Linda "Elianne" Rita Obadia
Born: August 11, 1949 in Brooklyn, New York
Died: July 13, 2019 Tempe, Arizona
Elianne was raised in a Jewish home in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother's family came from France, and her father emigrated from Fez, Morocco. Her mother was a homemaker and her father worked as the accountant in a family fabric business. Elianne was a high school cheerleader and graduated with a B.A. in Speech from the University of New York (Albany.) Her two sisters died before her. None of the three sisters had children. From that family beginning Elianne entered a most eclectic journey. While visiting a cathedral in France as a young woman during travels with her father, she was struck by a wholly unexpected epiphany. The presence of Christ came powerfully upon her, much to her surprise and her father's, and she knelt, overcome in this light. This experience would permanently, but not immediately set her life trajectory.
After a brief period with the Holy Order of Mans, she next found herself taking sannyas vows with the guru from India, Baghwan Shree Rajneesh, later called Osho. She took on the name of Nartana ("Nartzy"), meaning dancer. She spent twenty years with this group and traveled to Germany; Pune, India; and to Oregon where she participated working hard and long hours building a new rural town, Rajneeshpuram whose activities became infamous and that was later dissolved. She became a west coast woman and moved to Marin County, California where she became the managing editor of Viha Connection that provided news about the Osho community. Elianne co-founded the Marin Editors' Group with Netty Kahan, and co-founded the publishing house Origin Press with Byron Belistsos.
Her business of decades, "The Writer's Midwife" was editing books, being a true wordsmith who spoke French, some German, some Hebrew. Many books were successfully published by authors on topics of consciousness, personal discovery, and spirituality. Several commented, "She taught me how to write." Her long hours on video calls with authors had much to do with her special way of "midwifing" the author's thoughts into clear, understandable expressions, sentence by sentence. For just one example among many, she recently completed a years-long project of masterfully editing Living in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness by philosopher Jeffrey Wattles and Stephen J. Post, Cascade Books.
Elianne certainly was fervent seeker of truth. After her time with the Osho community she found herself at a life-changing gathering of lovely new friends in Florida, called "Celestial Nights." At this time she discovered again the presence of God and the reality of Christ Jesus and Machiventa Melchizedek. She was baptized, and took up the study of The Urantia Book, the revelation that became the guiding light for the remainder of her life.
With a great zeal, she became a pastor of The Church of Christ Michael in Marin County, using space provided in the sanctuary of a local church. She attended faithfully over liturgy, music, and the social needs of those who came under her pastoral care. She instituted the weekly "healing seat" where a seeker would sit at the front of the sanctuary and receive the support and spiritual renewal they sought.
Elianne's next move was to Arizona where she lived seven years for the remainder of her life with Joshua J. Wilson. She was at the top of her game in editing and under high demand. They were glorious years of travel, entertaining friends in her home, camping, hiking, biking, gardening, attending fine arts performances, Tempe Community Chorus, tap dancing, Toastmasters, attending and teaching at conferences, arranging gatherings and costume parties, and becoming part of a large surrogate family replete with the birth of grandchildren. For over a decade she conducted a weekly morning prayer call on her conference line. She was a constant on the regular "Mother Spirit video calls" with her sisters and fellow seekers. Elianne was a faithful lector at her Catholic church, dressed beautifully, and beaming forth the words of the gospel each Sunday evening with a clear voice of compassion and conviction.
Elianne was conservative in her politics, outspoken in her beliefs, and deftly moved among many religions and philosophies. She got much joy from donating to the missions and organizations she deemed worthy and important, such as those promoting religious education, family formation and opposing abortion. The mailbox filled up daily with replies.
She recently drew out a map of circles on a big poster board of her many close friends. I would love to name five people that were mutually influential in a big way. But then I would have to leave out 55 others. Her telephone dial pad numbers are worn from use, and she had to replace the alphabet keys on her computer. She loved to keep in contact! But when she helped someone, it was more than a good phone call. She would arrange travel itineraries, funds for seminars, subscriptions, literature. She had the special gift of putting people together. She wanted the "circle to be unbroken" in heaven, and she rejoiced greatly shortly before her death when one hold out came into the fold. When she would walk to the neighborhood park it was not uncommon for her to return with stories or to even bring people into the living room. One night recently in the park at 3 a.m., with her walker in front of her, she counseled a black man who had been kicked out of the house by his wife. All who came in contact with her great big love gained something new in their spirit—she believed in them, and each felt it.
They didn't grow gardens in Brooklyn. She loved her two sisters. Parental relationships were distant. Elianne survived cults, the challenges of making her own living, betrayals and inconstancies, losing her sight and regaining it, and finally loss of health. Everyone agrees she had a massive intellect, and a big heart to go with it. She was also opinionated which worked sometimes in her favor, and other times, not. But we all enter the next life with those soul transcripts only of our useful, learned insights. There is no substitute in all the wide universe for experience, and she had much of it.
