The Words of the Debacker Family
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The Words of the Debacker Family |
Good evening, everyone. I hope you will forgive me for speaking in English. I've been in Belgium only 2 months ~ not enough time for me to master French yet. Please invite me again next year, and I will parle Francais avec vous!
I appreciate this opportunity to celebrate International Women's Day with women from different religious backgrounds. I'm sure we have many things in common with each other. So let me begin.
I joined the Unification Church, founded by Rev and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon, 34 years ago as a young American woman searching for a better way to live.
It's somewhat difficult to say what the place of women in the Unification church is. We are a movement in its infancy, with only 60 years of experience behind us. However, our view of feminism is one that ultimately includes a love relationship with a man, and in that respect we are very traditional. In the Unification movement, we understand men and women to be God's masculine and feminine expressions, and the union of the two to be God's plan of creation.
A key difference that sets Unification theology apart from its parent, Christianity, is the belief in a Messianic couple, a man and a woman together who embody the love of God fully. The fact that Jesus never married limited the devout Christian woman to the monastic life as the highest expression of her faith. Marriage was seen as necessary for procreation, but a life of celibacy was the path for those who strove to follow in Jesus' footsteps. In our understanding, without a woman the goal of the Messiah cannot be achieved.
Our principle teaches that God's original ideal was for Adam and Eve to grow to perfection, form a family, and expand the lineage of God on earth. The highest mission of a member of the Unification Church is to receive the blessing of marriage, and to become a parent, experiencing for herself the heart of the creator.
We use the yin/yang symbol as a way to represent God, Yin being the female principle, and Yang the male. As God is One, man and woman are meant to become one ~ a balance between complementary opposites, not opposing or competitive forces. Male and female are thus interconnected and interdependent. Their interaction gives birth to new life, and in the process, they are transformed by one another. Rev and Mrs. Moon teach that love is the basis of equality between men and women, and that in love, everything is equal. An interesting note is that the yin yang symbol is at the center of the Korean flag, the country of our founders.
We are a young movement, still in the process of discovering the way of womanhood and true femininity ~ what it means to be a true woman as well as what it means to be a true man. As the world is changing, so are we. But the core teaching is one woman for one man, and abstinence before marriage. We raise our children to remain pure until they are ready to be matched by their parents or by Father and Mother Moon, who are well-known for their matchmaking skills. We train our daughters and sons to see members of the opposite sex as brothers and sisters, or uncles and aunts, and to protect their purity as their most precious possession.
A concrete way that we promote world peace is through international marriage. Luckily for me, I married a Belgian! We are encouraged to marry outside of our nation, our race and even at times our religious backgrounds in an effort to break down barriers and create what Rev. Moon often refers to as the love race. Children from these marriages are a beautiful color! As in traditional Catholicism, we are also encouraged to have many children, and birth control is frowned upon. Aging populations in the world might do well to embrace that idea!
Many problems in the world are related to the breakdown of the family, and women have both a great responsibility and opportunity here. We have the power to lead our husbands and our children, and to set the pattern of love in our families. Mrs. Moon has told us that if a woman insists on righteousness, the man will follow. Wasn't it Eve who gave the apple to Adam? We also understand that the unity between man and woman is the creative principle that liberates both to their fullest potential. The blessed couple is seen as the purifier of the lineage. While infidelity and divorce lead to losses on many levels and affect future generations adversely, the children of a harmonious and truly united couple receive great benefits ~ emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
Rev and Mrs. Moon have declared this to be the era of women, and as such, we have a lot of hard work to do. In her concern for the empowerment of women, and to address the breakdown of family ethics and racial and religious struggles around the world, Mrs. Moon initiated the Women's Federation for World Peace 20 years ago this month. Networking with women from all persuasions, WFWP is dedicated to empowering women through leadership training, strengthening marriage and family, and promoting projects for peace and reconciliation between enemy nations.
In our church, women hold varied responsibilities, including top leadership positions. The leader of the American church is a woman, as are all the WFWP leaders in Korea and elsewhere. However, it's probably accurate to say that Unificationist women see our core responsibility to be a daughter of God, a filial child to our parents, a sister to all the world's women, a virtuous wife and loving partner to our spouse, and a wise mother who can raise her children to follow the same path that we do. Women are educators. We are the ones who teach and guard the faith inside our homes, and model it outside in our workplace. I see women as God's undercover warriors (no pun intended). Through women of every religion He has hope to reconcile the painful past and lead the world into a new era of peace.
It's true that gradual advances in the status of women in the world's religions are being made, but we have a long way to go. Many of us still feel the lack of an equal place beside the men in our faith, and we are anxious to find out what we are capable of as women. To this end, we need to devote more of our energies into empowering each other, that our children might have a better world.
The Unification Church offers women a fresh view of traditional marriage that is both inspiring and comforting. When I joined this movement, I was grateful to rediscover my ideals of marriage and family, lost in the upheavals of the 60's. I called my grandmother to tell her that true love really exists, and she said, "Of course it does. I married your grandfather, didn't I?"
Our topic, The Place of Women in Religion, is a discussion that we need to have over and over again, with more and more of us in attendance. This is an excellent beginning and I hope to learn more from our dialogue here this evening. I'd also like to thank our organizers for their vision and hard work. Thank you!