The Words of Sun Myung Moon from 1987
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The Words of Sun Myung Moon from 1987 |
Father,
Mother, and Hyo Jin Nim at the 16th ICUS in Atlanta, November 1987
How old is the Unification Church? Just as old as we are. The Unification Church has grown with us. Even though it is young, its background is immense, as long as history itself. During this long human history, people have struggled and suffered from ignorance, constantly wondering what life was all about but getting no answers. They just kept hoping, waiting, and suffering. Now, amazingly, in this very short period of time since the Unification Church came into being, we have come to know everything about mankind -- where we come from, where we are going, and what the future holds for us.
We have come to understand precisely God's purpose of history: to perfect one person. It has taken a very long time for a man to be perfected -- to achieve unity of his mind and body. Yet human beings are born to become perfect. After a person's mind and body become one, he or she will seek a spouse, and in their unity they will find perfected love, which is the goal of the human being. No one knew before what perfection meant, but now we know clearly.
Who is the master of love? God. Since we are not our own creators, we cannot be the originator of love but must seek the cause of love and connect with that. Our love should go up to meet God's love.
When man wants to get near to God, man should circle around God, while God stays at the center. Although God moves around enough to create harmony, the subject cannot and should not move around as much as the object.
The relationship between a man and a woman is limited to the horizontal plane, like the joining of East and West. Then how can this horizontal relationship between man and woman become vertical? East and West must unify, meeting precisely in the center. Then a vertical relationship with God descends down, and the three points meet at the exact middle.
What is it that God, Adam, and Eve want? They all want true love. But in order to achieve that true love, first a man and a woman must grow to attain perfection. As they grow, God's expectation also grows, and He starts to come down to meet them. Since God has male characteristics and female characteristics, He can become one with both the woman and the man. When He meets them, a revolving motion starts. Even if this motion is very rapid, it cannot spin out because God stays right at the center axis.
If the axis were not perfectly vertical, disaster would follow. What insures that the axis is straight? God, Adam, and Eve are unified in wanting children. The only way to achieve the straight vertical axis line is for the children to cherish their parents more than themselves. And likewise, the parents must love their children more than they love themselves. This is why we need to respect, love, and cherish Father and Mother. Parents must do the same for their children.
All four positions -- God, man, woman, and children -- want to connect to the stable, central axis. Only by centering on this can they maintain an eternal relationship without spinning away and getting lost. Everyone needs that constancy. History can then continue on harmoniously by extending this straight line of descendants. It will go on and on without end, and as it becomes longer, the four position foundation becomes immense.
Especially American women must understand that you should love your husbands and your parents more than yourself. American young people generally care only about horizontal relationships. They say, "Well, I'm happy just to have this one person to love. I don't care about having children, and I don't care about my parents." If they continue to disregard the vertical axis line, they will spin out of the center and lose everything.
God needs and cherishes this four position foundation. Originally, Adam, Eve, and their children were to recognize their need for it and uphold it very carefully. Since this is the blueprint of creation, our original mind impels us to seek marriage, without anyone telling us, because innately we want to fulfill the purpose for which we were born.
Happiness is everyone's final goal. What is a happy woman? She is the one who has God, a loving husband, and loving children who all live together centered on this axis. Once you achieve unity centered on the axis of true love, you are totally free to go anywhere and inherit anything you desire.
Another way of describing true love is: True love is what makes God, man, woman, and children settle down happily. Ideal true love is right there among them. Why are we sad when we aren't with our parents? Because we were designed to live in relationship with them. Why is the wife who loses her husband unhappy and sorrowful? Because she was destined to achieve true love together with him.
Sometimes a married couple has no children. They are missing a great deal. Why? Because they were created to have children.
When a person is 100 percent fulfilled, supported by the four poles of this four position foundation -- spouse, children and God -- then the universe will protect him. When a person is only 90 percent perfect, the universe pushes him 10 degrees off of center, saying, "You are peripheral, you must live on the side." To the degree the universal power pushes a person out, to that degree he is sorrowful. What if he is only 20 percent perfect and 80 percent imperfect? The universe will really chase such a person out. Being on the periphery is very painful, because we were originally meant to be in the center.
Since God operates through the Principle, God must have some criteria for evaluating a person. Though we may like to think that no criteria are necessary, God says, "This is the standard. If you meet the standard, the universe will cherish you. If not, you'd better adjust yourself or you are simply not going to be able to stay in the center:"
Three generations -- man and woman, children, and grandchildren -- are meant to live together, all unified with God, who forms the center of all three generations. Why is the number 7 the number of perfection? Because all six points -- the two poles of each of the three generations -- connect to the central line, the seventh point. The statement that the number 7 is the number of perfection is based on love.
If you have dominion over this number, you can say anytime, "Grandma, I want to see you," and no matter what she is doing she will come to you. Likewise, the moment your grandfather hears your voice he will jump up, because his mind is always with you. Everybody is attracted instantly because you are centered on the axis of love and harmony.
