The Sermons of Rev. Hak Ja Han |
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(Mrs. Sun Myung Moon) |
American Speaking Tour - September, 2002
Hak Ja Han
August 19, 2002
Draft by Tyler Hendricks
Ladies and Gentlemen: I extend my warm greetings and gratitude for your coming. The words I am going to share have been heard by seven million brothers and sisters of my beloved homeland, 70 million people around the world and 700 million blessed couples in Heaven above.
The moment at which we have finally arrived is truly historic and providential. The time of heavenly fortune is upon us. It is the time when we will build the ideal world of peace that Heaven and Earth have longed to see for six thousand years. That is, it is time to build the Kingdom of Heaven in Heaven and on Earth.
As God worked His providence through history, Heaven has permitted various religions to arise in accordance with different historical periods and regional cultures. Humankind, working within the realms of these religions, has devoted continuous effort to the task of achieving a world of peace.
Yet even today, human beings groan in travail, because they are unable to free themselves from all manner of unethical and immoral behavior. People today are astonished when they suddenly realize their true situation: that having failed to stem the tide of immorality, it is now rushing in with the power of a surging storm, sweeping them away in its turbulent waves. This is the self-portrait of the modern human being.
Does this mean there is no hope for us eternally? My husband, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, and I have dedicated our lives to conveying God's messages. These prophetic messages have been proven to be fact, to be truth that transcends the realistic limitations of the age and the environment.
Today, once again, I come before you with a message from Heaven. To believe or not believe is for each of you to decide for yourself, but I stand here firmly resolved to act in God's place to convey His message to a humanity living in the time of the Last Days. The title of the message is, "The Root Source of Peace Is God."
I sincerely hope that you will open the doors of your heart. I encourage you to demonstrate the wisdom it takes to humbly receive Heaven's warning to you who live in the Last Days, for it is a time that is filled with ignorance and confusion.
Originally, human beings were created to live centered on God in the Garden of Eden, and to enjoy freedom, ideals and peace for eternity. As a result of the fall of our ancestors Adam and Eve, however, the vision for this original world never became reality.
From the day the fall occurred, a history of suffering and sorrow unfolded on this Earth. God intended human beings to live with true love and true ideals, but we were unable to grasp true ideals and did not even know what true love was. God intended us to live in an environment of happiness, but we lost that garden of happiness.
God intended us to sing songs of freedom and peace. We were to possess the complete happiness of becoming one in heart in the presence of the Creator and returning glory to Him. But we were not able to become such people.
Satan defiled our true parents, true family and true brothers and sisters. He defiled our true tribe, true society, true nation and true world.
That is not all. Satan is the one who has forced God to spend the past six thousand years in a state of suffering and adversity. The fall marked the beginning of a history of death on this Earth. From that day on, the Earth became a land of suffering instead of a land of peace. From the day that death was entrenched on this Earth, we went the way of conflict instead of peace.
Within the individual, there is continuous conflict between the mind and body. There has been conflict within families that has expanded into conflicts within nations and worldwide. Today we find there is no place on Earth free of conflict. We need to come to terms with the fact that we have woven this history.
Cain and Abel, the children of the human ancestors Adam and Eve, were not born out of God's love. Adam and Eve were to have created God's true lineage, but they created Satan's false lineage instead through the act of the fall. So the children they bore were not God's children but could only be children of the devil Satan.
That is why in John 8:44, Jesus scolded the people, saying: "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do."
What was it that pushed human beings onto the path of the fall, a path that was so horrifically tragic? In a word, the fall originated when human beings took a self-centered view of themselves.
It is nothing other than today's extreme selfish thinking and behavior, the way of life that openly rages around us with impunity. This is the primary culprit. It still drives us down the path of the fall.
I speak of the reprehensible behavior whereby people seek their own benefit and convenience before thinking of the position and situation of others. I refer to the shameless attitudes whereby people try to save themselves without concern as to whether others live or die. These are fragments of the type of behavior that brought about the fall. They are not the behavior planned by God at the time of the creation.
God did not desire to bring about such a world, and, had we any choice in the matter, we would never desire to be born into such a world.
So God has set His purpose to clear away this tragic, sorrowful and painful history and return to the world of peace, world of happiness, world of freedom, and world of goodness that He originally desired. He is working to set this fallen world right. This is the path of restoration and the path of the providence of salvation.
