The Words of In Jin Moon from 2009
|
|
The Words of In Jin Moon from 2009 |
Good morning, brothers and sisters. How is everyone this morning? We just got back from Korea. On October 14 my father officiated over the blessing of 40,000 couples, and one of the couples that was part of that ceremony happened to be my eldest son, Shin Myung Preston. True Parents, my parents and his grandparents, chose a lovely bride from New Jersey, of all places. I’m sure many of you know her. Her name is Krista Un Jung. I am delighted to welcome her into my family, and the True Family is delighted to welcome her into our huge extended family. We were able to spend lovely moments with True Parents and with my brothers and sisters there, who welcomed her wholeheartedly.
When we were slightly younger, my siblings and I were not always too kind to the incoming in-laws. But now that we are adults and have children of our own, we are welcoming in-laws into the True Family, and I think they’ll have it a whole lot easier than the generation before. I’m sure Krista had a wonderful experience. It’s the start of something wonderful in my life.
When I walked down the aisle and got blessed over 25 years ago, I could not have imagined how God was going to work his mysterious magic in my life and put into my hands these five gorgeous specimens. To see one grow up, take on a bride, and to embark on a new life as husband and wife, I could not be happier. It really made me feel like we are one family to celebrate this with our whole worldwide community, including the other couples who were getting blessed for the first time and the older couples who were there renewing their vows. There is really nothing like it in the whole world.
It was raining quite heavily in Seoul the day before, so some of us were a bit concerned about whether the weather would be kind to us at the blessing. When we were en route to Sun Moon University, leaving from Seoul, the clouds were still quite heavy, and it looked like it was not going to be a beautiful day. But as we approached the university, God showed his great grace and love toward the couples, and the sun came out.
Here we were, two weeks into October. It was supposed to be quite cold, and a lot of the brides had sleeveless wedding gowns, so I was a bit concerned for these ladies. But the weather was so warm, unusually warm for October. With the sun out, and with our True Parents graciously officiating over the ceremony, it was truly an indelible experience for me and, I’m sure, for a lot of people in the audience as well. I want to thank God, our Heavenly Parent, and our True Parents once again.
My husband and I were joking en route, and also coming back from Korea, that there’s really nothing like the blessing when you look at human history. We know as children of our Heavenly Parent what God’s original purpose of creation was. God wanted to experience love and joy with his children, so he wanted to create his children, Adam and Eve, and really longed for them to grow up as mature and perfected men and women of God so that with God’s blessing they could embark on married life and welcome children of their own.
But we know that because of the Fall history started off on the wrong footing. The process of restoration has been a road of suffering, indemnity, and great difficulty. It took a true champion like our True Father to perfect himself as an individual and then to welcome a true bride, our True Mother, and together stand in the position of True Parents, becoming the true olive branch that the whole of humanity can graft onto.
With our True Parents, for the first time in history not only do we have the experience of God’s love and finding new life in God, like Christians have had through the person of Jesus Christ, but we have something extraordinary in that we can literally inherit the true love of God, meaning that we can experience what it means to have true lineage in our families and in our lifetime. Not only do we have true love and true life, but with our True Parents we have the hope of true lineage.
When we look at the history of Christianity, what looms large is the concept of the Trinity. You have God, you have Jesus Christ, and you have the Holy Spirit. For those of us who understand the Divine Principle, we realize that the position of the Holy Spirit never took a physical form because Jesus was crucified on the cross. Had Jesus found his ideal wife and had they been blessed together as the True Parents of humankind, Jesus Christ would have blessed humanity 2,000 years ago, and we would have enjoyed not just true love and true life, but also we would have been grafted into the blood lineage of our Heavenly Parent, God.
But the problem with Christianity is that the true mother never materialized. The only thing that Christianity could stand on was on this tripod, the Trinity. What True Parents bring to this world is the concept of four-position foundation. That means we have God as our center, and as we become perfected in love, we come to understand what life is supposed to be and how we need to apply ourselves in our daily lives so that we can become responsible human beings. Together with the grace and the blessing of God, we can stand in the position of true couples and ideal families in the making, in the position to enjoy the children that are to come from our union.
