The Words of In Jin Moon from 2010
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The Words of In Jin Moon from 2010 |
On October 3rd, 2010, Rev. In Jin Moon spoke of her father and mother, the Rev. and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon, both having the attitude of a warrior in their mission as True Parents. Rev. Moon clarified that the a true warrior is somebody with a purpose, with determination, who dares to go where no one wants to go.
Rev. Moon shared about her experience as a student being persecuted with her siblings at school for being a "moonie". However, after signifying their purpose for going to school each day, they were able to get through the battlefield as warriors living to serve others.
Good morning, brothers and sisters. How is everyone this morning? Sounds like some people over there had their breakfast: You have a lot of power there!
I'm delighted to be with you again, on this lovely Sunday morning. Here at Headquarters we are getting ready for a great deal of festivity that is scheduled in Korea on October 10, when our True Parents will preside over the Holy Blessing ceremony. This blessing is a very important one in that it is taking place on October 10, 2010: 10–10–10. We will not see these numbers again for the next 1,000 years, so it has a providential significance.
Together with the great men and women working with me here at Headquarters in the Lovin' Life Ministry, we are trying our best to share the breaking news of what a remarkable time this is when we have our True Parents with us. For them to be presiding over the Holy Blessing on 10–10–10, I feel, is historically and providentially significant.
True Father comes as the one anointed by Jesus Christ himself, when my father was 16 years old, praying in the lonely hills of North Korea. Jesus asked my father to fulfill Jesus' mission, and Jesus told the story of how he was not supposed to die on the cross. In fact, he was supposed to live and find the beautiful woman who could be his wife; and the two together, symbolizing perfected Adam and Eve, were to stand in the position of the True Parents.
If for the first time in history Jesus could have stood in that position 2,000 years ago, we today as people of this world could, through Jesus Christ, be inheriting and substantiating the heavenly lineage through which we would understand God as our Heavenly Parent and we would understand the clear purpose of our lives: to create beautiful families and to leave something beautiful behind in the form of our children, eternal sons and daughters.
But, as you know, Jesus did not have that chance. He had to go the way of the cross, and history had to wait another 2,000 years before Jesus anointed my father, who took up the responsibility of perfecting himself as the True Father and finding his beautiful wife in 1960. With their marriage representing the Holy Marriage of the Lamb, these two together as the True Parents stand in the position to partake in building one family under God. True Parents are doing this not just by teaching people that they all are especially prepared eternal sons and daughters but by helping them graft onto the "original olive branch" offered by True Parents. Thereby, people become part of the divine lineage, marrying into the lineage of Heavenly Father and Mother, so we can call God our Heavenly Father and Mother.
So, having True Parents here with us is an incredible thing. They are here to help us become part of the worldwide family, and it's just in the nick of time, if you really think about it. Here we are, living in one of the superpowers of the world with vast arrays of technology available to us. We have so much power, but we don't quite know what to do with it. We have so much power, in fact, that we have the capacity to blow up our world many times over. We need our True Parents here to remind us that despite the differences in culture, race, economics, and tradition, we must come together as one family, and not just talk about being one family but actually graft onto, marry into, each other's families, into God's family.
That is why True Parents are so crucial to this world for the work of peace building. Only when you become part of one family do you realize how much we need each other, how much we have to love each other and support each other.
Thinking this morning about my father's life, I reflect again that he's lived over 90 years and is still going strong. He can out talk anybody. The last marathon was about 12 hours, and he still wanted to go on. Had it not been for the cute little grandchildren coming in with notes from my mother reminding Father how long he'd been speaking, I'm sure he would have talked far into the night and way into the morning.
When I think about this man, he is truly extraordinary in that ever since he was 16 years old, when he was anointed by Jesus Christ, he has approached his mission with the attitude of a warrior. When I say the word warrior, I'm not talking about somebody who's out there slaying people. When I think of a warrior, I think of somebody with a purpose, with determination, with a mission that he or she wants to fulfill. A warrior is somebody who dares to go where no one wants to go. The world is so busy being selfish and consumed with temptation, maybe in the form of what I call PMS -- Power, Money, and Sex. It's not just women that are PMS-ing all the time, but a great many of the world's fathers and brothers are also PMS-ing because they're constantly being tempted by power, knowledge, money, and sex.
Despite what my father had to struggle through and overcome, the incredible thing about him is that he dares to live a life of unselfishness in a world that is consumed by selfishness. One of the great teachers of the Baha'i religion talks about it -- how we are all consumed by the temptations of the flesh. The teacher reminds us that we are all simply like fingers on a hand, that we are a member of a body.
