I have been pondering why some of us might find it difficult to embrace the notion of God and/or Father having resentment.

That English translations of Father's words could possibly be dismissed when referencing Father's speaking to his own and God's resentment because of problems in translating from Korean to English are duly noted. But I think it might be disingenuous to leave the whole discussion of this note.

Further, I suggest it might be healthy, minimally, and would speak well of our spiritual integrity if we consented to look more closely at the issue.

There are several avenues of approach available to us in this inquiry. I'll limit mine to maybe one. Some confrontation may be necessary. As noted elsewhere previously, the confrontation I speak to here is that confrontation that is defined by the sharing of emotionally significant information in such a way that encourages self-reflection rather than self defense.

First, let's approach this from the position that reflects our own willingness to confront ourselves. Let's imagine that we CAN'T accept God's having resentment. Why? Several possible answers suggest themselves to me.

I have suggested before that such reluctance may reflect our entertaining possibly unresolved issues that we have yet to come to terms with. Some may be irritated by such a suggestion. There is no judgment in this.

Let's imagine that we do have resentment. What possible scenario's of a general nature could induce such resentment?

First, Christianity failed to embrace us. Even though we envisioned them accepting Father and through him, us, our experience of Christianity brought persecution and prosecution, not just to him, but also directly to us. The intensity and breadth caught us off guard. We experienced in the media, televised as well as printed, a great hostility. We came to see it in our fundraising. We came to see it in our witnessing. We saw it when our members were kidnapped and then the courts sanctioned it. Then our families rejected us. The people who we thought could most understand our hearts treated us as adversaries.

Did we have a right to resentment? I would say yes in the extreme.

Americans failed to understand our theology or just compared it to their own and found it not only lacking, but attributed to it evil intentions. Plus, and more to the point, they failed to understand our hearts especially in regard to our motives.

Yet, in examining resentment, some here may not like the word resentment because it seems to suggest shades of a willingness to act...especially in tones reflecting or suggesting revenge.

I have taken issue with this because I don't believe that in experiencing resentment and even harboring it requires or leads to the impulse to act in a way solely limited to revenge.

Yes, resentment does create an uncomfortable feeling. It results from uncomfortable experiences. As such, we would naturally want to either see a cessation of the experiences that result in resentment or some method of resolving or otherwise digesting the resentment. Since experiences that produce resentment cannot always be controlled or stopped, the option most available to us may be in how to digest or resolve the resentment.

Digesting resentment ideally occurs by expressing forgiveness towards our enemy on the one hand and a resignation to acceptance modulated by love to continue to be vulnerable and intimate on the other. Since vulnerability and intimacy are necessary conditions for love to exist, they are important to this process. Resignation to acceptance of further abuse in a relationship can be argued since Jesus did command us to forgive not just 7 times, but 7 times 70. And all this in a world more predisposed to hostility towards those they do not care for than to be forgiving.

My judgment of the spiritual health of our movement, admittably of a totally subjective nature on my part, points to a condition in which as a movement we have not been able to truly act as TP's have in regard to loving the world. As such, in our bewilderment with Christianity's response to us in the past, and their willingness to side as comrades in arms with the left liberal press, and our on going inability to actualize the true principles of love, in part due to the almost incomprehensibility of Father's actions left us with few proactive avenues of expression. Except an almost blind faith.

This results in a temptation and tendency to internalize the resentment. Yet, knowing the danger posed by resentment, in part because the theological imperatives warning not only of the dangers resentment poses if unresolved or otherwise undigested and because of the historical failures that it led to, complete with murder, we were in fear of our resentment.

One critical sad side of such a posture is what it does on some level to our relationship to God. Above and beyond satanic accusations that may emerge in our consciousness. In our sense of failure, merely for harboring resentment, we feel ourselves distant from God. It matters not that it is a result of our own distancing from God that produces this feeling. We don't note the process, only the result.

Since vulnerability and intimacy are both required for love to exist and since the sense of sinning, even in one's heart, is sufficient grounds for a conscientious person to not only feel accused but to also feel qualified to render judgment on oneself, our sense of our relationship to God must surely suffer under such circumstances.

Further, because in our weakness and our inability to understand much less manifest true love under such circumstances, we do feel tempted to revenge. Note that I said tempted, and since we cannot imagine God being so tempted, we feel further disgraced and remote from God. And this encourages us to fear God on some level, owned or not.

One more complicating element enters into this picture. Biblical history has at times not only portrayed a jealous God but has also documented a resentful God. And a God willing to act on that resentment in ways that suggest a will to revenge.

We want to dismiss this God of wrath, but in our vulnerability and in part due to satanic accusation, we harbor secret fears that God could either act against us or allow such acts against us by third parties.

All in all, tabulated together, we are confronted with a vision of a resentful God in history, coupled with our belief that resentment engenders temptation to acts of revenge not reconcilable with present theological absolutes from our understanding of our theology. In our inability to separate resentment from the temptation to willful acts of revenge, we come to cement them together.

If we do so, we cannot envision resentment as acting as a catalyst to greater depths of true love. In this failure to see the two sides of a coin, we can never envision a God who either made similar confrontations nor a God who, by choosing to be love, allowed his resentment avenues of expression whose result brought a deeper, more profound commitment to love.

This is a historical problem as much as it might be our own, though generally, it brings little comfort or relief to those who realize it is historical. But, as I have mentioned other times, if we use such knowledge to temper our commitment and we resolve such disparities, it will be providential, for us and for history, since we are agents within a new history.

It is not a sin to be ignorant. But in our ignorance we can sin.

At every corner of our experience we have both the opportunity and the option of meeting at least one of two people. We can just meet ourselves, with all our attendant empathies, sympathies, prejudices, presuppositions, fantasies, suspicions and suppositions or we can meet God, often for the first time in some way not experienced before. Our choices, most often unconscious, and as such determined in large part by our suppositions and superstitions, will determine who we meet and whether it will be friendly or not. Even we cannot predetermine that, either in outcome or content.

Thus, issues such as the resentment of God, thought best to be regulated to superstition, may in fact lead us to deeper understandings, not only of God, but to true love itself.

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