Elianne has written a book that introduces those who know the Absolute of all to the idea of deity also as personal. The central feature of her life is her personal and eternal relationship with God, deity, the Trinity, Christ Michael and the Universe Mother Spirit—all as persons, even though they are beyond what wee mortals can conceive of, even as super personalities. This will be her unique contribution; it is in the hands of a publisher now and will be disseminated posthumously along with her poems and other collected writings.
We will all remember Elianne as slim, dancing, with big hair (one friend nicknamed her "Sheep") and with a gorgeous smile. A sweetheart. Enthusiasm for life. She said her purpose in this life was "learning to love." We love her. Our fires will be lit from hers for a long time.
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"Those who believe in him shall have eternal life." (190:5.4)
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Elianne had a great voice, excellent pitch, and had memorized dozens of songs and show tunes. At an international conference in Denver, Colorado, 2017, with microphone in hand, Elianne led the big group in singing this song, "I Believe the Promise."
I believe the promise, about the visions and the dreams
That the Holy Spirit will be poured out and her power will be seen
Well, the time is now and the place is here
and the people have come in faith
There's a mighty sound and touch of fire when we're gathered in one place.
Chorus
I believe that the presence of God is here
There's not one thing that can't be changed
When the Spirit of God is near
I believe that the presence of God is here.
Where two or three are gathered
When people rise in faith
I believe God answers, And his presence is in this place.
No ocean can contain it, No star can rise above
Into our hearts is given, The pow'r of His love.
I believe God answers, And his presence is in this place
(see additional photos below)
Elianne with Dylan on Easter
Pastor Elianne at pulpit in Marin County, California
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Sara Blackstock wrote:
Oh my, another sister being released. I love Elianne's statement. What an incredible blessing to experience the dying process knowing what she knows about what lies ahead for her. And that lies ahead of all of us, in one way or another. It was wonderful to see her so engaged a few months ago in the interview she and Bryon conducted with the unnamed Catholic priest who also has been studying the UB for many years. She was right there. I also remember her in the monologue about being the mother of Jesus. Does anyone else remember that? It was brilliant. I am sending support and comfort to Josh - May his angels uphold him in this very difficult process of seeing the one he loves leave.
She and Brendi lead the way for us.
Love, Sara
Maureen Amato wrote:
Hello dear sisters. Elianne Obadia may be in the last days of her sojourn here on Urantia. The cancer has spread from her brain to her lungs and pancreas. If you want to contact her, you should do so soon. You can email me if you want her cell phone. I don't think she listens to messages, but you can text her and she does answer when she is not busy getting poked for IVs or having visitors. Some people are journeying to see her. If you want to do that, I will send out some instructions for that kind of a visit later today or tomorrow. You can also get updates by going to CaringBridge under her name Elianne Obadia. She asked me to post this message from her, "I have no fear. I welcome what I know is going to be an even more wonderful phase of eternal life."
with love
Maureen
Angels will watch over you tonight
Under the beautiful moonlight
While stars are shining with all their might
Angels will watch over you
Angels will watch over you tonight
While your eyelids are closing tight
Your lips curved upward in peaceful delight
Angels will watch over you
They'll sing to you while you're sleeping
They'll shower you with love
Keeping you safe and warm till you wake at dawn
And greet them all with a smile
Angels will watch over you tonight
They'll all join hands in a circle of Light
Surrounding you for your spirit flight
Angels will watch over you, sweet Elianne
Angels will watch over you.
A Lullaby of Transition
By Sally Annabella
(2016)
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A Tribute to Elianne Obadia contributed by Byron Belitsos
Linda Rita Obadia was born in Brooklyn on August 11, 1949, to a devout Jewish family of five, the third of three sisters. She died of complications of cancer on July 13, 2019 at the age of 69 in Phoenix, Arizona. Her mother was a homemaker and her father, an émigré from Fez, Morocco, was a clothier who worked as an accountant in the fabric industry. Known for most of her adult life as “Elianne” (and also by her spiritual name “Nartana”), she was the last surviving member of her family line. Elianne was known as a fearless devotee of experiential truth, a fervent purveyor of precise thought and heartfelt expression, a selfless in-the-trenches friend, and a crusading minister of the religion of Jesus who “took the Kingdom by spiritual assault.” Her charisma and joyous smile lit her way into the hearts of thousands of people.