A great many religions and teachers have reminded humanity that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. We exist almost like fingers on a hand, but that hand belongs to our Heavenly Parent. When we hear teachings like this, and the words of my father, who dares to go where most people do not dare to go and to pledge himself to a life of ridicule, mistreatment, and abuse, we can recognize something worthy of the great warrior that I have come to know my father is.
Not only does Father approach his mission with a sense of purpose and fearlessness in wanting to right the wrongs, to go where nobody wants to go, and to live the kind of life that no one else wants to live, he also practices living for the sake of others because he ultimately wants to see the world become a place that God can call his and her home. My father longs for home, just like any warrior or soldier fighting a battle. The end goal in their fight is to bring the victory back home. There's a certain yearning for home.
That's what my father longs for and works hard for. He wants to come home. At the end of his life, he wants to create a world that God can come home to, a world that is loving and peaceful, where God's children can reside in love and prosperity. This is what he wants. This is the reason he has tirelessly fought over many obstacles, including six imprisonments.
I remember growing up in America in the 1970s. It was not a walk in the park. There was a great deal of fanfare initially, with mayors and governors giving my father keys to every city and state because they saw us as a movement of young men and women who were doing great things. But our movement became a victim of its own success. Hundreds of brothers and sisters were joining at every weekend workshop, and people started to wonder, why are they so successful? Why are they having such an effect on these young people?
Some of these young people were previously engaged in drugs and living hippie lifestyles; others were studying at the best universities. Why were people like that so inspired by this message of true love? It scared a lot of people, so we got the backlash. In the late 1970s my siblings and I had a tough time at school because of this. Attending school felt like going into enemy territory every day. On a battlefield, a soldier can roam around somewhat, but at school we had to meet the same people every day.
I was very close to my brother who was one year younger than I [Heung Jin Moon], and we often talked about how to tackle this conundrum in our lives. My brother was into fantasy novels, and he loved the image of the warrior–gladiator figure, a lonely, powerful man willing to take on the burdens of the world because he believed he had a mission to fulfill. This type of hero believed in a purpose that needed to be executed, and he was willing to go through any amount of suffering and misery to achieve what he wanted to do. My younger brother identified with these characters that he read about.
One evening I said, "Another week at school is starting tomorrow. How are we going to get through the week?" I suggested, "Why don't you and I decide to become warriors? Let's go to school knowing that we have a purpose -- we are there to learn, to absorb everything we possibly can so we can excel and be better prepared for college and our career, so we can be better prepared to give something back when we have professional expertise. We are there with a purpose."
Once we focused our minds on that, engaging fierce battle in different classrooms, we were ready because we knew why we were there. We were not there to get hurt, to be victimized, to be abused. Knowing we were in for a fight, we were going there because we had a purpose for going to school. We thought it was wonderful to see ourselves as warriors with a mission, going where nobody dared to go, entering the kind of environment that most teenagers would run away from, perhaps change schools or stay home and not deal with the problem. We had to glamorize ourselves a little, so we called ourselves warriors of true love. I know it sounds tacky, but back then it worked.
We were going to go into enemy territory, where no one wanted to go. Being called Moonies day in and day out felt like being shot with a machine gun. Moon is a beautiful name that belongs to my father, that we are proud to call our own, but the other students were using our own name to try to shoot us down. Sometimes it was so debilitating and wearing emotionally. How could we develop an emotional bulletproof vest and still walk down the hallways at school with pride and dignity, knowing we were there for a mission that we were going to carry through?
We told ourselves that we were going to go to school and dare to go where nobody else wanted to go; even knowing we were going to be called names and ridiculed, we still went ahead because we were the warriors of true love. When we got through these battles and past the land mines, we could come home at the end of the day having learned something. We weren't there just to be abused or mistreated or called names.
If we could have the strength in that environment to remember why we were there and learn something by focusing on our purpose and not listening to the static in the air, if we could not just learn and survive, but actually be the best students, get that award at the end of the year, write that winning essay for a college grant, if we could do that, we felt, that no matter how bad it was, at the end of the day we would be coming home, coming back to a place where we had love. We might not have had our parents, but we certainly had each other. We could regroup and re-energize ourselves, reminding ourselves one more time that we were warriors of true love and would go back the next day.