The four-position foundation, if you really think about it, is like a diamond. I’ve often talked about how living a life of true love is learning how to rub up against each other, going through the difficulties of life and turning ourselves, who are rough-cut diamonds, into brilliant diamonds, truly emitting the divinity within.
In this four-position foundation, for the first time in history, we have the chance to graft onto God’s lineage and to have sinless children, children who are not tainted by the satanic lineage, which was the result of the Fall. What God is wanting for each and every one of us is to own a wonderful, eternal diamond that we can think of as a family. The diamond symbolizes eternity for a lot of young men and women walking down the aisle because it takes tons and tons of pressure and thousands of years to create.
Just as it takes pressure and time to turn that rough-cut diamond into something beautiful, marriage and family are like a workshop in which we can become better husbands and wives, better sons and daughters, and better brothers and sisters. My father has often talked about the family as a textbook of true love. It is a place where we work out our problems and overcome various obstacles to become an eternal diamond.
How is it that the family becomes eternal? It’s because each of us, when we have our children, live eternally through them. We live on forever in our children, their children, and so on and so forth. Therefore, in this concept of a family truly owning up to itself as a brilliant diamond, connected to the true lineage of God, we can have immortality through the beauty of our children. If you really think about it, there’s really nothing quite like it. Just the concept that marriage is something bigger than ourselves, bigger than the two people walking down the aisle, is something truly beautiful to behold.
I have a lot of friends in the movement, but I also have friends who are not in our movement and I’ve been to a lot of weddings. One of the things that always strikes me is that my friends are getting married at the height of their relationship. They’ve usually lived together before; sometimes my friends call that process “checking out the merchandise.” They’ve already lived as a couple, and usually it’s at the insistence of the bride that the groom comes to the altar. By the time they get to the altar, they are at the height of their passion. They have been planning for six months to a year for their grand wedding ceremony and reception. Often they realize how fragile the relationship is when they get down to the details of wedding planning. Some of my friends never actually made it to the altar. But for those who have, it’s the apex of their relationship that gets captured in those wedding pictures.
But for a lot of us in this movement, we started at zero, right? Others of us started in the negative, negative 100, 1,000, or whatever our individual situation might be. I used to joke with my friends who did not understand why I was going to be married to a man whom I wasn’t too fond of, and at such a young age. They thought I was crazy. Maybe I was; maybe we all were. But I am an idealist in that I believe that there is something wonderful, at least conceptually, in this thing called an ideal family.
The great thing about our community, because we start at zero, we know, going in, that our marriage is not going to be a walk in the park. We know that there is going to be some serious work that needs to get done, a serious true rubbing process that needs to get worked out. A lot of us go with our eyes open to the fact that marriage might not always be a perpetually blissful state. We might have arguments here and there. There might be difficulty, cultural clashes, personality clashes, and differences in race that appear when two people start living together as husband and wife.
One of the things that made me reflect about how incredible this thing called the blessing is was when I saw the blessing in the context of human history. Whenever we are immersed in our own individual suffering or in our small, detailed problems of life that seem so large that we can’t possibly navigate through them, it’s always good practice to take ourselves away from where or who we are and to look at ourselves and our lives objectively, from another person’s point of view, or what I call the bird’s-eye point of view.
When I thought about the blessing from a historical point of view, I realized that it wasn’t really just about my husband and me and about how compatible we were as a couple. It was really about the promise that God wanted to see through our couple in these wonderful things called my five munchkins. I realized that here are these five incredible kids that I have the honor of calling my own, and, had it not been for my husband, they would not exist. And, had it not been for us as a couple, they would not exist.
So every time I appreciate God’s handiwork in my children, I realize that the blessing is about much more than the individual happiness of each couple, a man and a woman, but really it is about making a commitment to God, first and foremost. I John 4:16 says, “We have known God, we have known and we believe in God’s love for us.” We know who we are. It’s a great blessing that we know that we are his sons and daughters. And we believe in God’s love for us because we know he is our Heavenly Parent. We know that no matter what we go through, our Heavenly Parent is always, always there.
