Blessing and Ideal Family Part 2 |
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by Rev. Sun Myung Moon |
4) Parental Love Toward Children
Where is the place to receive God's love? Love is one; therefore, the place of love is also one. Are you willing to go forward if there's a place and a way to receive love? That is the position of a child in front of parents.
What is the original motivation for parental love? Love centering upon a man and a woman changes, but love centering upon children born of a couple never changes. Unchanging love is not the result of the horizontal bond of a couple, but it has to do with the origin of the vertical flow. Then who is the vertical subject? It is God.
That love cannot be controlled by a husband and a wife. In its presence, you don't have free choice to act according to your own will. You cannot abandon it whenever you don't feel like carrying it. It is impossible to cut it off. There's no way to touch it through the horizontal bond. That's why parental love is absolutely unchanging.
In democratic society, where individualism is dominating, children murmur about the difference in dimension between the old age and the new age. Even though children change, the heart of parents never changes. It is even true for animals. In loving their babies, parents risk their lives.
Why is parental love precious? Parental love is vertical, but it doesn't conclude as just vertical. Vertical love embraces horizontal love and helps it settle down. Parents play the role of beacon to dissuade children from wrong habits in life.
Vertical love exists surely to create the horizontal love. In this principle, parental love is established by the intensive integration of vertical and horizontal love centering upon God's love. Because parental love is responsible for both the vertical and horizontal elements, parents naturally want to give their precious things to their children. By letting the children receive these gifts in their purity, parents want them to expand horizontally. This is the essence of love.
Parental love is the greatest love in the world. Even people in the top rank of the world are nothing in front of their children. Parental love is unconditional and unlimited in the presence of children. Parental love is the origin of love. That's why orphans who never received parental love long for it most of all. Even if orphans have something to eat and a house in which to sleep, their hearts always hunger and are full of longing because they lack parental love. Even if they lead a joyful life in an orphanage, their time is not truly happy. The little orphans always long for parents even while they sing and dance, are awake or asleep. That's because every human being is supposed to grow up in the bosom of love.
Parental love of a thousand years ago and that of the present time is identical. In the fluctuating course of history, parental love never changes.
Parental love is the primary love. A sound man who grew up with parental love understands what love is. Because children love their parents, they come to learn love from their experience of loving parents. That is the highest joy for children. Without having parents, we never experience love.
One son can receive both man's love and woman's love through the parents. The father represents all the men in the world and the mother represents all the women in the world. In the historical view, the parents are an historical man and woman.
When children want to praise a woman, they compare her with their mother, and when there is a handsome man, children compare him with their father.
Is there a limit to parental love? Parents want to love their children not only for their childhood but for their entire lifetime and for eternity. If a father- and son-relationship is established centering on absolute love, through it will come infinite power, infinite stimulation and something infinitely new. If a father- and son-relationship lacks such a bond, their relationship will surely stop at certain time.
You were born as the children of loving parents. You grew up receiving parental love. Parents always love children whether they are old or young. Parents took at a 70-year-old son with the same standard that they had when he was young. As the age gets older, the heart becomes closer and closer; when the responsibility toward a son gets bigger, the attitude toward him broadens and broadens.
Orphans -- "lonesome children" in Chinese characters -- are miserable because there is no way for them to receive love and no way for them to love in a true sense. Orphans are different in that they haven't received the parental love required in the growing period and they haven't had the heartistic bond to love and sympathize with parents. Therefore, the initial way to have give and take centering upon love is through parents.
Parents' love doesn't just come from the bond created by horizontal experiences, but it springs up from the bone marrow. Parents have the loving mind which can never be cut off or forgotten; therefore, parents love children as long as their life endures. When parents feel the bond of life to the children, parental love naturally springs up. Parents cannot help but loving children, not because of a forced consciousness to love them intentionally, but because of the lineal force of life connecting them. We feel this fact in our daily family life.
If there are four children, do you think parents love them unequally? Do parents give a certain amount of love to the first son and a different amount to the younger ones?
When feeding milk to the babies, no parents treat them unequally. Feeding milk is supplying blood and flesh to the babies, so parents are to supply it equally. A mother feels good to see her baby sucking her breast. She also feels joyful when the baby tries to grab her neck while sucking. Mothers give milk for free to the babies, but they are happy. No mother demands money for giving milk.
Even a very ugly mother who doesn't took feminine at all gets very serious in loving her children. She becomes more serious than anyone else in feeding milk to her baby. In loving her babies, she is second to none.