As the descendants of Adam and Eve, humankind is fallen, but within each person there is to be found an original mind directed toward the original world. This is why humanity throughout history has desired and aimed for the world God originally wanted to create. This long-cherished desire remains today as an ideal that cannot be ignored.
God has carried out His providence again and again, in each historical period, so that fallen human beings could aspire to new ideals and attain a new heart.
If no central being capable of moving Heaven and Earth with these ideals appears, and if no people who are able to move around the axis of Heaven and Earth with that central being appear, then true freedom, peace, and other ideals will never come about on this Earth. Humanity will be fated to endure a path of restoration through indemnity of celestial proportions.
Because of these circumstances, God cannot come to us in glory. Neither can He come to us in peace or in freedom. The only way God can come to us is by presenting us with a mountain pass over which we cannot climb but by making of ourselves a sacrificial offering. This is because it is the path of restoration through indemnity.
Until the moment we are able to wipe away the sorrow in God's heart; until the moment in time we are able to resolve all the grief that has penetrated deep into God's heart, we cannot hope to accomplish peace among humanity, much less see God's ideal of creation bear fruit on Earth.
We are responsible to liberate God from the grief that has congealed into a massive stone in His heart. The saints who believe in Jesus today, however, are blind and deaf to this truth.
As fallen human beings, we need to return to the state before the fall. As human beings who have lost God, we must return to the state in which we would have been had we not lost Him. As those who lost the True Parents of humanity, we must return to where we would have been had we not lost them.
We are created to live in a garden of peace centered on God as the children of true parents. It is to fulfill this purpose that the term "providence of salvation" is with us again today.
What strategy does the omniscient and almighty God use to change this hellish world into a world of peace? Originally, if human beings had not fallen, our mind and body, being centered on God's love, would not contradict each other. Because of the fall, however, the mind and body came to stand in opposing positions. So God has worked again and again to correct the course of history, achieve world peace and prepare a base where He can settle. We need to know that to accomplish this purpose, God has woven a history of suffering, sacrifice, and bloodshed through wearisome religious rituals and rules. This history is referred to as the providence of salvation, or the providence of restoration.
But if we arrive at an ideal world without first establishing the standard of heart, we will need to rearrange everything again at some point. In and of themselves, the loftiness of our ideals, or the power to make the world one and bring about an ideal world of peace, are not the essential concerns. If an individual does not possess the standard of heart, then he or she will have no relationship with that world. That standard shows concern about that world, adapts itself to that world, and is one with that world and its movements. Without that standard of heart, even living in the ideal world of one's dreams would be meaningless.
The Absolute Being, who is the Lord of Creation, created all the creation, so the creation, too, is meant to become one with the Lord of Creation. So if human beings, the highest among created beings, are to stand in the position of Lords of creation, we must be able to incarnate God's heart. Heart is not just the certificate that attests to the parent-child relationship between God and humanity. It is also the link connecting humanity with the rest of creation.
In restoring an ideal world of peace, a world of the original ideal of creation, it is necessary to establish conditions of indemnity. We must go through a process of restoration through indemnity.
What is meant by restoration through indemnity? Whenever something loses its original position and state of being, then certain conditions must be set in order to restore it to its original position and state of being. The setting of such conditions is referred to as restoration through indemnity.
We note that society does not place much importance in the term, "indemnity." This is because people do not understand its meaning well.
If there were only Heaven and Earth, God and us, we would not need the word "indemnity" in our vocabulary. It is there because of Satan, who caused our first ancestors to fall. If Satan did not exist, there would be no need for indemnity, and no need for the phrase, "unity of religions," which we now proclaim with all our might. Neither would we need expressions such as "the liberation of God," or "the liberation of humanity."
The fall brought about the destruction of human life throughout history. It turned history into a record of anguish and failure, a chronicle of war. So God, in order to wipe away this history and unravel the fundamental issues, needs to establish anew the original starting point in a life of true love being lived for the sake of God, humanity and all creation.
Without this, we cannot find the starting point of peace; and without the starting point of peace, we cannot establish a world of peace.
In your life as well, you can change your orientation from one of wanting to receive love to one of wanting to give love. The moment that standard is globalized, the world of peace will arrive.
The world of peace will never exist where people's consciousness focuses only on receiving love. Our particular parents are not our only parents. Our particular brothers and sisters are not our only brothers and sisters. Our particular children are not our only children. Once you become a person of character, capable of feeling that every person is your parent, sibling, or child, and treating them as such, then you will not be able to look upon the ocean of people wandering in the world of death without tears coming to your eyes.
