The Words of the Choi Family
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The Words of the Choi Family |
In early 1976, Father asked Mrs. Won Pok Choi to speak in his stead at Belvedere on Sunday mornings while he was out of the country. These four meditations are from those talks. Mrs. Choi is now director of the Little Angels School in Korea.
O God, You are as old as all the time that has passed. And yet You are as young as time yet to come. Your height, width and depth I can never measure. I only know that You are of such size that can embrace all that You have created. And yet that same immeasurable size can become as nothing so that You can also come and dwell in me, this infinitesimal grain of sand in the vast ocean of life. God, thank You that through an example of a perfect man, Your son, I learned that in You I can become big enough to accommodate the whole universe.
What a wonderful feeling I have standing at the horizon of my life! You are already there waiting for me. In a tight embrace I become one with You and without difficulty understand Your heart. But alas, when I so ardently wanted to share this blessing with my beloved ones, they rejected it. I could not understand this at first, but now I understand that if I would turn to heaven, I must turn away from the earth. It is more than natural.
Once, back in time immemorial, I turned away from You, making a left turn. Then in coming back to You, I had to make a right turn. Having left You, I lived an abnormal life among the sick and crazy people of the satanic world. After being used so long to the abnormal way, people think the abnormal normal and the normal abnormal. I was once like that myself, so I understand them. But from their part, of course, they cannot understand me. Still I don't mind crazy people calling me crazy; I only pity them. I don't give them up, just as You don't give up in restoring me. Nevertheless, I cannot afford to go back to the old world even to save them until I am completely cured of my sickness and have become strong enough to be able to bring them to Your side.
O God, You are my everything. I can find You in every imaginable capacity. When I am helpless, You are my father. When I am lonely, You are my mother. When I am isolated, You are my friend. Thank You for being my everything. On the horizon in a profound solitude I meet You, with the cares of the world miles away and all the ugly past washed away. Sometimes with the far distance between You and me, I can see You much, much better. Above all, when I find You in a man of Your image I not only see You but also come to know You, understand and love You with a sensation that is so real and intense.
Thank You for having sent Your son, who is so perfectly Your image, as Your representative in human society. If and when You are clearly reflected in a man, it is quite safe to call him God incarnate; You have told us that we too can become as perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect. I want to resemble You, Father. That is my only desire.
It is so strange and frustrating that no one has ever truly seen himself or herself directly, but only as reflected in a mirror. I know, God, that You too could not look at Yourself directly; therefore, You created man to enjoy looking at Yourself reflected in a person of Your creation who is another You. So You said to him: "You are my flesh, my bones. And sometimes You are My son and My second self." That is God incarnate.
Your son is another You, so he is our visible Father. He is our True Father, having nothing to do within or falsehood. He would only give and give to the world and yet receive so little or nothing in return except rejection and persecution. He found a pure unstained bride and married her to make her perfect and mature. What a beautiful thing! Under common parenthood alone can we really become brothers and sisters of one human family. Coming into the True Family of divine origin, we are given rebirth into the heavenly lineage.
Now we understand that God's creation of man was no different from mankind giving birth to children. We understand now that there was a total investment of Your whole being. We are the product of Your love, the love between father heaven and mother earth. From heaven we were given the spirit; from earth, the flesh. As we grow and mature, we too learn to love and want to multiply. Then we experience the heavy burden of conception and the sharp pangs of labor in childbirth, a new awareness of being parents to a newborn child. We learn to feel a true parent's heart. What pain there is! But the labor we go through is nothing compared to the joy of having the child. We want to be prolific in bringing children to You, even having multiple births. Raising our children is another whole realm, but with every child, love is born anew to make the job easy and joyful. Through experiencing childbirth we really experience all loves: parental, fraternal, conjugal and filial.
Thank You, Father, again and again for having given us new life -- life dedicated for Your great cause, which is worth living and dying for. We welcome this opportunity to shed tears, sweat and blood. We will not hold back from the fight because we know that we cry to build a world without tears and we fight to build a world where there will never be fighting again.
Our hearts sing in Your praise, drumming out a loud pitch to You. For all this, I turn to You. In the name of our True Parents, Amen.
O God, You are my alpha and You are my omega. You are my beginning and You are my end. Look, we are on an endless pageant of life, acting out Your drama, going round and round in a grand circle, where start is only, next door to the end. But we are set to go the clockwise way ever to the right, to reach the end, which is only another start for a better and better day.
Round and round we go on a dial of time, touching high noon and then midnight, only to come back to the zero hour, not in a void but marching forward there to start a brand new day, while the pendulum in rhythmic precision marks the seconds, minutes and hours to cover the days, months and years.
