How Sun Myung Moon began

Michael Balcomb
August 2013

In his best-selling autobiography, As a Peace Loving Global Citizen, Father Moon explains that when he first encountered God, the Heavenly Parent, and Jesus, he began to receive the revelation of the Divine Principle. It was a dramatic and, in many ways, astonishing experience. He didn't encounter the serene, peaceful God that he had learned about in his Presbyterian Sunday school. Instead, he met a desperate, tearful parent, who explained how He lost His children in the Garden of Eden and has been looking for them ever since.

And then there was Jesus, not the quiet parable teller of the Gospels that he imagined growing up, but the mercurial firebrand who overturned the money changers' tables in the temple and drove out the traders with a whip; the prophet who spoke truth to power; the Jesus who asked hard things of his disciples and wouldn't and couldn't take no for an answer. He was so different from the idea of Jesus in Sun Myung Moon's imagination that for a while he doubted if it was real.

When Father Moon sought to verify and understand what he was hearing from the Bible, it wasn't easy either. The comforting passages he'd turned to in the past suddenly seemed to contain challenging new meanings. There were shadows of ambiguity in the resurrection message that weren't there before. Men and women of faith that he'd understood to be the great saints were revealed to have very human failings. All the while, he felt the pressure of Jesus and his Heavenly Parent calling him to a very special mission: to continue the work of Jesus to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth in substance. At the beginning, the young Sun Myung Moon really wanted to say, "No." He could think of a hundred reasons why he was not qualified, not sufficiently educated, not old enough, not capable, not the right person, etc.; yet, he couldn't bring himself to deny the call, as he explains:

"My encounter with Jesus changed my life completely. His sorrowful expression was etched into my heart as if it had been branded there, and I could not think of anything else. From that day on I immersed myself completely in the Word of God."

As we look back now on a long life well lived, it's important to consider how Father Moon began. At that time, Korea in the 1930s, he was confined by boundaries on all sides. For starters, the country was poor, and food was often scarce. Every year, families rationed themselves on a meager diet, waiting for the first crop of spring. Many didn't make it: Five of his siblings died in childhood.

The whole country had been under Japanese imperial occupation for over a generation. Koreans were discouraged from using their own names, or even their own language. Schools were poorly equipped, and for those children lucky enough to go to school at all. Their choice was between a traditional, patriotic school that focused on rote learning of the classics or a Japanese school where the curriculum was modern but taught in the language of the oppressor. Sun Myung Moon chose the latter, determined to find a way to be relevant.

With all these boundaries and limitations a teenager could reasonably not be expected to have much impact, but Sun Myung Moon turned to the challenge of controlling and dominating himself. Later on, he would speak about this principle often, saying that his first motto was "Before seeking to dominate the universe, I must seek first to dominate myself."

All the time, he found himself guided by the logic and spiritual power of the Divine Principle, the ongoing revelation he was receiving from God and Jesus. In his speech "Line of Limitation" from the early 1980s, he spoke of this, saying:

"Divine Principle is not a random ideology, but is precise enough to guide you in a certain direction, and according to Divine Principle, there are certain limitations by which we have to be bound. When man becomes one in mind and body, for instance, then he can make a breakthrough and move on to another area. But if mind and body are going in different directions, this cannot happen. You must have mind and body in unity in order to go beyond individual perfection."

Father Moon came to realize that the discovery of the Divine Principle would guide his life and form the bedrock of a faith community. It was not about learning anything truly new, but discovering what has been there all along, but hidden. It was like the sculptor Michelangelo, who once stated that when he began a sculpture, he saw the finished statue "already in the marble." His task as the sculptor was to take away what surrounds the masterpiece to reveal its untapped beauty.

The principle that mind and body should be united is already present; it is not created by you. You do not create any new rules. These are given by the Creator of the universe, who designed certain immovable principles that guide unity between mind and body. In going the way of the Principle, there are formulas by which you are bound.

From the day that Sun Myung Moon first met Jesus, until the day of his death, the living Word of God was the very center of his life. In the early days of his ministry, he would preach and speak the Word every single day. Many of those sermons and sayings are recorded in more than 600 volumes of his speeches. In the later days, he was still studying the Word through the relentless practice of Hoon Dok Hae, or daily scripture study. He formalized this practice in May of 1997, sixteen years ago. From that time until his Ascension, he never missed a session.

It wasn't an easy course, and it involved a great deal more than just studying the truth. In his speech "Single Mindedness at the Risk of One's Life." he commented:

"The path of restoring the world has to be worked out in reality first before it is taught. If it had been possible to teach the path without the necessity of practice, the truth would already have been given to us 6,000 years ago. Why wasn't it? Because the original parents, Adam and Eve disobeyed God and did not know how to practice the truth. Therefore, parents who know the truth must pioneer the course of restoring the world. Because the first parents could not practice the truth, new parents must set the precedent for practicing it."

As we remember the life of our Founder, we may consider how well we are following in his footsteps. Does God expect the Divine Principle to transform our lives, and our world? Yes, most certainly. Does God expect us to like it, every minute of every day? That would be a "no." Learning to dominate our body with our mind is difficult work.

“When you hear this truth, your concepts of life, family, society and nation, the world and God all become different. Sometimes you may wish you had never heard of the Divine Principle. But even if you wish you could deny this understanding, you have to conclude that the world has no other hope than this."