When you see young people thrashing around in the quagmire of drugs and debauchery, you will feel compelled to devote your full heart and soul to saving them, as if they were your own children. This is a manifestation of the love that seeks without conscious thought to give rather than receive,
Unity is a prerequisite of freedom and peace. Consider the life of a husband and wife. If the two have not become one, how can they enjoy the freedom of husband and wife in a true sense? If a husband and wife are not one, then there is no hope for harmony in the family. Peace in the family will be an impossible dream.
Unless there is an effort, not just among individuals and families but also across the world, to produce people who can say, "I will give love rather than receive it," the unified world and a world of peace will not come.
A person blasphemes God if he stands before the unchangeable God and says he will become a changeable person. A person blasphemes love if he stands in the presence of unchanging love and practices a changing love. We must have a standard whereby we can prepare the foundation for peace in our hearts at the point of the origin, the unchanging point from which we are able to share both sorrow and joy with God. Then we can go on to prepare the base of freedom and happiness.
Following this and centering on that standard, a movement to gain complete mastery over the body and develop within ourselves the capability to unify this world must arise on this Earth. The new global movement brought by Jesus was such a movement.
Please bear in mind that these words are given us by God. They are His warning, proclaimed to a humanity wading through the turbid waters of a corrupt world in the Last Days. We are all destined to face this task. It is not our fate, but our destiny. A person's destiny does not change. We can improve or change our fate through our effort, but we cannot change our destiny. Destiny is Heaven's absolute command.
I think that everyone, at some point in life, searches for the origin of peace and happiness. From where do peace and happiness emerge? They do not originate from America, or Korea, or the United Nations. Where is the problem? The most crucial issue is how human beings, whose minds and bodies are in conflict, can embrace a peaceful view of the universe and a worldview of happiness in their heart.
The artillery fire of a 6,000-year long war continues to flare in our miniscule heart. The First World War was fierce, as was the Second World War. Such wars, though, were relatively small occurrences in a much larger process. Neither of them lasted more than five years.
The struggle between mind and body that goes on within each of you is the worst kind of war. It is a war that knows no end and whose inevitable result speeds us on to ruin. Everyone is firing artillery shells at his or her own life. The confrontation between mind and body has become a war of good and evil between God and Satan, and a fierce battle is being waged.
We must overcome sleep, overcome hunger, and overcome unprincipled sexual desire. That is why Reverend Moon, as he set out on his course, put forward the slogan: "Before hoping for mastery over the universe, gain complete mastery over your own self." And this is how he has fought throughout his life. As long as fallen nature remains within us, it does not matter how much we may sing the praise of ideals or call out for peace; history will always be riddled with struggle and turmoil.
That is why we conclude that we will not find the path to peace until we have pulled out this fallen nature by the root. The standard for world peace does not lie far off at the end of history but rather lies in the place where each of us is able to unify our conflictive mind and body. The wider the gap between a person's mind and body, the greater the struggle and the resulting pain.
The mind is God's sentry post, while the body is Satan's frontline. We need to narrow the gap between the mind and body, keep them from coming to blows, and finally unify them as one.
To pull out this deeply rooted fallen nature and achieve mind-body oneness and unity of thought, we need True Parents. Our only option is to meet True Parents, who are able to remove Satan's false lineage, inherited from false parents. We must meet the True Parents, receive from them the truth about true love, and live a life of true love, living for the sake of others.
Ladies and Gentlemen: please look at the world. There are so many problems. They begin with struggles between husband and wife and go all the way to conflicts and wars among nations. We cannot even begin to count them all, and they result from countless causes and reasons. But if we dig down to the fundamental issue, we always arrive at the problem between man and woman.
We cannot deny that if we dig deeply enough, we find that even the largest problem ultimately boils down to a problem between man and woman. Did not humanity begin with a relationship between a man and a woman? Disharmony within the family expands into various problems in the society and then the world.
If we could just resolve the problems involving men and women in every family, every society and country, and on the worldwide level, and establish one model, then the world would be able to unite as a world of peace, that is, the ideal world of the original creation.
God originally wanted a world of true peace to take root on this Earth centering on our first ancestors, Adam and Eve. If they had not fallen but had grown according to God's will and perfected their character, they would have received God's blessing, formed an ideal family, and built the ideal Kingdom of Heaven free of evil and pain.