True
Parents offer a prayer on Mt. Mani, Kang Hwa Island, Korea, on
October 22, 1987. Left to right, Rev. Jae Suk Lee, Father, Mother,
and Rev. Chung Hwan Kwak
The person who lives in this way, and fulfills this formula, can go absolutely anywhere in the universe and be welcomed. That's happiness. You can even steal up to the throne of God, which you ordinarily can't do, and sit right beside Him for a moment, and God will not push you away. You are entitled to His protection. No matter what you do to God, He will be happy. Then people will really become curious and ask you, "Tell me, I want to have what you have. What is your secret?" You will reply, "It's too precious to say loudly," and whisper, "True, ideal love. If you have this, you can be like me, too."
The universe is governed by strict laws. We have to abide by the physical laws in order to make machines work; the same with love. We often think, "Oh, love is not like a machine. With love you can do anything your mind commands, and still God will be happy." No. God has the most rigid standard when it comes to love. If He didn't, how could the universe be harmonized?
To measure love, we need some sort of unit of measure. This formula I have just described is the unit that measures love. Now that you understand this, could you ever send your parents to an old folk's home? You women, if you felt for some reason that your husband didn't suit you, could you divorce him? If you were to divorce him, you couldn't achieve this formula. How else are you going to find happiness? Divorce is like the act of abortion. Staying married together will bring forth all these goals, but by divorcing you will destroy the parents, the children, the ideal relationship, and even destroy a part of God.
Ask your children, if you have them or are planning to, whether they would like you to divorce your husband. And what would your physical parents think of the idea of your divorcing? You already know in your original mind that nobody would want you to go through with such a thing. It would make everybody sorrowful, including yourself. But you go ahead and sign the divorce papers, because you don't perceive the tragic implications of that act.
Have you ever seen or imagined any unmarried woman who throughout her life just lived alone, caressing her own body, saying, "Oh beautiful me! I'm such a happy person"? Is such a woman really happy? It's unthinkable. In reality, such a woman is inconsistent; she doesn't want to marry but she still would probably like to have a child. And this eccentric woman will no doubt think about her parents sometime, even for a brief moment. Does anybody really want to be an orphan and live all by himself or herself? Why does every person want children and parents? Because every man and woman is created to go higher and higher up to where God is.
One of the many ways to describe an ideal man is this: He is a man who could creep into his grandfather's bed at night and his grandfather would wake up and say, "Oh, are you here? Please, you are welcome to stay." He could creep into his grandmother's bed and say, "Grandma, I want to sleep here," and his grandmother wouldn't mind at all. He could go to his wife's bed and his wife would be completely happy to see him. He could go to his children who were fast asleep and climb into their bed, and his children would wake up and say, "Oh, father, is it is you? Please stay with us," and then would go back to sleep. That kind of man, welcomed everywhere, is an ideal man. An ideal man could even creep into God's bed and God would never kick him out.
Another description: Let's say an ideal man is sitting right here. Whatever he is doing, do you think he is lonely? No, because his grandmother all of a sudden rushes in, wanting to stay with him. It just makes her happy to be around him. His wife wants to come to him too, and circle around him, because she is completely happy when she does that. All his children want to be around him and never want to leave him wherever he goes. Everybody wants to stay around such a person, because he creates a center point of love. God will come and put an axis through him. Where the ideal man is, that is where you find the axis. If you want to meet a lot of people, you know where to find them, because they will all be hanging around that person!
Does the family of an ideal man have to make an appointment to see him? Some American couples make a kind of contract: "You can visit me on such and such a day, but don't visit me on any other day." But day or night, any day of the year, you can go to the ideal man and be welcome. Ask Mother whether she is an ideal woman and Father is an ideal man. An ideal man may even enter the room with his backside first, and still an ideal woman would welcome him, because they are both ideal.
If I go to Korea, your mind would also be in Korea, imagining what I am doing every hour of the day. When I am away from America, this country feels empty to you, because it has no center. When there is no center to go through, and you try to give something out, nothing comes back. But when you are connected to the center, no matter what you give out, a response always comes back. That's the beauty of the center.
The topic of this morning's sermon is: "Thank you for protecting us!' We need many levels of protection. If my whole family is protecting me, I'm so much happier than if only my spouse is protecting me. Better yet is when my whole clan or even the nation is protecting me. If God's personal protection is upon me, there is nothing more I can expect, and I am the happiest person. How do we get that protection? If we treat the people of our parents' generation in the same loving way as we treat our own parents, if we treat all men and women around our age as if they were our very own brothers and sisters, and if we love all children as our own -- in short, if we are the kind of person who can love all levels of people -- wouldn't the universe protect us? Yes, it would. There is no race that doesn't like Rev. Moon. Why? Because he has followed this very logical formula and fulfilled it.
Once I went to Germany. The German people are generally very antagonistic toward me. I was eating in a restaurant, and I saw an old, very ugly woman sitting at a nearby table, eating her supper. My imagination went right to work. I imagined her eating a bowl of long Korean noodles. You know how it is to eat Korean noodles -- you can't just take bite-sized pieces into your mouth; you have to slurp them up, and the other half of the noodles in your mouth are still in your bowl. I imagined myself going over and sitting opposite her and taking from the bowl into my own mouth the other end of the noodles that were in her mouth, and together we would finish the bowl of noodles at exactly the same time. I said to myself, "Could I do such a thing? Of course I could." If I had actually done it, I know that woman would never be able to detach herself from me as long as she lived.