We told ourselves that the single most important thing about being a warrior was that we had to understand unity. We had to have a single purpose. We could not have dual purposes. When you're going into battle, you need to clearly know what you are going to do. If you are confused going into battle, you are not going to survive. We knew we needed a single, unified purpose in going through what was hell for us. We willingly and conscientiously went to school every day because we wanted to live our lives serving others. That was our single most driving and important philosophy. Behind that philosophy was the example of our True Parents.
We realized that the most important thing in that hostile environment, a difficult life for a good number of years, was to have clarity of vision, singularity in thought, and total unity with our parents and what they thought we needed to do so that we could become great people.
When I think back to my high school years and my younger brother, I remember how we supported each other to tackle life. Battlefields are not just physical. Because he was a boy, my brother was assaulted many times by people calling him Moonie and saying that he belonged to a weird cult. But he took on all that burden, all the emotional as well as physical battles, because he had a unified, singular understanding of why he was doing what he was doing. He realized he was an eternal son of God, with a personal destiny he had to fulfill.
Yes, we knew there would be difficulties and battlefields, but we also realized the key to overcoming these. It was to be totally unified in the spirit and love of our True Parents and in understanding that there has to be a sincere desire to live for the sake of others in order to help mature and grow ourselves into altruistic and loving people. We realized we could not deviate from being focused on our parents.
This singularity of vision is just as important for all of us today as it was for my brother and me many years ago. As our church grows and as we become a movement of not just First and Second Generation, but now third and fourth, and soon fifth generation, many things in our church are changing. My father is getting older. The children are growing up. We are faced with a situation in which there are lots of different representatives of our True Parents all around the world. In the First Generation, there are missionaries and leaders of our movement, but as the True Family comes to the forefront, we have many children involved. We as True Family know very clearly that the most important thing, as the hands belonging to a body, as a foot belonging to a body, as an elbow or a knee belonging to a body, is belonging to one body. The head of the family is the True Parents.
Therefore, we must absolutely be singular in our purpose or else the body cannot operate properly. Can you imagine if the brain signals to the hand, "Grab that piece of chocolate sitting on the table. With the thumb and index finger, bring it slowly to your mouth and take a bite without biting your thumb or index finger."
Now imagine if somewhere down the line that communication goes awry and somehow the hand picks up the chocolate and throws it at the husband sitting across the table from you, all while you're opening your mouth to savor the delectable treat. Not only are you going to upset your husband because you're a good shot and you got him squarely on the nose, but you're not going to be satisfied because you didn't get the chocolate.
Or what if your brain signals you, "Take the thumb and index finger, pick up the chocolate, slowly bring it to the mouth, and take a bite," but your hand understands that somehow as, "Grab the chocolate, smoosh the chocolate and bite your fist." It's not going to have the same effect, right?
Likewise, the True Children are like different parts of the body. We have to work, listening to one command, one brain. It's one brain with two hemispheres, the right and the left, our Father and Mother. They give us the signal and say, "It's time to reward yourself a little." It's time to take a bit of the chocolate. Enjoy."
When we unite with the signal from the brain, we can partake in something pleasurable to our senses. Biting into that rich milk chocolate that slowly melts in your mouth and coats your tongue, you feel gloriously happy. It's almost as if all the problems of your world disappear and then you can enjoy and feel satisfied in that bite.
Likewise, during this time of transition, when our church is going through growing pains, our True Parents, the two hemispheres of the brain, are still the center, taking care of the whole body, sending us truly courageous and right signals for us to unite with so we can accomplish the task at hand. The brain is telling the True Children, but also brothers and sisters in our movement, to be warriors of true love: "Live a life with a purpose. Live a life that dares to go where nobody wants to go."
We dare to live a life of unselfishness. We are not going to be caught PMS-ing all the time. We are going to try to create something beautiful out of this gift called life. We are going to find that special somebody and try to build an ideal family. When our Heavenly Parent blesses us with beautiful children, we are going to try our best to bring out the best in them, to inspire them to want to fulfill their unique personal destinies that are eternal, unchanging, and always there just waiting for them to make the decision to be that special eternal son or daughter of God.
The Good Book reminds us in I Corinthians 1:10 to be united, to be perfectly joined with no divisions amongst us. It asks us to be perfectly joined, same mind with same mind. The King James Version uses the words "same judgment." Different Bibles use the words "same purpose." We need to be perfectly joined having the same mind and same purpose in the way we carry out our belief system, in our understanding of why we are here and who we are, and in the way we live our lives so we can become that great son or daughter that all of us are meant to become.