That would have been an eternal world of peace. From generation to generation, humanity would have enjoyed a life of happiness, not only by communicating directly with God as His direct sons and daughters but also by communicating freely with our ancestors in Heaven. It would have become a world in which good would have absolute dominion and people would be incapable of sinning.
How could anyone in such a world even imagine conflict between mind and body or feature the possibility of disharmony in the family? Satan, who for thousands of years has had his way and has violated Heaven and humanity, would not even be able to show his face.
Human history began with the first button being inserted into the wrong buttonhole, but Heaven did not forsake us. Instead, for six thousand years, God has devoted His heart and soul to the providence of restoration for the sake of finding His lost children. Not once has He regretted that He created human beings. He has never been discouraged in the face of Satan's ability to have his way. With single-minded devotion, God has worked with true love and forgiveness to carry out the providence of restoration.
It is not by happenstance that you are able to study and learn a little more deeply about God today than you could before. You need to be grateful to Heaven and your ancestors who guided you to this truth.
Our supreme task now is to perfect our character through the oneness of mind and body, set right the families that have splintered under Satan's rule, and establish true families.
Heaven will dwell eternally with the family that establishes the realm of a three-generational oneness. That family attends the grandparents (the first generation) as they would attend Heaven, shows absolute obedience to the parents (the second generation), and creates children (the third generation) through absolute husband and wife who raise their children in purity and without sin. Your families will attain a unity of heart with God and become the birthplaces of eternal happiness and human peace.
Ladies and Gentlemen: human beings were originally created so that mind and body would respond to God's true love and form oneness. Any person who comes to have a correct mind will want to move all people at once into the palace of peace. Because human beings are God's children created in His image, we possess the potential to be free of mind-body conflict and to establish the origin of true unification.
There is no possibility for contradiction or conflict within God, the Absolute Being. God is the harmonious union of masculine internal nature and feminine internal nature. At the same time, in relation to the universe, He is the subject partner having masculine qualities. This can be compared to the dual mind-body structure of human beings.
God exists in a state of having formed absolute and total unification within Himself. So it stands to reason that human beings, who were created to resemble God, the Great King of all creation, also have the ability to achieve the full unification of mind and body.
As a result of the fall, human beings lost the standard of harmony and unification between the mind and body and lived in the quagmire of struggle and contradiction. God's love for the sake of saving fallen humanity has been expressed in history through the appearance of many religions.
It is nearly impossible to live a life where the mind has total control over the body in a world in which the forces of evil are rampant. So God permitted the necessary and appropriate religions to arise, giving consideration to every age, culture, regional environment and circumstances. For our part, human beings have followed the teachings of religion and steadily pioneered the path of life centered on the mind. We have learned the path of renunciation and how to place our hope in the eternal world. In Christianity, for example, we find no teaching telling us to focus on the world of reality. It does not teach people to be selfish so that they can eat well and live well in this world. Rather, Christianity always emphasized peace in the world of the mind.
A good illustration of this is the Christian teaching: "The Kingdom of Heaven is in your heart." This concept of Kingdom of Heaven does not refer to worldly affluence or power. The Buddhist teaching, "In all of Heaven and Earth, I alone am the most honored one," can also be understood in the same context.
Methods may differ from one religion to another, but the mission of all religions has been to strengthen the hope and aspirations of human beings and guide them to examine themselves and live a life where the mind subjugates the body.
God has carried on His providence for human salvation in this way through religion for six thousand long years, but no religious leader or sage has ever been able to teach how to overcome the conflict between mind and body and bring about eternal unification and peace. No one could teach us what we need to do in order to conquer the body completely centering on the mind.
No one could show where we could find the standard for peace. No one could bring us to the point of mind-body unification where parents become eternally one, husbands and wives become eternally one, brothers and sisters become eternally one, parents and children become eternally one, and all one's relatives become eternally one.
Now, however, the time has come. Heaven's wait has ended. The age in which we live today is the final Last Days among all the Last Days that we have experienced in history.
Heaven cannot extend or delay the providence for human salvation any longer. This is because the True Parents, whom Heaven and Earth have hoped would come and have longed to see, have manifested on this Earth. They are taking all responsibility upon themselves and are successfully completing the providence of restoration. They are establishing an order of true love in the world entangled in chaos and debauchery.
Ladies and Gentlemen: It is said, "Blessed are those who believe." The Reverend and Mrs. Moon, who convey this truth of Heaven to you, are the True Parents.
