The Words of the Beutl Family
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The Words of the Beutl Family |
My dear brothers and sisters,
On Friday the new issue of the iUnificationist Cyber Congregation newsletter reached my mailbox with the regular invitation to give a feedback. This time I understood that I should do so in response to Pastor Kyle Toffey’s sharing about the theme: Two Brothers!
Kyle begins his lines with the following words:
“I work and live between two brothers that are fighting, disunited, jealous and are in a stalemate relationship. Somehow the will of God is not being done and this is causing our Father much stress. Both think they are in the right and are fulfilling their true destiny. This has been brewing for many years.”
Our brother finishes his valuable reflection with speaking about the responsibility that is uniquely mine:
“I have a responsibility to live a Principled Life. This is my 5% responsibility that takes 100% of my heart, soul and mind. I have to become a perfected being of love and heart. No one can do this for me. I have to love my wife, children, community and God. And before I take the speck out of someone else’s eye, I need to gain victory myself. I have to learn to love my fellow brothers before I can expect someone else to do so or expect a country to do so. The best condition I can make is by overcoming the resentments and ill feelings I have. I firmly believe that the random acts of love I perform in my daily walk while striving to be a joy maker will have a ripple effect far and wide. In this way I can have a cosmic affect on history.”
I fully agree with Pastor Toffey when he speaks about this important content. Each one of us is challenged to go beyond resentments and ill feelings we may harbor in our souls. Do we have such emotions? This is a question addressed to the conscience that knows very well whether or not I am able to love my brother -- leader or member -- who has disappointed or hurt me so deeply.
I have expressed my conviction in the past and I want to confirm it here once again: If two brothers are fighting the solution must come through the mother or somebody with a parental heart. If the position of parents is well represented then all kinds of problems in relationships can be resolved.
What is the situation of our True Parents? Providentially they had to love their Cain children more than their own direct children, which left their 7 sons and 7 daughters with a feeling of lack of love which should have been compensated by our love for True Children.
This is the basic formula which should have been fulfilled. But as we did poorly in loving the children of our True Parents many serious problems came about which cost our True Father and True Mother so much heartbreak until this very day.
We all learned about the Principle of Restoration and know that Cain and Abel must unite in order for God’s love to come down and dwell among us. This Cain Abel relationship starts within each one of us in the relationship between our mind and body and needs to be fulfilled victoriously on all levels in order for us to stand in a position of complete unity with our Heavenly Father.
True Father mentioned it many times that it is the task of the mother to unite the children and to bring them to the father in order to establish unity of hearts within the family. When the required motherly love is lacking then serious problems arise as we have seen in the history of God’s providence -- sadly manifested also in many ways during the past decades of God’s final dispensation of bringing this world back to Him.
From this viewpoint we are definitely not there where we should be. We heard our Father speak repeatedly about the gap between him and us but what did we invest in order to overcome this serious problem of our disunity with the heart of God and True Parents?
We may have worked ever so hard day in and day out while going to our limitations so that we feel rather exhausted but what is the use of it all if we lack in our ability to love? Countless people in this world work a lot but it is generally for the sake of their own or their families’ happiness rather than for the sake of bringing comfort to the heart of God.
Saint Paul wrote about the essential problematic we are faced with in the well-known 13th chapter of his letter to the Corinthians:
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains and have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned and have not love, it profits me nothing.”
Whom do we meet at the Gate to Heaven? It is not Saint Peter but it is our worst enemy. If we know how to truly love him we will be able to freely pass through with Satan giving us his confirmation that we have become victorious in the realm of love. If we did not learn this most important lesson during our days on this earth then we have not really understood the secret of how to overcome fallen nature and remain in a realm outside of the Kingdom of Heaven or Cheon Il Guk.
My dear brothers and sisters, let us face facts: Did we become the “love race” Father was speaking about many times? Are we the ones who manifest True Love -- the underlying theme of all sermons Father offered to us over the years?
Father says about himself that he went straight for “the path of death in an unabashed way to reach the high level of True Love”. He asks us to go beyond the limiting line of this world with an attitude of absolute faith and not like: "If my children are blessed and I have a happy life, I will believe in God and support God…"
Did we also walk the path of death like our True Parents in order to reach the highest level of True Love which is possible for us as God’s sons and daughters who are called to comfort and liberate His Heart? With what kind of attitude did we spend our days as Unificationists so far?
At times we may have been exemplary in our work to support God’s providence but what counts is how we have been doing in the long run and what is our reality now? We may be able to point out how much money we fundraised and how many spiritual children we have but the decisive question is still: Am I able to truly love my brother or sister who caused my heart to bleed -- who brought so much suffering into my life?
We know that God, our most beloved Heavenly Father / Mother loves all people as his children no matter how good or bad they may be. This means for us that we are only His true children if we do the same without making any exceptions.
Let us therefore ask ourselves most honestly: Whom did I remove from my heart -- who had a place in it before my becoming frustrated about this person -- and to whom did I never give space in my heart because he or she seems so impossible to love?