So we believe. When we believe, we live our lives applying this wonderful thing called true love, which is eternal, unchanging, absolute, and unique. We realize that God is love, as it says in the Bible. In I John 16, it says, “God is love.” We realize that God’s love is a parental love, and it’s an all-encompassing love. It’s an all-embracing love.
When I think about the blessing, no matter how difficult it might be, I recall that just the fact that God is giving all of us an opportunity to experience what parental love is all about is probably one of the most profound things in life. The day that I had my firstborn and first held him in my arms, of course, I was overcome by the sheer beauty of this magnificent little bundle of joy, but what really impressed me and what I felt truly to the bone was an incredible love that I had never known before, an incredible love for another human being that I’d never experienced before.
I realized at that moment that this is what God feels for each and every one of us, the parental love that you have for a child, the first time you hold that baby in your arms, after seemingly coming back from the dead. The birth process is so horrific. You feel like you’re going to die, and you feel like basically saying, “Never again.” But when you gaze upon this face, which can barely open its eyes, and all it does is cry and snuggle up to you, all you can think is, God is love. This is love. For the first time I realized how much God truly loves us.
It’s a profound love. The feeling I had for my child when I first held him in my arms was that I would give my life over and over and over again for this tiny little human being. Isn’t that the love that God has for us? He would die over and over again for us, just like the way our True Parents would die over and over and over, and go through excruciating suffering and incredible difficulty, simply because they’re our parents, and they gaze into each and every one of our faces like the way I gazed into my first child’s eyes.
That’s when you realize the true nature of God. That’s when you realize how incredible is this thing called a four-position foundation. Or, as I explain it to my kids, it’s a diamond. It’s like a baseball diamond, and all of humanity is longing to come home, to come back to God’s embrace. One of the greatest blessings for all humanity is to not just know God’s love, not just believe God’s love, but to actually abide in God’s love, abide meaning to stand fast, to await, to submit, to continue in God’s love.
When I think about the blessing in that way I’m always reminded by a bit of humor in that the word blessing sounds like blesser, in French the infinitive meaning to strike or to hit. I thought it was interesting how, when I got blessed, I felt like I had been smacked over the head with a huge iron rod. I’ve often wondered, “Will I ever recover?” But that’s what it feels like for a lot of us when we go to the blessing. We’re literally struck by this gift that Heavenly Father and Mother want to give to us. Not every one of us is prepared enough to understand the magnitude of this gift that our Heavenly Parent is giving us. But for those of us who have persevered, continued, and stood fast, knowing, believing, and abiding in God’s love, many of us have been blessed to welcome a whole new generation of children. When you gaze into the eyes of your child, there is no love greater, right? There is nothing more beautiful.
What Heavenly Father is encouraging us to do is to experience that profound love within the context of this diamond that we call an ideal family and, in the spirit of living for the sake of others, extend that love to the rest of the world. So our True Parents love you as much as they love me because, yes, I might be their biological child, but you are their children just as well. When we have children of our own, God is inviting us to experience that profound parental love and to learn to look at other children of the world as our own, to look at other children with as great a love as we do for our own child by living for the sake of others, by practicing true love each and every day.
People who are not in our movement usually are thinking about their own happiness, or how they’re going to enjoy their honeymoon, or how they are going to enjoy their careers and fine, new home. These things pretty much engross the couple. But, in our movement, let us be thinking about how we honor God with our lives, how we become a true son or daughter of God, and how we truly create something eternal by inheriting true love. Let’s not just believe but actually substantiate this thing called the lineage that we are so privileged to partake in because we have our True Parents here with us. We have our true olive tree here with us.
To see how incredibly blessed you are, compare yourselves to Christians 2,000 years ago. They had only Jesus as the model. God was waiting to raise up a beautiful lady to be Jesus’ bride and the true mother so that they could start blessing the world and their brothers and sisters, but they never got a chance.
With the foundation of the Trinity, Christianity was able to come quite far. But think about how much more fortunate we are as a movement that not only do we have the True Father model, but we have the True Mother model as well. Instead of a three-wheeled vehicle, we have a four-wheel drive. There is a reason why a car has four wheels: It allows for greater maneuverability. A tripod is great when you’re standing still, but when you have four wheels on a vehicle, you can go anywhere.
