This address was given at the Closing Banquet of the Hoon Dok Hae conference on October 31, 1999.

This is the third time I have come here to give congratulations to participants of these conferences. As I stand here before you I am in awe by the spirit of your participation here and the openness with which you engaged in my father’s ministry. That to me, as a son, is something that is tremendously moving and gives me personally a tremendous amount of hope, and tremendous amount of positive inspiration in human beings. That they can actually go over dogma, differences in culture and language and actually recognize what is common and recognize the common element, which is family. This should be truly the focus of discussion as we prepare for the new millennium.

I gave a message to the last conference talking about how my father’s ministry and message is not just a so-called "spiritual message". I emphasize the fact that my father’s message is also grounded in practice. In other words it is a practical message. It’s not something that is beyond human experience. It’s not something that we cannot feel and grasp. The reason why I mention this, the reason why I like to reinforce this understanding to you today is because I want to leave an impact. The essence of my father’s ministry has been a ministry on building true families, if I had to sum it up.

Now the span of my father’s ministry has been more than fifty years. In that time he has engaged in tremendous breadth of activity, as Neil suggested, ranging from the academics to even business. Yet the fundamental essence of what he has preached that maintained its continuity, and that connected all of these various projects was the centrality of the family. Why? It’s because the family, if we want to talk about the human condition, should be the first point of discussion, of which we are, of what we are. Is it not in the family that we as sons and daughters recognize our love for our parents and our obligations to them? Is it not in the family that we, as brothers and sisters, recognize compassion, recognize the humanity in our fellow man? Is it not in the family that we also overcome the very difficulties that might underlie brotherly disputes, or sisterly disputes? Is it not from our own experiences of resolving and reconciling these differences within our families, as adults, as leaders, as teachers, we fall back on these experiences to recognize how we should deal with human circumstances as leaders, as teachers.

So the point I want to really stress to you here today, and I think Professor Rich, if I may be so bold as to mention your name, I think he hit it right on the dot, that my father’s message is a universal message. Once we shed all of our dogmas that separate religious leadership, once we shed our cultural differences, habits and traditions, once we shed our own biases and we look at what is common we recognize that truly the family should be the core of discussion as we enter the new millennium.

It is in the family that we as human beings share something in common. I think to understand my father you have to understand this because this is the way that he looks at the world. He looks at the world as one God-centered family. He believes that his mission, whether you believe he is the Messiah or not is a mission of a True Parent. It is a mission of somebody who recognizes the very essence or the importance of the family in the human condition. He tries to bridge the difficulties, all the strains that might exist in family, to bring resolution as a source of inspiration for all the various conflicts that we face in the world.

I have been a student of history. One thing that I have noticed in history is that conflicts arise out of misunderstanding. If you look at conflicts from the perspective of nation we can almost give it some human type of expression, saying that one nation, just like one brother, might not understand my position. Just like an individual brother might not understand my position. If we start looking at the world from this perspective couldn’t we start building the bridges within ourselves to actually reach out and bring an end to these hostilities that we see in the world today? We no longer have a monolithic ideological enemy such as communism. We no longer have any type of ideology that separates mans’ or our conversations, our daily conversations anymore. Truly the next battleground is a battleground that is going to be rooted within our societies, that deals with, "How do we as human beings learn to live with each other? How do we resolve the various conflicts between generations, meaning parents and children? How do we resolve conflicts between brothers, and therefore actually nations? I think it is so appropriate at this time that my father has launched these Hon Dock Have Conferences where you can see clearly what his true message has been for the last fifty years. It has been a ministry of family. It has been a message of peace, focusing human conflicts or difficulties within the context of the family.

This century has been a century of tremendous difficulty. Within this century alone we have experienced two world wars. Those are world wars when the world was in conflict. It touched each and every one of us regardless of where we came from. I am a Korean. I know the devastation that was brought unto my nation after World War II. I know, because I can see it and I can hear from the experiences of my parents as well as the scars on their bodies that these conflicts weren’t something that was somewhere out there. These were actually experiences by people I care about. That has made a tremendous impression on me. This has been the legacy of this century. The century has been a century of tremendous hardship and conflict.

I want to impose a challenge on each and every one of you. As academic leaders, as political leaders and especially as religious leaders let us make the twenty-first century, and the new millennium not of conflict and war, but of peace. That is why I say that the Hon Dock Have Conference focuses on the family. It is such an appropriate conference for discussion as we enter the new millennium.

I know that as a young man I need inspiration, not only from my parents, but from such prominent leaders from many different religions as well as political groups as well as academic fields. Why? In order for us to establish a millennium of peace we have to work together. We have to work in concert. As a member of a new generation, as a young man, I want to challenge you to set the precedent that we can inherit of dialogue and peace, of thrusting down our dogmas, our entrenched beliefs, and touching that which is common in all of us to solve the very fundamental questions that plague each and everyone of us, irregardless of which nation we come from.

I want to once again congratulate each and every one of you for coming here today. I also want to challenge each and every one of you. Please take what you have learned about my father. Please take what you have learned about the importance of family in our discussions when we talk about the new millennium of peace, when we talk about the twenty-first century. Please take that to your congregations. Please take that to your classrooms. Please take that to your political forums and make it the source of discussion for all mankind so that we elevate the position of the family as a standard bearer for peace.

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