by Saskia Raevouri (1998)

HAVING LIVED in several different countries, I know firsthand that what is considered perfectly normal in one culture is regarded as absurd in another. As a child I moved from Holland to Australia, and was set free with all my Dutch quirks in an Australian school. Everything about me was considered foreign and strange by my Aussie peers. By the time we emigrated to the United States nine years later, I had successfully eradicated all traces of Dutchness from my person and passed admirably for a fair-dinkum Aussie. Arriving in Los Angeles, I soon discovered that I was no longer required to be an Aussie. Once again, my odd speech, dress and mannerisms set me apart as an alien, and I immediately got down to the business of becoming a replica of Sandra Dee. No sooner had I transformed myself into a passable facsimile than I was sent to school in Holland. “At last I’m going home to be with my own kind!” I thought, and was shocked when my Dutch schoolmates looked upon me as an American curiosity.

So you see that each regards the other as peculiar—and I was dealing with three “white” cultures!

Hugging, for instance, is a harmless practice. Most Urantia Book readers hug each other when they get together, whether they know each other well or not. Yet, for a while I lived in a country in Asia where hugging was not a common mode of expressing affection, where people didn’t openly touch each other in public. If these people saw a group with a Big Blue Book hugging each other all the time, they might say, “That book is not for me.”

“No revealed religion can spread to all the world when it makes the serious mistake of becoming permeated with some national culture or associated with established racial, social, or economic practices.” [ 2064]

“The gospel of the kingdom was to be identified with no particular race, culture, or language.” [2064]

Rather than form a church just yet, let’s do whatever we can to get the book into the hands of educated people in all the countries of the world. Let’s exercise patience and restraint now, and not try to see results in our own lifetime—we can always follow the growth of the revelation from our mansion world vantage point. Do we want to look back in three hundred years and see that the Urantia movement failed because it had become a Western religion? Let’s forget about ourselves and consider the needs of the rest of the world, where they still require books and translations. For our next vacation, why not pick an obscure destination and place a book or two in the local library? Those who are ready for the teachings will be led to find the book, in the same way that we were each led to the book we found.

Picture the midwayers, how they work invisibly and anonymously behind the scenes. It would be ideal if we could remain a low-key brotherhood until the book has reached the rest of the world, where they may be ready for it but not if it comes with a peculiar flavor dressing. When that day comes we can jump up and down and hug the daylights out of one another. Let’s be far-sighted, not short-sighted.