One of the things I used to love to do with my brothers -- and I find it quite funny that the biggest tomboy in the True Family ends up being almost like an example of a good mom -- whenever somebody new would come to visit us at East Garden, like blessed children visiting from Korea or from some other state, we used to love to take them “out to dinner.” They would come all dressed up, thinking, “We’re going to have a wonderful dinner with the True Family.” Once we got in the car, we took a little detour before the restaurant, going off-roading.
We had a four-wheel drive, or a Bronco, or some kind of truck and used to love to go off-roading at night, up the mountains and down the mountains, through the rivers and streams, really making a mess of all the people in the car. So by the time we got to the dinner, we were dirty but we were laughing and having a great time. And one of the things I noticed is, when you go off-roading, it’s not a good idea to drive a three-wheeled vehicle because it’s not as stable. You don’t have great maneuverability, and many times it will flip over and cause an accident. But a four-wheeled vehicle can maneuver and respond to you.
I’ve often thought that Christianity, trying to teach the good news without a True Mother figure, is a tripod in that you can’t really go very far in addressing the issues of marriage and of how to raise great kids. But here, with our True Parents and with the understanding of the importance of the four-position foundation and of the importance of having not just true love and true life but true lineage in our lives, then we realize that what God is asking us to do is not just create stationary families just for our own individual happiness or state of being. What our Heavenly Parent is asking us to do, he and she are inviting us to start maneuvering, start moving as this incredible thing called a family, to help others and inspire them to be an ideal family as well, to graft onto the true lineage of our Heavenly Parent and truly have the opportunity to substantiate God’s blessing in our lifetime.
We have something so precious and so good, so we must not be greedy with our gift. We must not think that it’s only for us; we must have that parental heart that is all-encompassing, that is all embracing, so we want to reach out and allow others the opportunity to enjoy what we have, to have a better life than we have, to want for others more than what we want for ourselves. This is what it means to be a man or a woman of true love.
Growing up, one of the things I’ve always felt -- of course I had this grand design to be a wise mother in that I wanted to serve the world with integrity, service and excellence -- but deep in my heart I’ve always wanted to love and be loved. I thought, There’s nothing greater than to love and be loved, and to have that with God is probably the most profound experience that I’ve had in different time periods of my life.
I realized that God is ever constant. He is never-changing. He is absolute and eternal in his love for me, and I realized that the only thing I needed to do was to reciprocate that love back to my God and enjoy this incredible thing called true love that truly moves me to this day.
A couple of years ago I was watching a movie called Moulin Rouge, which is almost comical, but it’s brilliant in cinematography in the sense of trying something new and out of the box. I love people who think out of the box. One of the lines in that movie, as a writer was typing away on his typewriter, says, “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.” I thought, that’s what I’ve thought all this time. It’s amazing how a place like Hollywood can come up with something like that.
You see, brothers and sisters, for each and every one of us hot-blooded human beings here, the greatest thing is simply that -- to love and to be loved. How wonderful it is to know that God is love, that God, our Heavenly Parent, is always there with his love. But more than that, how wonderful it is that in our True Parents we have the ability to practice loving and to practice being loved by our spouse, by our brothers and sisters, by our children.
This thing called an ideal family, which sometimes seems like a responsibility and something that’s quite irksome and troublesome, if you really think about it, is God’s greatest gift to all of us. It’s his way of letting us know how much he and she truly love us.
For the young people in the audience who have just walked down the aisle, never take the time that you’re living in for granted. And never take for granted how incredible it is to exchange your vows with 40,000 other couples. You are part of something greater in that you start out your married life with a commitment to God and to humanity before you make a commitment to yourselves.
Again, there’s a proper order. So no matter how much we as couples might struggle individually, we realize that we’re part of something larger, part of this community, part of this family called God’s family. So the blessing doesn’t just become something that’s supposed to be a road of suffering and an invitation for a great deal of difficulty, but it becomes an invitation for each couple to be that next thread that weaves into this incredible tapestry called God’s family. That has got to be one of the greatest blessings.
