[tmtranscripts] "Try a Little Tenderness"

[Gerdean]

DATE: February 8, 1996
LOCATION: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
T/R: Gerdean

Urantia Book Study
Paper 3. The Attributes of God
(Including the "inevitabilities" on Page 51)

TEACHER SESSION:
Try A Little Tenderness

TOMAS: Good afternoon, faithful following, as we all follow Him who sent us.

Beloved friends, it pleases me again to be with you, to enjoin with you in our configuration of study and sharing that which has worth in your life and which will manifest in worth in the lives of others.

We have been on a vigorous path of absorption of truth and experientials and I am going to back off in our strenuous pursuit somewhat; not that we might grow trivial, no, but that we may access and appreciate some of the refinements of the spirit, in order that you may appreciate the gentle qualities of your spirit reality as well as those strengths of character which pull you forward and earmark you as a valiant soldier of the circles. And therefore today, precious ones, I will call to your attention a characteristic, a quality of divinity, which you yourselves can sincerely understand and appreciate, and that has to do with that of tenderness.

As parents, as elder siblings, as owners of pets, even as mortals indwelling the tabernacle of flesh, you have an understanding and appreciation for various degrees of tenderness. When you exercise robustly, your muscles grow tender. In that light, then, today, let us nurture ourselves in tenderness of the mortal condition, the child of God who grows weary and who hurts, who calls upon the Third Source and Center for ministry in healing of tender wounds, the solace of Michael and his Divine Minister, to assure us of their tender mercy on our assaults upon ourselves and on others.

Embrace tenderness beginning with your own self, your own soul, for your soul, although strong, is also tender. It is young. Your understanding of your faith status is tender, for sometimes you are confident and sometimes you flounder and so herein you are tender. In your growth, then, remember tenderness. Be always tender with yourself and with others in your physical dealings, in your emotional dealings, in your mental dealings, and in your spiritual dealings.

Tenderness will take the edge off of your striving and allow your ascent to become an easy climb to the farther view, rather than a death-defying exercise. Tenderness with yourself does not connote necessarily glossing over your shortcomings, but is in tender appreciation for your journey yet to come, for your status again as a growing thing.

When you observe your fellows, observe them now with tenderness. Even as they spitefully abuse you, hold an eye on tenderness of their ignorance, and be joyous in the prospects of things to come. Tenderness in your dealings with others connotes sincerity, but tenderness in your attitude lives in your relationships as a godlike quality. Mistake not tenderness for sentimentality, and do not regard my words as sanction to regard everyone as an infant needing coddling, but even as you are tender, so are they tender, an aspect indeed of Godlikeness.

We read, we absorb, we learn as to the all-powerful, all wise facet of God and we see nothing of his tenderness except as we feel his tenderness envelop us in our private moments with Him. We overlook the gentle qualities and attributes of God as we behold in awe his power and wonders. What makes Him meaningful to you, however, is that He is merciful and gentle and tender with you, His Child, and you may carry this legacy into your arena and manifest tenderness also.

As a muscle that has been overworked, apply the healing balm of, the salve of tenderness, to those who strain at gnats. As a heart reveals itself as being broken, or in pain, return their mood through tenderness and reintroduce their heart to the tender love and appreciation of divinity. As your fellows have fallen and have hurt themselves and are in shame of their frailties, embrace them tenderly as Father embraces you, and lift them up in tenderness from that place. Be tender of your own wounds as well.

I will offer an odd assignment this week and if it offends you, pluck it out of your frame of reference. But this week, if you would, bring yourself tenderly to this precipice of faith and forgive Father for the times when you have not felt His tenderness, for those times when your overworked muscles strained unmercifully, in your mind. Forgive the Father.

Of course, it is an entirely presumptuous and arrogant attitude in the intellectual sense, but in the soulful context of camaraderie and understanding between yourself and your Creator Parent, sidle up to Him, bringing your tenderness of spirit, and with a quiet hand on His shoulder, forgive Him for those ills which you have experienced, that He has caused you to experience in order that you might learn.