Elianne attended public school in Brooklyn where she was a high-school cheerleader among many activities. She received her B.A. in Speech while attending the State University of New York (Albany) amid the unrest of the late 1960s, becoming a spiritual seeker. Elianne relocated with her first husband to Boston, where for several years she was the office manager for the psychiatry department at MIT. After her divorce, she travelled to India to join the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, becoming a fervent follower. Now given the name of Ma Deva Nartana, “Nartzy” became a highly active sannyasin during the classic period of the worldwide growth of the Rajneesh organization, gathering several dozen lifelong friends.
As Nartana, she lived for lengthy periods at the main ashram in Pune, India, later relocating to the organization’s new worldwide headquarters, Rajneeshpuram, in a rural county of Oregon. She was one of thousands who participated in the building of the organization’s elaborate communal center from the ground up. At Rajneeshpuram she often worked in 12-hour shifts, sometimes six or seven days a week, in a massive collective effort at infrastructure construction and socialization around the teachings of Rajneesh. She also became attached to the movement’s editorial group that produced its many books and publications. Elianne appears twice in “Wild Wild Country,” the 2017 Netflix documentary about the commune.
After the dissolution of the commune in 1985, she moved to Marin County, California and lived in one of the organization’s communal homes. She became involved with the group’s Viha Connection newsletter from near its start in 1986. When it grew from a local newsletter into a magazine with subscribers worldwide, she became its editor. After Osho (her guru’s later appelation) passed in 1990, she began to slowly shed her sannyasin identity. Her dear friend Robert Volberg is said to have “dreamed” her new name, Elianne.
She soon began a career as a professional editor of books and other publications under the trade name The Writer’s Midwife, continuing in that work until her passing. Elianne became widely regarded as a highly competent and thorough editor as well as an expert grammarian. In 1996, with her long-time bosom friend and intellectual companion, Byron Belitsos, she became a cofounder and “muse” of the independent publishing house Origin Press. In its inaugural years she worked on a contract basis as the company’s chief copyeditor and office manager. Elianne created the editorial style of the organization and copyedited, among many other works, the bestseller The Center Within: Lessons from the Heart of the Urantia Revelation (1998). This title was one of the first important trade books for the “Urantia” movement, a group of believers in the revelatory Urantia Book. She soon joined this growing movement.
As an independent editor, she specialized in first-time authors, often midwifing them all the way to publication as their developmental editor, copyeditor, and proofreader. She also worked with many established authors, most notably becoming chief editor for A.H. Almaas (pen name of Hameed Ali), the renowned founder of the Diamond Approach to Self-Realization. Among the Almaas titles she edited for Shambhala were Spacecruiser Inquiry (2002), Brilliancy (2006), and The Unfolding Now (2008). Her last major project with Almaas’s organization was The Jeweled Approach: The Biography of the Diamond Approach to Inner Self-Realization (Shambhala Publications, 2018) by Karen Johnson. This was one of her most cherished projects. Another recent project was her masterful copyediting of Living in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness (Wipf & Stock, 2016) by prominent philosopher Jeffrey Wattles. Elianne was also chief copyeditor for many years of Shift: At the Frontiers of Consciousness, the international magazine for the Institute for Noetic Sciences, working with the magazine’s editorial director, Matthew Gilbert. Matthew became a good friend and colleague, and later a housemate with her for many years in Fairfax, California, sharing this home with mutual friend and colleague Byron Belitsos.
Elianne was known to all as a religious genius as well as a passionate devotee to the truth as she understood it. She was an influential and talented evangelist and generous minister whenever and wherever she took a faith position. Following her root teacher, Osho, she laid her key emphasis on the centrality of interior spiritual experience as opposed to any exterior doctrine; yet, she was also an abiding student of religious philosophies and a great variety of spiritual teachings. In the late 1990s, she had a series of profound inner experiences, including celestial contacts, that led her to become a student of The Urantia Book. She formed an inspired lifelong “devotee” relationship with Christ Michael and Mother Spirit, as well as Machiventa Melchizedek, who first presented himself to her in a vision before she knew who he was. She brought her usual liveliness, brilliant intellect, and social charisma to the Urantia movement, cofounding with Byron Belitsos in 1999 the Urantia study group of Marin County, which continues to this day. Both clairvoyant and clairaudient, she was briefly an active participant in the Teaching Mission, a celestial-contact sect within the Urantia movement.