To the new couples, as somebody who has gone through and is still walking the road of trying to create an ideal family with my immediate family, I want to leave you with a couple of pointers. There are three things I’ve garnered from the wisdom of my parents over the years. At different times they’ve spoken to me when I’ve asked them, “How do I deal with this problem?”
Usually three things come to mind over and over again in my family. First of all, the importance of gratitude. Psalm 34:1 says, “I will bless the Lord at all times, and in my mouth, on my lips I will sing his praise continually.” For me, this passage encapsulates what it means to be grateful. The meaning of gratitude is not just something within. Articulating our thankful thoughts, putting them into words, and actually delivering them to the universe, or to your spouse, your children, and your family, I realize, is probably one of the most important things.
Many times when we live a prayerful life and we think of ourselves as religious people, we understand gratitude to be a heartistic attitude. But that heartistic attitude needs to be expressed in order for it to become something real and tangible. So this passage from Psalms always reminds me that a heart of gratitude needs to be expressed verbally and articulated, so it’s not just in our thoughts and prayers, not just in our attendance, but in our literal thanksgiving to the Lord, to each other, the couple, or to the children, that allows us to continue on this road of gratitude.
One of the other points that my father and mother always stress to the different couples coming into the True Family is that they say, Go ahead and argue. When I got married to my husband, Father said, “You can argue as much as you want, but end that session before bed. Finish that day’s altercation or difficulty before bed because when you come to bed as a couple, you are entering a holy place. So finish all your arguments before bed so that when you, arise then you can greet God with a heart of gratitude, and you can start your day by articulating and singing his and her praises.”
Each new day is like turning a page in your diary. Each new day should have a clean, blank page for you to write on. The ink from yesterday’s writing in your journal should not bleed into the day after.
The third point that I’ve learned in my time with my True Parents is the importance of laughter. When you live as husband and wife, each has likes and dislikes. When I look at my parents, they are no different. When I was a little girl and went to greet them and give kyung-bae, to bow, and tell them I would be going off to school, many times I would see my parents getting ready in the bathroom. The only time I saw a scuffle between my father and mother was in that setting.
Because my father came from a poor background, he’s very conscious of the environmental factors that we human beings affect in our daily living. Even as simple a thing as flushing the toilet, my father is thinking, How many gallons of water are being used? Many times when it’s number one and not number two, my father will purposely not flush. Then my mother would come into the bathroom and say, “Appa, please, why don’t you flush?” Then my father would go into an elaborate speech about the importance of protecting the environment and saving water. I saw this, and many times my mom was at wit’s end because she knew that he had a good point. Of course it’s good to save water, but also she’d like to keep the bathroom clean.
As my father’s going on in this little speech about how important it is to save water, you could see my mother giving up because, once my father starts, it’s going to be hours. I could feel and see the mechanics in my mom’s brain. But then I saw something incredibly amazing. As a little girl, I learned a valuable lesson. My mom simply stopped what she was saying and just laughed. When she laughed, my father stopped speaking! It was amazing. Not only did he stop speaking, he laughed, too. Within a matter of seconds, all this battling became nothing. It evaporated into thin air. I thought to myself, “That’s magic! Laughter is magic.”
I think for a lot of us in the room, when we’ve been dedicated, longtime members, we understand the profundity and depth of crying, and we understand how incredibly moving it can be to cry for God, to cry for True Parents. Sometimes we cry because we’re in so much pain, in the midst of so much suffering. But one of the most important things in life is to remind ourselves how important it is to laugh, and especially in the context of a marriage. Laughter is the magic that can literally evaporate a lot of hard feelings, a lot of anger in a matter of seconds, as long as both spouses are willing to laugh together.
I’m hoping that as my eldest son starts down this road as a heavenly couple that he can inherit the wisdom that I’ve garnered over the years as a member of the True Family and go on in the heart of gratitude to articulate his thanksgiving, to remember to finish all altercations before bed, and also to laugh every day. If we all do this, God will give us the opportunity to love and be loved, and that has got to be the greatest thing in our lives.
So brothers and sisters, please know that our Heavenly Parent loves you and our True Parents love you so much, and with all their heart.
Have a blessed day and a great week. Thank you.