How long is the list of the people whom I cannot love? The ones among us who don’t know the answer may well write down the names of the people whom they know and whom they are not able to really love with all of their heart and soul. Won’t we be surprised how extensive this list will become?
Earlier or later each person will be confronted with his or her inability to love. At this point the question is not whether they have been a faithful member of the Unification Church or any other religion but whether or not they are able to love their enemy.
Our True Parents pushed us to the frontline of living a life of shedding sweat for earth, tears for man and blood for heaven while maintaining the heart of a father on our course of walking in the shoes of a servant. When Father spoke on December 27, 1981 about “True Parents and Our Responsibility” he pointed out under the theme of The Servant of Servants Course: “It is only with a parental heart that one can become humble and willingly accept the lowly tasks of a servant.”
We have studied Jacob’s course in order to see a model of how it is possible to subjugate one’s brother by offering everything to him, moving his heart with the attitude of seeing the face of God in him. But do we see the face of our Heavenly Father / Mother in our brother or sister whom we find so difficult to love?
Pastor Kyle Toffey writes in the above mentioned newsletter:
“Key figures just can’t seem to unite the brothers or with God’s will. This causes so much heart ache and pain for many people who are affected by this disunity.”
We have two brothers called Preston (Hyun Jin Moon), meaning “dweller at the church or priest's settlement”, and Sean (Hyung Jin Moon), an Irish variant of John with the meaning, “God is gracious or gift from God”, who find it hard to unite. According to what their names refer to it is clear that Hyung Jin Nim is indeed a precious gift from the gracious God and Hyun Jin Nim has shown that as son of our True Parents he comes from the place where symbolically speaking, the high priest settled. The meaning of their Korean names refers to “manifest” and “everything goes well”. When unity between these two precious brothers is manifested, everything will go well…
As I explained before, problems that are not solved in our movement reach True Parents family, causing much suffering there. Because we have not established a victorious pattern of achieving unity between Cain and Abel, serious difficulties could arise among brothers in the True Family. In other words, our inability to love one another as true brothers and sisters is the inner reason for the present heartbreak of our True Parents.
In his speech entitled The Standard of the Unification Church Father told us on August 10, 1986: “You cannot look at me without feeling ashamed for failing to live up to my standard -- even though you have been following me. In other words, you are greatly indebted to me.” Or on May 2, 2004 Father had to say: “Because you all did not fulfill many things in your responsibility then I was dragged through all kinds of difficult indemnity conditions.”
True Father expects us to be guided directly by our Heavenly Father as he expressed on June 1, 2003:
“You should now as Blessed Central Families and owners of Cheon Il Guk pay very close attention to your senses and let God tell you the direction that you must go. You must bring your mind and body together as one. Then God will guide you. We are restoring the position of Adam and Eve. We must connect with God's thought and heart and connect with God's way and then restore Adam's Family. Since Father and Mother's Coronation and Holy Wedding then you can now establish your own authority of Kingship.”
To be able to achieve this highest authority we have to consider first of all what God said to Cain as recorded in Genesis 4:7: “Sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it.” Unless we overcome sin within ourselves -- leaving our fallen nature of not being able to love our brother fully behind -- we will not see the Coming of the Kingdom based on a victorious foundation of substance with brothers uniting in heart.
Our True Father showed the example of how to apply Jacob’s course through his being able to win the heart of Kim Il Sung who once wanted to kill him. He established a victorious pattern of how to win the heart of one’s enemy also in achieving the victory in the Moscow rally, meeting with Gorbachev, and at countless other occasions.
We know about what kind of path our True Parents went e.g. through the book with Won Pil Kim’s testimony entitled Father's Course and our Life of Faith and now also through Father’s own biography. What remains to be answered through the life we lead is the basic question: To which extent do I follow in our True Parents’ footsteps?
To come back to St. Paul’s sharing with the Corinthians about the way of love, he wrote in verse 11 to 13:
“For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I fought as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things. For now we see though a glass dark plain, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then shall I know even also as I am known. And now abides faith, hope, love - these three, but the greatest of these is love.”
As Unificationists we represent the fulfillment of these words: We are the ones who have studied the perfection level of God’s truth and we see its manifestation face to face in our True Parents. We understand what really counts -- living a life centered on True Love -- but how well are we doing in putting into practice what we know to be true?
There is indeed hope for swiftly resolving the given issues in the True Family once I am ready to deal with my own inability to truly love my brother or sister. One member wrote in this respect: “At this point I believe it is only we Unification Church members who can rise above such a situation: Indeed, by having a ‘parental heart’ for the True Family ourselves, we are now in the position to cover for this, to take responsibility, to show mature wisdom to Hyun Jin Nim and Hyung Jin Nim so that they can be carried through this period of difficulty with our support. So ‘the ball is in our park,’ so to speak.”
May we all take this fact to our hearts with the determination not to rest unless I have gone beyond any small-mindedness and narrow-heartedness of not being able to love the ones who have been entrusted by Heaven to my care.
Sincerely yours,
Nikolaus