For this giant procession of life, we cannot remain just spectators; but we as active participants, if possible, want to play the major role with myriads of spirit men watching and cheering us on.
In the great ensemble of harmonious movements, like the beautiful celestial parade of the orbs on the orbits, we as planets revolve around the heroic sun, rotating on our own axes, enjoying the privacy yet partaking in the public. In solo and ensemble, there we go!
Like the wheels thus we go, sometimes up and sometimes down in a repeating circular motion advancing forward on and on with the wheels of human history. We are neither arrogant when we are high, nor are we humiliated when we are low, because we know this is the way life goes.
On the clock, thanks to God, we have hands pointing the time; on the dial of life, too, Your hands are there pointing the way, never letting us go astray. Hand in hand and step by step we go up and forward on and on, dancing on the rainbow bridge to reach heaven and down to earth into a reality repeating the rhythm again and again.
To our attentive ears You chat and whisper the sweet, sweet word of love which is often a word of lesson and at times a word of warning. Our understanding then is so illuminated that we know by heart that You created man with Your word, as You are now re-creating us also with wonderful words of truth and love.
We then speak back and forth, not in a language where "I" is so loudly capitalized but rather where "You and I" in happy togetherness sing and sing along the beauty of life in the plural sound of music.
Yes, "I" am forever singular and lonesome without You, but "We" are always in plural happiness. In a single life nothing is multiplied, but in plural we go in oneness, giving birth to what is viable not only in its optimum environment but also in any climate or soil, whether it is native or foreign. A fearful thing is the state of ennui, where we may become a non-conductor of love.
With the fruitful days ahead, O God, let us wind ourselves for the day and unwind our tension for the night. Let our day be duly active, but not in such a breathless haste. Let our night be moderately passive, but not in such an absolute pause. Let our day be a king-size garden for the healthy growth of beauty and happiness, and let our night be a queen-size room for the delivery of love and wisdom.
Life is short, so we want to live one day like a whole life: morning for childhood, noon for youth, afternoon for adulthood, evening for middle age and then the night for advanced age in a quiet rest and retrospect, rejuvenating if feasible for another such beautiful cycle.
To live our life is to love our experience, loving our lover most of all. "Do it yourself' should be our philosophy of life. To let others do our part is hiring someone to live our life, making even the love for us.
This is our life, our own to claim. So why not invite and welcome anything of value for the richness of our life experience! Then we sort out solid things, grind the rest and sift the powder, make a dough and bake it right, and finally eat it up with challenging appetite. Everything will be so well digested and will become part of us, helping our health help our life.
Even for the bleeding investment in the vicious cycle of the depressed world, we will never go bankrupt at all, because God is there as our brain. On the stormy sea of nether darkness we are all in the same boat, but gone with the wind are all the worries, because our Father is the captain. In the deafening noises of jarring and grating, we are not a bit disturbed, because we are deeply in tune with an entirely different channel.
In the blinding dazzle of the spotlights focused on us, we are only warned against the red light, being the danger signal. But we are never affected at all, because in our world with our Father we are using a different dimension of light waves.
We are a great ensemble of white, yellow and black, all in consonance playing the music of which our Father is so great a conductor. We blend and shade in all three colors because our Father is so great an artist that he teaches us that love is the magic solvent to blend them all. With the variety of colors to blend, we have already many things in common and respond in unison to anything and everything that is ever so good and beautiful. In complete oneness in response to Your love, O God, we all are ready to shed tears, sweat and blood -- springing out from our inmost source to move the hearts of humankind.
We are a variety of vehicles dashing to the goal at full speed, but without violating the traffic laws. We stop from time to time just to charge the hungry tanks with adequate amount of delightful oil, because we know that when they don't move they are not out of gear but only out of oil.
We are impossible people for Satan, possible and obedient only to God.
In our anguish, we remain cool and collected still, withholding our pearls of tears, reluctant to show them to evil ones. We are also most unwilling to reveal our grief to our Father who is already grieving for us. To pretend nonchalance is another pain, so we turn to a piece of paper and in naked honesty write on the vacuum of the silent paper the bitter experience we now undergo and let it speak out eloquently for us; then we become a step wiser.
"They drew a circle that shut us out, calling us names in every possible way, heretic, rebel, a thing to flout: but Love and We had the wit to win. We drew a bigger circle that took them in."
In love everything turns beautiful. Beautiful still is the nature around.