The True Parental thought elucidated by Reverend Moon is the only thought system that can promise peace to humanity. Communism and democracy have failed. The thought that will prevail is "a philosophy of living for the sake of others." In other words, only the "heavenly Father Ideology" based on true love is capable of bringing about eternal life.
There is no way other than for each of us to come to the self-realization that, as God's reciprocal partner, we possess a value even greater than God's. And we should sing praises to this fact! This self-realization is the only place we can connect to the eternal world of peace, that is, the eternal life in the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth and in Heaven.
My husband and I, in our capacity as the True Parents of humanity, have already unified the entire spirit world. We are receiving messages from not only the Founders of the four great religions - Jesus, Buddha, Confucius and Muhammad - but also from 120 major disciples of each of these leaders. They sent these messages after having studied our teachings in the Principle and Unification Thought at a seminar in the spirit world. They are filled with hope and gratitude toward the True Parents.
Even Communist leaders from around the world who have gone to the spirit world, beginning with Marx and Lenin, completed the Principle seminar in accordance with True Parents' command, and are sending messages soaked with tears of repentance and deep lamentation.
They have only one hope. This is that their believers and followers will accept the teachings of the True Parent Reverend Moon as quickly as possible, and prepare themselves for their eternal life. This is their message.
Their messages are filled with advice that people should not waste their precious time on the fleeting Earthly life but prepare wisely for life in the spirit world, where all people will live together for eternity after casting off their physical bodies.
What does this mean?
First, it means that all people - men and women, young and old, high and low - must believe in the unequivocal fact that God is actually alive and is working His Will. We must not believe in Him only conceptually. With eyes of fire God is watching our every step and every act.
He waits for the day when the humanity that left His bosom and went to Satan will repent and return to His bosom. He paints a picture of what it will be like when the prodigal child, who once left Him, returns to the bosom of the Father with tears of repentance. His request is that people comfort and attend the True Parents, who still remain on Earth and walk the path of blood, sweat and tears for the sake of human restoration.
God's hope is that we will receive the warning that He gives in these Last Days with a serious heart, correct the errors of our lives, and live in a way that we will not regret later.
Second, it is a warning that we must accept as fact the existence of the spirit world and live every aspect of our lives in accordance with heavenly law. God is sternly telling us to discover a more advanced self, establish a more advanced subjective nature, and settle a world of peace on this Earth.
God is watching. Tens of thousands of wise men and sages with your ancestors are watching your daily life. When you realize this for a surety, how will you be able to go against heavenly law?
Soon, you too will begin having spiritual experiences. The time will come when your ancestors will be mobilized to directly observe and guide your life and even your thoughts. The numerous Unification saints, who believe in and follow the teachings of my husband and I, are already experiencing this state of life.
I declare to the seven million brothers and sisters of my beloved homeland, the 70 million people of the world, and 700 million blessed couples in the spirit world who are watching this gathering:
You are truly blessed, because you are able to live in the historic and providential age when the Messiah, the True Parents of humankind, has returned to Earth, when North and South Korea will be unified not by guns and knives but by love and truth, when all the religions of the world will become one under the teachings of the True Parents, and when all the sages and ancestors in spirit world will come down to Earth to live with us and communicate directly with us.
I would like to conclude my remarks by urging all humanity to fulfill the responsibility to which you have been called in building a world of peace that transcends race, ideology, and national boundaries.
I pray that God's boundless blessings will come upon your family and nation in abundance.
Thank you very much.
Here is True Mother's 2002 Tour Schedule again.
1 Mon, Sep 16th Washington DC Reg 01
2 Tue, Sep 17th Bridgeport CT Reg 05
3 Wed, Sep 18th Boston MA Reg 04
0 Thu, Sep 19th IIFWP Conference, New York NY Reg 02
0 Fri, Sep 20th IIFWP Conference, New York NY Reg 02
0 Sat, Sep 21st IIFWP Conference, New York NY Reg 02
4 Sun, Sep 22nd Atlanta GA Reg.09
5 Mon, Sep 23rd Miami FL Reg 10
6 Tue, Sep 24th Chicago IL Reg 12
7 Wed, Sep 25th Seattle WA Reg 18
8 Thu, Sep 26th San Francisco CA Reg 20
9 Fri, Sep 27th Los Angeles CA Reg 21
10 Sat, Sep 28th Denver CO Reg 16
11 Sun, Sep 29th New Jersey NJ Reg 03
12 Mon, Sep 30th New York NY Reg 02
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