no longer a slavish part of the mathematical cosmos but rather a liberated volitional son or daughter of the Universal Father. No longer is such a liberated son or daughter fighting alone against the inexorable doom of the termination of temporal existence; no longer does he or she combat all nature, with the odds hopelessly against him or her; no longer is he or she staggered by the paralyzing fear that, perchance, he or she has put his or her trust in a hopeless phantasm or pinned his or her faith to a fanciful error....At last all creatures become conscious of the fact that God and all the divine hosts of a well-nigh limitless universe are on their side in the supernal struggle to attain eternity of life and divinity status. Such faith-liberated sons and daughters have certainly enlisted in the struggles of time on the side of the supreme forces and divine personalities of eternity; even the stars in their courses are now doing battle for them; at last they gaze upon the universe from within, from God's viewpoint, and all is transformed from the uncertainties of material isolation to the sureties of eternal spiritual progression. Even time itself becomes but the shadow of eternity cast by Paradise realities upon the moving panoply of space. (ibid., p. 1117:02-03)

An environmentalist within Divine Administration must see the world and all of life through a spiritized mind, through the eyes of God, understanding His nature, before truly effective action can be taken. We must become cosmic in our world view, thus making it a universe view. How do we discover the nature of God? How do we know how to live within a spiritized mind?In the Paper 2 on the nature of God, we're told that,

…The nature of God can best be understood by the revelation of the Father which Michael of Nebadon unfolded in his manifold teachings and in his superb mortal life in the flesh. The divine nature can also be better understood by persons if they regard themselves as children of God and look up to the Paradise Creator as a true spiritual father.The nature of God can be studied in a revelation of supreme ideas, the divine character can be envisaged as a portrayal of supernal ideals, but the most enlightening and spiritually edifying of all revelations of the divine nature is to be found in the comprehension of the religious life of Jesus of Nazareth, both before and after his attainment of full consciousness of divinity. If the incarnated life of Michael [of Nebadon, Jesus] is taken as the background of the revelation of God to people, we may attempt to put in human word symbols certain ideas and ideals concerning the divine nature which may possibly contribute to a further illumination and unification of the human concept of the nature and the character of the personality of the Universal Father. (ibid., p. 33:01-02)

In the fourth part of The URANTIA Book, "The Life and Teachings of Jesus" we see how Jesus as a human being with a human mind that is spiritized and in harmony with the divine mind of the Universe Mother Spirit was a true environmentalist within Divine Administration principles of his day. From childhood on he was a naturalist, studying and appreciating nature. As a child he spent much time alone or with his siblings and friends walking in the hills. In fact when, at the age of fourteen he became the father/elder brother of his home as a result of his father's death, he took his brothers and sisters for nature strolls every Sunday afternoon. He was a great storyteller and told them stories about nature and animals, and as a young man in his twenties taught his spiritual apprentice, Ganid, a seventeen year-old youth from India, about nature and her various moods. From childhood on, Jesus abhorred the use of animals in religious sacrifice because he realized the incongruity of a loving Universal Father requiring sacrifices in order to be appeased, and he was sickened by the slaughter of innocent animals. In his public ministry, he often used nature in parables to teach higher spiritual truths. He taught his apostles to pray amidst the quiet surrounding of nature and often used the solitude of the hills and shores to teach and preach. He himself spent days, weeks, months, by himself in the wilderness to commune with the Universal Father and reflect upon his life here on Urantia (earth).

Never did Jesus go against the natural laws that he had set up as Creator Son of this universe Nebadon. Living as a human being on this world for thirty-six years, no law of nature was modified, abrogated, or even transcended. In any seeming miracle, the only abrogation was of time in association with the celestial personalities who aided. He did not try to conquer nature or deplete it. He tread lightly wherever he walked, and he lived simply, never consuming more than his simple physical needs. His lifestyle should inspire us all to, as Mahatma Gandhi said, "Live simply so that others may simply live." That brief and yet simple statement reflects a lifestyle of stewardship for all of life, human and non-human. It reflects mindful living, making choices moment-to-moment from our higher minds and hearts as children of the Universal Father, taking personal responsibility for our own decisions and actions. It requires that we are not only scientists and artists but compassionate, caring human beings who are true religionists with a cosmic perspective.