How I Found the Urantia Book - Square Circles Publishing

32 How I Found the Urantia Book
My first serious thoughts and curiosity about God occurred around the age of
13, in the mid 1950s. Up to that time I had taken the necessary catechism classes,
but even at that young age I found them to be utterly lacking in meaning. For
my 8th grade graduation I requested a Bible—we did not own one. I now know
that my Thought Adjuster had been busy leading me in my first tentative steps
to learn more about God. By the time I was 15 years old I knew in my heart that
I was not a Catholic. My own sense of what God must be was so much more
than the sterile, rigid doctrines that had been preached to me up to that time.
During my first year in college in 1959 I attended the church services of a variety
of denominations as I continued to look for my spiritual “home.” The next
year my roommate introduced me to Jeffrey Bedell, son of Clyde and Florence
Bedell. We fell in love and married the following year. Jeff introduced me to the
Urantia Book. Clyde and Florence spoke highly of it, and I was very impressed
with Clyde’s devotion to it. During that time, I would occasionally pick up the
Urantia Book, more out of curiosity than anything else, and read at random an
interesting paragraph or a few pages. At Christmas and Easter I would read the
accounts of the birth and death of Jesus. Nevertheless, it didn’t “take” until I
was ready.
In 1968 we purchased a home in Chatsworth, California, near a small Congregational
church. We began attending the Sunday services. Over a period of
a few months, the spiritual truths of the minister’s sermons and conversations,
combined with the way I saw him living and caring for others, was the catalyst
needed to seriously begin my study of the Urantia Book, to learn about Jesus
and our Father.
For so many years my patient Teacher was waiting for me to take this superlative
book in hand, not to dust it, but to learn from it, to delight in its teachings
and satisfy my lifelong quest. What a Godsend! I’m truly blessed and eternally
thankful for this great gift.
PAT FEAREY: 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