Look, winter has retired and spring is here. Now the thaw of the ice-locked minds, slowly merging underground, will give a new rise to the plump breast of pulsing earth.
Let us go on the march of springtime.
Our hearts sing in Your praise, drumming out a loud pledge to You. For all this, we again turn to You in the most precious Names of our True Parents. Amen.
O God, You are as bright as the light that brings out everything in the honest truth. And more than that, You are as hot as the heat that melts away every element into the sweet warmth of love. You are like the power of electricity. Yes, You are always there. Our job is just to plug in and switch on to have the light or heat or both according to the receptive capacity we are prepared with. If my light is not bright enough, the blame is on me; or my heat not hot enough, the blame is also on me. Like someone with sore eyes, we sometimes choose to have our light dim, where we feel more comfortable, not being able to stand dazzling brightness.
Sometimes, we take the heat for granted and burn harmful ingredients within ourselves, only to puff out future pollution to affect others. We feel disconnected and turned off.
We complain that it is dark and cold. Then we grope in the darkness for the light. We shiver in the cold, in need of warmth. But we are apt to forget that with You turned on, everything is solved. In the broad daylight of truth, we find that Your son is the sun. And in the dark of the night, he is the moon to shine out to the world, representing God during the welcome days, and still reflecting His light during the negative nights.
God, how we wish to become Your stars. We want to resemble You as Your son. Furthermore, the stars are small suns and together they complete the celestial beauty. We learn from You the light of truth and warmth of love that are the very essence of our lives. Truth incarnated, we will assume a perfect shape. And love infused, we shall ever wear perfect beauty. O Father, we want to resemble You in such a degree that in any way, shape or form we resemble Your beautiful image. Then in our perfect resemblance to You, we want to truly represent You. Before anything else, we want to be re-created by Your hands. Humble and obedient, we shall become the clay utterly at Your disposal. If I exercise my stubborn will there, crush me again in a fast squeeze to undo the whole thing like one would a disobedient dog.
Make me a perfect image of Yours, molded, conditioned and programmed by Your hands. No other hand can ever "deprogram" it. In the recreation process let me participate in assistance to You by destroying my old ways. I am more than willing to go back to the zero point to start over again. Even though we may have to go down to zero, it will leave something for You to work with because zero is not a blank nothingness but as possibility. Though smaller than zero, there is a dual invisible quality ever left there and never coming to naught. Don't say, "I'm impossible." Yes, I may be less possible, but not impossible. Possibility is what created us. With that possibility left in us, You can recreate us.
I once tried to blow into the balloon of hope -- empty dream of endless greed -- to the maximum point where it was likely to explode. Now I want to become a ball with such flexible elasticity that the stronger it is hit and pounded on the ground, the higher it will bounce, even to the sky. I once surrendered to every adversity but now I want to be a tumbling doll, standing upright no matter how hard it is knocked down. I once yielded before every blast of wind, but now I want to sail faster, taking advantage of the strong wind.
Gone is the old jealousy, anger, grief and resentment after the simmering vortex of chaos.
On the verge of explosion, I breathe deeply, and all emotion -- at the boiling point -- evaporates. Emotions are evaporative, so why not wait a second until they do evaporate to leave you to be once again serene and tranquil? With challenging appetite, let us swallow the hardships and digest them. Emotion exploded, we feel defeated. But with emotions pressed, we feel victorious.
Ignored and rejected by the outside world, we are still Your proud children to live strongly as long as there is Satan. If the people insist on stubborn rejection, let them alone, because we are drops of water from the same origin. And water can never rebel against water. Somewhere downstream, we are sure to meet. At the latest, we will meet at the estuary where all the tributaries merge. Then we will be going hand in hand to the heart of the sea.
Men live and die, ever retreating into the remote obscurity on the panoramic scrolls of human history. Let us feel at home in the whole universe until the day of our final homecoming to our permanent domicile, our everlasting world, which is so much higher, so much wider and so much deeper, where we plunge into a new life in divine love, where obscurity turns into a dawn so glorious, where oblivion once more wakes up in a brand new reality. There, our good life achievements will be cited and rewarded. Our bad life record will of itself be judged and exposed. After all, it is we ourselves who either praise or punish us. So we have no right to complain or feel resentment.
O God, You are deeply aware that You are not a God of love alone but of judgment too. Being our Father, You would of course rather not judge or punish. But as long as there is Satan as the prosecutor, You cannot but do the job. But You wish Your son, the mediator, to play the role of good defender.