When I first came to America and saw people with white skin and blue eyes and blonde hair, I thought they looked very strange, and the way they acted seemed even more strange. I thought, 'Am I ever going to love these people as much as I love the Korean people? Can I love them as much as my own mother and father?" In the beginning I pushed myself to like the American people, and gradually I came to love them. I knew there was only one way to develop a relationship with them and that was to cherish every person and make everyone as high as they wanted to be. If I met a woman who thought she was like God, then I treated her as if she were God. She was born to be a daughter of God, after all, so it wasn't hard.
A practical lesson can be learned from this. If you see someone on the street who looks ugly to you or somehow makes you feel, "Ooh, I hate that person," buy something for him or do something out of the ordinary for him right away so your bad feelings toward him can be erased. Never let that hatred go past without doing something to heal it. If you don't and that person just disappears into the crowd, it will take you one more year to get over that particular problem you had with him.
When I came to America, the American people pounded on me and attacked me over and over again. An ordinary person could never have endured such circumstances and would certainly have left the country. But I tried very hard to love them, and now, even with all the memories of that suffering, I can stay here and continue to work for the benefit of this nation. The American people might not protect me, but the universe protects me. American Moonies must be indignant over the way I have been treated, and feel, "I will love Father 100 times more than other Americans have disliked him." At the same time, you should never hate Americans for what they did. Even though you don't feel like loving them, still you have to try. Otherwise, America will simply drop away from God's providential course. Neither God nor we want that to be the fate of America.
God cherishes most the one who cares about the fallen world more than his own family. However, there is no pain greater than being hated by the very person you love. I love the Americans, but the Americans seem to hate me as much as I love them. How can I tolerate this hatred? I always keep in mind, "If I can persevere through this, a gift as big as the universe is waiting for me. Someday everyone will come around me, including all those people who now hate me." That's the kind of gift God wants to give to His own son. This illustrates the old maxim: By enduring the beating now, we can recover all the lost people and property of God.
During my first and second tours around this country, I gave everything I had in my effort to love Americans. That Satan can never deny. A heart filled with God's love can never be touched by Satan. While I was very busy loving the people, and the people were equally busy trying to oppose and slander me, time passed, and now they are beginning to recognize my value, through the emergence of such things as The Washington Times, Insight, and The World and I. Those very people who opposed me furiously are now shedding tears, saying, "Rev. Moon, I love you" However, all this time, how did I survive? Who was protecting me? The universe. And who protects the universe? God. And who protects God Himself? Ideal love. God is absolutely destined to claim ideal love back.
If one person is trying to give out love, and another person is trying to oppose and persecute him, which one will be pushed away eventually? Those who persecuted me and had me put in jail thought, "Aha! Now he is in jail and can't move!" But on the contrary, after I was imprisoned, I soared to a higher level than ever before, and those who put me in jail went lower and lower. This is simply because of the law of the universe.
In the three years since I was in Danbury, America has improved remarkably quickly. People in high positions are asking my advice on how to solve world-level problems. In the midst of all the confusion, we know that the formula I have described can solve any problem, given enough time.
Is this formula of unconditional giving easy or difficult to follow? For those who are willing to apply this formula at the risk of their life, the way is easy. But for those who say, "I want to preserve my life, so I'll just do whatever I can," the way will be very difficult. It's paradoxical but nevertheless true that those who are willing to die will live and those who want to live will die. My experience proves that true.
I have just described the simple formula that can change the entire universe from negativity to positivity. Where do we practice this formula? We can practice it right in our daily life. We don't have to travel even one step to begin. If we live this way of life, the world will become heaven, and God and mankind will be liberated. If we don't live this way of life, we will have created hell. This is an amazing discovery. You are all very intelligent people. Don't you think it will work? Most people thought I would never amount to anything, but look at what is happening today.
Now we know that our primary struggle is not an external but an internal one. I have to fight within myself and win over myself, then winning over other people will be relatively easy after that. Just as Jesus taught, "Heaven is in the midst of you." We know that hell is right here within me as well.
If you follow this way unswervingly, even being willing to die to achieve this goal, you will be successful. If you continue to live just as everybody else in the world, you will go straight down. When you adhere to this principle on all levels -- family, clan, nation, and God's level -- you will be protected by God and by the universe, and the making of heaven is guaranteed. March on with absolute confidence. I am giving this promise and blessing to you.
People ask me, "Father, where is your source of stamina, your source of success? How could you have risen so high under such tremendous persecution?" It is because I use this formula. You can inherit it because you are the children. Wherever you go, no matter what the circumstances or how many millions of people come against you, you will succeed, because God is stronger than they are.
Therefore, we must be deeply grateful to God, because He is protecting the Unification Church members. You must know that you now have a failing grade, but if you try harder, you will achieve a passing grade. No matter what it costs, you must pledge to follow this way. Those who pledge, raise your hands. May God bless you.