This peculiar assignment, dear ones, is intended to provide you with a perspective on how truly tender the relationship is between you and your Parent, how gentle and soulful and meaningful this merger is. If you have this experience in the next few days, if you allow this exercise, it would lend for some interesting discourse among you, again reflecting a tenderness and a patience and a forbearance you might not have realized possible.

There is an old Christian song, "softly and tenderly Jesus is calling," and so many of you have such a sense of urgency, as if an evil were nipping at your heels, as if you must run to secure yourselves within the walls of Havona before the sun goes down. And yet you are bidden to come forward, to come into this holy place softly and tenderly.

It is not necessary to march in the gate and show God how good you are, how on time you are, how noble you are by showing up. Part of this attitude is anger at God in the fissures and crevices of your conditioning. And so talk it over with Him, by experiencing sufficient camaraderie and tenderness with yourself, in conjunction with Him, that you can experience forgiveness together. And then, children, go forth in tenderness and greet one another.

***************

My lesson is complete for today. I am glad to be with you. How are you? Have you questions or subjects for discourse on the table in your minds?

Celeste: Do you think we fully understood page 51 today? I find this so fascinating and can learn so many different ways.

TOMAS: It has been said of the text that it is presented in such a way as to provide different levels of understanding. It well may have to do with your level of growth as to what you are capable of understanding at any given time, but at any given juncture in your growth, the inevitabilities outlined are truly worthy of comprehension, and this comprehension is more than intellectual. They are designedly active, designed to activate your sensibilities in terms of experiential.

In other words, you may philosophize about the meaning, but unless and until you have feelingly experienced it, it is a mere mental exercise, and so as you experience it, much like morontia mota, you then gain a greater appreciation for your intellectual understanding. As you were discussing today, social inequalities are not exclusively related to financial inequalities, and the resultant conversations regarding inequalities is expansive, for what one individual can readily see as an inequality has perhaps not occurred to another, and so in sharing your perceptions, you share your knowledge and this increases your capacities to aspire, even to wisdom.

And so, no I do not believe that you entirely understand what you read today. I believe that there is more substance there that you will enjoy for a long time.

Celeste: I think so, too. I hope so. It's more exciting to know that there's a lot more to be gained from it.

TOMAS: Indeed, it is one of the exciting facets of this new revelation, for although it is disconcerting at first to discover that the concept of "one God" has gone from a simple concept of one God to the hosts of space with, as you are reading in your studies, many titles, for many different facets of function. It was easier perhaps when you believed you died and then went at once through the pearly gates to see God with his scepter and the angels with their halos, but by the same token, eternal bliss could become tedious and dull, and now you see that you get the best of both worlds: you get increased perfection and eternal service, an unending university of discovery. Thus we evolve. Yes.

Celeste: I can't believe that we don't have a million questions for you.
TOMAS: You are perhaps savoring tenderness.

Hunnah: Savoring lunch.

TOMAS: Which falls tenderly upon your stomach.

Hunnah: You like that word! The word I was thinking of when you were talking, when you used tenderness, was fragility. And when something is fragile, it takes a very light touch to encourage it to grow in the direction it will otherwise it can be overwhelmed or frightened. Could it be you have overwhelmed or frightened us? Or we're not getting close enough up on that lap that we've been invited on?

TOMAS: No, I do not perceive that at all. 

Hunnah: Okay.

TOMAS: I do perceive, however, some reluctance to become that intimate with yourself. As you regard yourself as fragile, you are picturing yourself as if you were glass or something that could break, but in tenderness, there is no allowance for breaking, only bruising; more malleable, perhaps less dramatic, but certainly substantive and qualitative. You are not accustomed to thinking of yourself, perhaps, as tenderloin or a tenderfoot. You think only of babies as tender.

Celeste: I always think that one has to be very strong to be tender. One has to have learned a lot and gained a lot of strength to be tender toward others.