One
of the phrases Paulo Coelho coined in The Alchemist tickles me every
now and then. He says, "To realize one's personal legend is
really the only true obligation of any individual." He means
that to realize the meaning of our life, we have to tap into why
we're here and understand that each of us is a personal legend in the
making, a precious child of God put upon this earth to do great
things, not just for ourselves but to affect, influence, and empower
those around us.
By lifting others through your good works and being the kind of good person you are, you live eternally in these people's memory. You become a legend in that you have touched these people's lives and perhaps have brought them closer to an understanding of the divine, or an understanding that we all share a common parent, our Heavenly Father and Mother.
Coelho encourages each of us to realize that every person was born with the precious gift of a personal legend. In The Alchemist he tells a tale of an Andalusian boy, Santiago, who goes in search of the great treasures near the pyramids. When Santiago doesn't find anything and comes back home, he realizes that basically the journey was really a process of getting to know who he is. In the midst of his travels, Santiago meets a sheep that encourages him to speak the language of enthusiasm, the language that everybody understands universally.
When Santiago wonders what this language of enthusiasm means, the sheep explains that it means speaking a language in which things are accomplished through love and peace. These are things that we as human beings can understand universally. The sheep is encouraging this boy in his lifelong pursuit to find the treasure which in the end Santiago realizes is himself: He's holding the treasure within his own hands. The sheep encourages Santiago to speak the language of love and peace, what the sheep calls the language of enthusiasm, meaning we need to be inspired.
Regardless of how difficult the emotional or psychological or physical battlefields might be, we need to speak the language of enthusiasm. We need to speak the language of love and peace. And we all must remember that we are divine sons and daughters with a personal legend that is just waiting to be discovered. By believing in ourselves, in how precious we are and recognizing how grateful we should be for this life we have been given, we come to realize and celebrate this opportunity in gratitude. Therefore, we want to make the most of our time here and to leave something truly beautiful behind.
When I think about the theme of warrior, of course my mind goes to my father and mother. But all of us sitting here are warriors of true love, too. Not that we're brandishing swords of any kind, but, yes, many times we're fighting a battle, our own emotional battles. In fact, many times we tend to be our worst enemies, right? We fight the battles of fear and loneliness.
I thought, how fitting that the battle of loneliness is a real battle of war. Many times, even when you are engaged in an attack on an enemy line with thousands of your fellow men and women, and you are feeling part of the multitude, at the same time every soldier very sharply feels a sense of being all alone. There can be an extreme sense of being incredibly alone while you're sitting in the throngs.
Every soldier has to battle a demon inside, to become a focused soldier who is ready for battle. But many times in life we are like that, too, in that we have our own emotional, psychological, and physical battles that we have to fight in order to be prepared to tackle each new day.
If we can understand that we are all in this together, we are human beings after all, and we share in the humanity of the different things that we experience, then we can know that we are truly not alone. But better than that, we have our True Parents here with us, guiding the way.
The Good Book [Isaiah 11:6] also says that when the lamb lies down with the lion, there will be 1,000 years of peace. In Christianity the lamb is frequently a representation of Jesus Christ, so the lamb can also represent Christianity. The lion symbolizes royalty, or the true lineage of God; lineage is what differentiates the royal from the non-royal. God wants humanity to be a part of his and her lineage. Therefore, the Good Book talks of when the lamb lies down with the lion.
When you say in biblical terms that somebody is lying down with another person, you're talking about marriage. So when Christianity can be married in the spirit of interfaith and receive this lion, or the royal lineage, represented in the figure of our True Parents and can play the correct role as John the Baptist to the world, then the world can experience 1,000 years of peace.
The fact that our True Parents are presiding over the Holy Blessing ceremony on 10–10–10 is significant in and of itself. I believe that it signals the next three years as the time for the opening of the floodgates when the world will finally come to realize why we need True Parents and why we must have a singular vision and understanding. By grafting onto the heavenly lineage through the Holy Blessing, we can become one family under God, seeing ourselves as brothers and sisters, as families, and loving men and women, just as we love, respect, and want to live in peace in our individual families.
This is not a time to be confused. The Bible says that when the true teacher comes, there will be a lot of static in the air. The static can come from far, or it can be very close. When Paul was addressing his congregation through the first letter to the Corinthians, he was writing the letter in 55 C.E., or Christian Era, in response to some of the pleas that his members were making to him because there was so much division. There were a great many missionaries representing Jesus Christ in Corinthians. The people were confused over whom to believe and follow.
At that time Paul was reminding people that we have to see ourselves as the body of Christ. This was Paul's attempt to convey clearly to his brothers and sisters in Corinth that they have to be united, that he was the representative of Jesus Christ, and that his members needed to be united in Jesus Christ but also through Paul's words.