O God, once and for all, this time forgive us of our sins by remembering what we have done right and good. And chastise us, not to crush us to death, but to the point where we can survive and start again. With Your forgiveness, we can lift the veil of obscurity and of oblivion so that we will shine forth with Your light and warmth, giving a surge of truth and love to spread among all Your creation. And we know that this will reflect back to You the echo of Your goodness coming again, O God, that we may rejoice in eternal give and take. Our hearts sing in Your praise, drumming out a loud pledge to You. For all this, we turn to You.
O God, You are the sun and You are the moon. You are the day and You are the night. You are the great eternity. And here am I, a small I, nothing to the world, but something to You.
Utterly enveloped by the tight hug of the night, I feel so close the presence of God. In the dark of the night I see more things, and in the hush of the night I hear more things. When the dawn unfolds a new day, I feel released but still enjoy the lingering reverberation of the nocturnal tranquility.
After miles of travel in my dreamland in search of evasive happiness, I wake up to come back home into reality and find happiness right there at my bedside. It's perfectly simple and simply perfect!
I jump up and stroll out into the dreamy garden, treading on the virgin snow, where sleepless lamps with blurry red eyes are anxiously awaiting me to present a day and fade away.
After the glorious sun is up, I breathe deeply the light and air and space together. I smile back at the beaming sun with a broad daylight smile. And I, too, shine out in all readiness to reach every corner of the earth.
Look at the world! Look at life! O what a fool we are to shun the world that is so full of life, to confine ourselves into a small cell, when the world is so wide and open for us to enjoy free of charge!
I feel I am different today. I am no longer what I was yesterday. Yes, O God, You don't change; You don't have to, because You are already perfect. O no, You must not change, because You are our goal. But we do have to change because we are imperfect, destined to have progressive changes towards perfection until we attain the goal, which is You, with whom we want to unite once and for all.
As everyone else, I loved life but have not realized until now that to love life is to love people -- those immediately around me -- with Your design to put into order the whole creation. I'm here to love them, and they are there to love me.
Up to the present, we have lived fragments of life day by day and moment by moment. Now we want to thread the pearls of the moments to decorate us, throwing away what is bad and ugly. It is so strange that I don't get tired of life after having lived so long. But alas, being old is not necessarily being wise or advanced or matured.
Weather-beaten by age, sometimes we are like the earth's crust, hardened with dried apathy, all the feelings completely petrified. But somewhere far, far below the layers and strata, the very marrow of ourselves is alive, still warm and soft, ready to erupt at any moment. So we are yet an active volcano waiting for the time to ripen.
Sometimes, yes very often, we feel empty like a cave eroded by wind and rain, where only loneliness echoes and reaches its rhythmic resonance. We shrug our shoulders, cock our heads, raise our eyebrows, sometimes nodding and sometimes shaking our heads, but all in vain. But we know that God is the only visitor there to see us when we are desperately in need of someone. Then in the hollow vacuum of our hearts where even dreams are absent, He would pour the beautiful message of life, inviting us to drink a nectar of love and elixir of truth.
Sometimes we are like a poor man's house in a desert, with high walls to check the frequent winds, but without roof to welcome the shower so rare. Poverty is inconvenient but not a shame, maybe painful but not a sin. Contented in an honest poverty, we don't want to cheat the people for undue money for our own use. We are poor, but thank God, we always have something to give out.
With everybody trying to give, give, give, every other person will surely receive, receive, receive. But don't you see? With everyone holding back what they have and just extending bare hands only to receive, receive, receive, no one will really receive, because without mutually giving at all, it is more than natural that no one at all will be receiving.
Give and take is the greatest expression of life, isn't it? Yes, though we have traits and characters contrary to each other, when we become one in give and take action, we complement each other, to make us whole and perfect. Though we may stand far apart on opposite extremes -- like north and south poles -- when we face each other on the communication line of the axis, we meet somewhere in the heart of the earth.
In harmonious give and take, colors melt and sounds blend, making a great symphony of life. With myriads of sounds reconciled with one another, great harmony resounds, with individual instruments still articulate. O God, as Your delicate fingers run on the dormant strings of my mind's harp, my heart, chiming with Your resonance, sings out Your song in the celestial chorale of cosmic magnitude.
Yes, Father, as You said through Your son, "To know man is the knowledge of all knowledges, and to be harmonized with man is the art of all arts." What a beautiful truth!
Just wait, Father. We will prove the truth of Your words. We will do it. Thank you! We are proud of being Your sons and daughters, millions of times over.
Our hearts sing in Your praise, drumming out a loud pledge to You. For all this, we again turn to You, in the precious Names of our True Parents. Amen.