TOMAS: It is not necessary, for you see, even the childlike personality knows tenderness. A little girl can go up to a grown-up who is grieving and comfort the adult tenderly, with a tender compassion, and she is certainly not strong in terms of experience or wisdom.

Loreenia: Just innocent.

TOMAS: In her childlikeness she is tender. It is perhaps a commentary on your society that says that only those who are strong can afford to be tender, for many tender-hearted individuals are taken advantage of or glossed over as being insignificant, and so many of you, if not all of you, have your dukes up, and therein is why I suggest you ...

Hunnah: Try a little tenderness. There was a popular song years ago called, "Try a little tenderness."

TOMAS: Yes, try it. The song wafts to the mind of the transmitter, of course, that women get weary wearing the same shabby dress, and perhaps your understanding of tenderness is to treat yourself by going shopping (group laughter) for in some ways it nurtures and caters to that in you which is wounded and bruised. But it is costly!

It is referenced in the text that you may adorn the person, but that will not satisfy the longings of the soul, and in that context then, although "when the going gets the tough, the tough go shopping," to assuage that internal tenderness, shopping is not the solution. The solution is in directly accepting the true tenderness and not putting a Band-Aid on it, not putting a new dress on it, not sidestepping the need for tenderness with a material dressing.

Celeste: Often there's a pretense at tenderness, too, that is not really there. It's a front.

TOMAS: It is a common technique of deception, in fact, and this is why I say to utilize your sincerity and why I suggest it is not mere sentimentality, nor is it nor should it be reserved as an attitude for babies. Big people do need tenderness, but as your song also says, "Big boys/ big girls don't cry" and, in truth, they do. They sometimes need to cry. Therein is the need to show tenderness, to embrace the mortal, to embrace the personality in acceptance of the struggle, of the difficulty, of the disappointment, of the experience.

I will also point out that it is not necessary, even, that a person have an excuse to feel bad. Sometimes, in the human, a "bad feeling" will just simply waft in and over the mechanism, allowing it to feel a certain depletion of energies, and the mind can quickly, in defense of its nether state, feel that something must be wrong; there must be a reason for this feeling. It is not the case. Sometimes just sitting there, allowing time for tenderness to come upon you is adequate. Did that make sense to you?

Leah: I understand you to say, "Embrace your anguish."

TOMAS: It may be interpreted that way. I would not have chosen those words, but as I observe the configuration of those words, I would agree, for as the "bad feeling" is embraced, it is loved, it is accepted, it is owned, and it is then allowed to be dissolved, absorbed, melted away, no longer concrete and worrisome, no longer a rock but now thousands and thousands of grains of sand that can be washed away. However, to tell someone to embrace the "angst"-- 

Leah: Anguish.

TOMAS: Either would apply. -- is perhaps a brutal suggestion on its face.

Celeste: Tomas, you seem so serious today. We like it when you bring some humor with you.

TOMAS: I am going to shift the blame. (Group laughter) I am also going to be tender of my transmitter. As she is elevated in body, mind and spirit, I am, too, for certain obvious reason. And as she is weary, thus am I. And so I ask you to be tender of us both, as you are tender with yourself.

Celeste: I can't think of two people that we would rather be tender with.

TOMAS: Do! For there are many who are in far greater need! It is not uncommon for you to look upon your own loved ones first, for a practice of such an intimate emotion and attitude, and that's a good place to start, but don't stop there. Be tender of strangers also, and of "the enemy." Tenderness is a form of prayer.

I am going to call it quits for today, so that you can enjoy each other and entertain yourselves at leisure. This little one is tuckered, as are you, perhaps.

Celeste: Full.

TOMAS: I have cautioned you about that before, but you don't listen.

Group: Yes we do listen to you, Tomas!

TOMAS: I know you do! In fact, it is because you listen so well and you grow so vigorously that you wear yourselves out, and so suckle yourselves. I look forward to our next gathering. Do let me know where and when we are to convene. I will try to catch the correct bus. 

Our love to you all. Farewell.












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