In 2001 she became the chief aide of the Australian priest-prophet Rob Crickett, founder of an innovative worldwide ministry that at the time blended Christian Pentecostalism and Urantia Book teachings. She cofounded and was chief pastor of the First Church of Christ Michael in Marin County (later “Light of the World Ministry”) under Crickett’s leadership, along with co-pastors Peter Hayman and Doug Childers. This was one of the first churches in the world that openly espoused the teachings of the Urantia Revelation; it met in a rented Lutheran church in Fairfax, California, for many years, and followed a Pentecostal-style service and liturgy. At the church she innovated the weekly “healing seat” for hands-on healing of congregants in need of physical, emotional, and spiritual healing, which had life-changing effects on many. She traveled with and ministered extensively for Crickett’s organization and later attempted to be a reformer within that group. She left the ministry around 2010, continuing on as an active member of the Urantia movement. Ever the broad-minded seeker, she was led in a series of unexpected inner experiences to become a member of the Catholic Church. As a convert to Catholicism, she was a “double-belonger” who kept her Urantia affiliation strictly separate. She frequently attended church services and took the sacraments, meanwhile maintaining her deep sannyasin and Urantia friendships. She also ran a weekly telephone prayer group for over a decade, and was a mainstay on the regular “Mother Spirit video calls” with her beloved Urantia sisters.
In 2011 she moved from Marin County to Tempe, Arizona, becoming the close companion until the end of her life of Joshua Wilson, a veteran convener of Urantia Book students in the southwest region. According to Joshua, “these were glorious years of travel, entertaining friends in her home, camping, hiking, biking, gardening, attending fine arts performances, [and also] attending and teaching at Urantia conferences, arranging gatherings and costume parties, and becoming part of a large surrogate family replete with the birth of grandchildren.”
In her closing months of illness she was attended by numerous close friends, and staunchly and devotedly supported by Joshua and his extended family. Bosom friends Olga Babalula and Anastasia Kurilich faithfully ministered to her at her bedside until she peacefully graduated from this world to the next.
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Well of Grace by Elianne Obadia (RIP)
If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink,” you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. —John 4:10
One of the most beautiful stories in the gospels is that of Jesus asking a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well for a drink of water. Anyone who has read this account is aware of how scandalous Jesus’s behavior looked in the eyes of the society of that day. The woman, who is also aware of this, says to Jesus, You’re asking me, a woman—and a Samaritan—for a drink of water?
Jesus is looking into her heart, and he sees her thirst. He isn’t interested in the dictates of convention; here in front of him is a woman who needs the living water of the Spirit, and he offers it to her.
She keeps getting sidetracked, asking questions that have no direct relevance to the needs of her soul. Jesus is always perceptive about the real deal; every day he sees how people get hung up on what’s trivial and miss the revelation of the truth they are craving, which is right in front of them. He understands our human tendency to avoid being confronted with that which will turn our lives upside down. So, he keeps bringing this woman back to the essential, and eventually she gets it. And it is to her that he reveals, for the first time in his ministry, that he is the long-awaited Messiah.
Like this Samaritan woman, when we come to the Well of Grace, we come with everything that our past has told us. We come with questions—the ones that matter as well as those that are decoys. We come laden with our fears or objections, our prejudices or defenses. Sometimes we come with past wounds that need to be healed so we can allow God’s love in again. We come with hopes and dreams and prayers and needs. We come with the desire to be healed and loved, and for others we love and care about to be healed as well. Or maybe we just come with an empty cup, able to receive the water of the Spirit in whatever way God wants to offer it to us.
All are welcome at the Well of Grace. All. Jesus came for every man, woman, and child on Earth. Jesus belongs to all of humanity, not just the part that is called Christian. He waits in the silence for those who seek grace and truth.
Come as you are. If it is forgiveness that you need, he is the author of mercy. If it is wisdom you seek, Jesus is the perfect counselor. If you want to know him more intimately—if you yearn for him to be more personally real and present in your life—he will reveal himself to you in ways that will thrill your heart. If you are trying to discover why you are here on this world—he will open up for you a destiny in him that surpasses anything you could imagine. If you have been hurt in some way and have not been able to find your way back to God, Jesus will heal those wounds and embrace you anew. If you are already involved in projects under his supervision, he will bring you more encouragement, spiritual capacity, support. There is nothing that you need that cannot be found in him.
The thing is, you don’t have to believe that; you can just find it out for yourself. He always comes in the way that each of us can best receive him.
The cup you bring to the Well of Grace can be of any shape; as long as you carry it in sincerity, he will fill it. And if you need to be emptied of what you have too much of, so he can fill you with himself—he’ll do that too.
Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give will never be thirsty, forever.—John 4:13
—Written by Elianne Obadia (December 25, 2015)
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UPDATE FROM ANASTASIA 7/13
On the morning of July 13, at 8:20 am PST, Olga and Anastasia were having a sacred holy slumber party in Elianne's room, anointing her with St. John's Holy Oil and frankincense and holy oil from the room of the Last Supper in Jerusalem. Elianne peacefully slipped out. Olga and Anastasia prayed, anointed and washed the body and dressed her in a beautiful light saffron peach dress with a lacy covering and a cream-colored sequined scarf; she sent a pic which will be up in the journal soon. We're all just watching the day unfold...will post any celebrations anyone wants to organize, here.
Love and Blessings, Anastasia