Even if a mother is facing an agonizing situation, when her baby asks for milk, she right away opens her bodice to feed the baby. When a baby is sucking its mother's breast, making the mother tired, it is almost like stealing the milk, but the mother is happy just to see the baby sucking because there's love. Everything is good in true love. Being in the realm of true love is like being controlled by the typhoon in the arms of the typhoon.
Parents suffer for the children so much that it melts their bone marrow, but they don't feel pain because they love the children. Do they record the price in an account book after giving away their blood and flesh? They rather feel frustrated not to have given everything.
When babies don't suck the mother's breast, mothers get frustrated. It is like drawing out mother's blood and flesh through the umbilical cord. In a way, a baby is the king of thieves. Then why do mothers like to be robbed? Because it is the law of love.
When looking at her baby jumping into her bosom, a mother feels love. By embracing her baby, a mother feels new buds blossoming out of the cosmic atmosphere of peace. So even though the baby gets violent, the mother can have a generous mind and let it go ahead. In a way, the baby is the enemy stealing its mother's blood and flesh through the umbilical cord, but no mother thinks like that. That's because the mother receives the stimulation of new hope and also new stimulation toward her husband through the baby. Something penetrates between them. Nobody can control such a state of heart. When we pledge to work for God and the whole, centering upon absolute love, the strongest standard will be established. Without standing on that foundation, we shouldn't make the promise. East, west, South and north are different, and spring and autumn are different. When a seed planted in the spring can maintain its bond of life until the autumn, it can have the standard to embrace all four seasons. If it doesn't remain as the seed of life, everything will be dispersed.
We can see that parents who have raised up many children have bigger and broader hearts of love. Such parents come to feel that they cannot harm even an enemy. This shows that they stand upon a broader ground with a broader law.
Then what about God? Does He just want a love relationship with a certain individual, eliminating other individuals and the family, tribe, nation and world? If God is a parent, He would want to share love fairly with everybody.
Parents work for their children. No parents work just for their own survival. Imagine parents working as laborers in an agricultural community, picking weeds out of a field, carrying burdens on their backs, or hoeing weeds. They do all that for the children's eternal happiness. The drops of sweat running from the parents' foreheads are not for themselves. When the fruit of sweat and parental love get tangled with each other, new creative history will take place. A new history dwells in the footsteps of laboring parents.
Parents never say, "I want you to know how much I suffered," or "You should shed tears for me because I shed tears for you." They transcend all of these feelings. Only parental love and the love of children can solve such feelings. We can never deny the power of love. Human beings tried solving problems with human power or money, but it didn't work out.
A man's love shouldn't conclude in loving his wife, but it is to extend to loving children. The man loves his children on a much higher dimension than he loves his wife. Man would want to love his children in a new perspective, adding more to the stimulating love toward his spouse. He would desire a love deeper, more serious and more valuable in his parental love toward his children.
When a child who was begotten when its parents were in their sixties dies young, it is an event of extreme despair. If the child is the only begotten son of seven generations, how would the ancestors feel, who wanted the child to succeed to the dominion of seven generations? The ancestors want to receive supreme fortune through their direct lineal descendants. That's why parents want to die when children die young. By the way, Adam was the begotten son of eternity, not of seven generations.
Heavenly Father wanted to accomplish His great plan centering upon Adam's family. How did He feel when Adam died? The parental pain at that moment was far more severe than the pain from the unaccomplished marriage. How do the parents who live with the sole descendant of seven generations feel when the child is on the verge of death? Imagine that your child is dying, gasping for breath in front of you. What would you do? The parents do anything they have to, using all the possible methods, abandoning their dignity. Do you understand such a feeling? When there's a way to resurrect the child, parents don't think of their dignity.
When a husband is resurrected from death, the wife will serve him a thousand times more than before. And parents will risk their lives to gain the possibility to resurrect their dead child. The joy of meeting their child again is much stronger than the pain of sacrifice. Such power is produced only at the place of love. You may have felt such a feeling in your daily life.
Parents, knowing our ideology, are to enjoy and praise the conjugal love of their son and his wife. How can parents be jealous of their daughter-in-law? They should dance with joyful heart when their son joyfully loves his spouse. Love for the daughter-in-law is included in the parental love for the son. When God watches how Adam and Eve love each other, would He scold them, saying, "Get out of my way. You are blocking the traffic"? Even in the middle of an expressway, God would never care about the traffic. He would rather open their way.
Where is the ultimate land of True Parents' settlement? In other words, where is the standard point of God's true love?
New "parental love" is the ultimate settling land of love for humankind. By "True Parents' love," humankind can find the eternal and absolute standard point of true love.
From here, humanistic love will be expanded into higher dimensional love and will be connected to Heavenly true love.
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