What Paul was dealing with back then can be seen as analogous to some of the things taking place in our movement at this time. That's why we would all do well to learn from the mind-set that a warrior has in going to battle: the singularity of purpose and the willingness to do and go where nobody dares to go. We can apply this mind-set because we want to live a life in service, or in defense, or in safeguarding our family, nation, and world, knowing that one day we're going to be going home to the embrace of our Heavenly Parent.
We have to have a unified spirit and a unified mind centered on our True Parents. When our True Parents clearly teach us, giving us a great blessing by taking the guesswork out of what the future will look like -- when the brain clearly signals to the body how it must respond to the next signals coming from our True Parents' representative, the spiritual head of the family who is the youngest son -- then the body must follow. The body must listen, and the body must be united.
As we prepare ourselves to partake of this beautiful Holy Wedding ceremony, when the world can substantially become that one family under God, let us remember our True Parents. Let us remember the great warriors of true love, our True Father and True Mother. Let us follow their example, and let us be true vessels so that we can respond to the signals they're sending us -- the true signals that will guide us and propel us forward, empowering us to be great men and women of God.
Brothers and sisters, shine your beautiful light unto the world, know who you are, and go with pride and dignity because we are working for a better world. We're doing something wonderful that will leave a lasting imprint in the form of our beautiful children, who can stand as members of the Generation of Peace.
So God bless, and have a wonderful week.
For a 1981 interview of In Jin and Heung Jin Moon visit http://www.tparents.org/Moon-Talks/InJinMoon/InJinMoon-811100.htm
1: Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and our brother Sos'thenes,
2: To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours:
3: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
4: I give thanks to God always for you because of the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus,
5: that in every way you were enriched in him with all speech and all knowledge --
6: even as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you --
7: so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ;
8: who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
9: God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
10: I appeal to you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no dissensions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.
11: For it has been reported to me by Chlo'e's people that there is quarreling among you, my brethren.
12: What I mean is that each one of you says, "I belong to Paul," or "I belong to Apol'los," or "I belong to Cephas," or "I belong to Christ."
13: Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?
14: I am thankful that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Ga'ius;
15: lest any one should say that you were baptized in my name.
16: (I did baptize also the household of Steph'anas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any one else.)
17: For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.
18: For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
19: For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the
wise,
and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart."
20: Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
21: For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.
22: For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom,
23: but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles,
24: but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
25: For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
26: For consider your call, brethren; not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth;
27: but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong,
28: God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are,
29: so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.
30: He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption;
31: therefore, as it is written, "Let him who boasts, boast of the Lord."
1: There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots
2: And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him,
the spirit
of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the
spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.
3: And his delight shall be in the fear of the LORD.
He shall
not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide by what his ears hear;
4: but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide
with equity for the meek of the earth;
and he shall smite the
earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips
he shall slay the wicked.
5: Righteousness shall be the girdle of his waist,
and
faithfulness the girdle of his loins.
6: The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall
lie down with the kid,
and the calf and the lion and the fatling
together,
and a little child shall lead them.
7: The cow and the bear shall feed;
their young shall lie down
together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
8: The sucking child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and
the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den.
9: They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain;
for
the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters
cover the sea.
10: In that day the root of Jesse shall stand as an ensign to the peoples; him shall the nations seek, and his dwellings shall be glorious.
11: In that day the Lord will extend his hand yet a second time to recover the remnant which is left of his people, from Assyria, from Egypt, from Pathros, from Ethiopia, from Elam, from Shinar, from Hamath, and from the coastlands of the sea.
12: He will raise an ensign for the nations,
and will assemble
the outcasts of Israel,
and gather the dispersed of Judah
from
the four corners of the earth.
13: The jealousy of E'phraim shall depart,
and those who harass
Judah shall be cut off;
E'phraim shall not be jealous of
Judah,
and Judah shall not harass E'phraim.
14: But they shall swoop down upon the shoulder of the Philistines
in
the west,
and together they shall plunder the people of the
east.
They shall put forth their hand against Edom and Moab,
and
the Ammonites shall obey them.
15: And the LORD will utterly destroy
the tongue of the sea of
Egypt;
and will wave his hand over the River
with his scorching
wind,
and smite it into seven channels
that men may cross
dryshod.
16: And there will be a highway from Assyria
for the remnant
which is left of his people,
as there was for Israel
when they
came up from the land of Egypt.