The Words of In Jin Moon
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The Words of In Jin Moon |
Good morning brothers and sisters. It is so good to see you in Boston. I'm sorry I had to cancel our engagement once before; there was a conflict in schedule and I could not make it. And today I'm not at my best, a bit under the weather, but I am delighted to be here with all of you and with my family.
This is my hometown. Well, my family home is in Westchester, at East Garden as you know, but this is the place I raised my younger siblings and this is where I raised my family.
So this is a city that is near and dear to my heart and it's really an honor for me to spend this morning with brothers and sisters from the Massachusetts area.
You know, I live in the town of Lexington, and when I think about that town and why I settled there in the first place, the whole spirit of the American Revolution and how this country came to be, inspired me quite a bit. The first shots fired at the start at the American Revolution took place in the Lexington. And I've often wondered, if I could start here where the first shots were fired, if I could start in this tiny lovely town of Lexington, and maybe start something wonderful, which is to live the Principle that our True Parents have been preaching, to in a way start with something small, with one or two shots, those one or two shots that are building wonderful families, raising great kids, so that in a way our True Parents' message can be heard around the world when the children grow up and they can be in a position to contribute to their grandfather and grandmother, and really come to be in a position to contribute something from the community that they come from, a community that they're extremely proud to be a part of. And by their own example, or perhaps by their own lifestyle, maybe there can be a way to naturally witness to many, many people that they come across. And that has been my simple homework in my daily life if you will.
I've done my best to protect them, to raise them, and I hope they are well on their way. But you know, as I raise my own family and think about what our movement has come to be, and what we truly can be, there are a lot of things that come to mind. I spent a wonderful time with True Parents, in Hawaii, in the beautiful King and Queen Garden there, and Father and Mother send you their love. They love you very, very much, and they are so proud of the American movement, and every time they come to this country, they're in a much mellower mood than when I find them in Korea. This is truly a place where they can relax and take a breather. And Father, as you know, is advancing well into his 80's, but is a hot potato as much as ever (laughter), giving and nudging and advising and scolding his children and encouraging the leaders to do their best, yet at the same time giving a message that is incredibly inspiring to everyone that was there.
I was able to take a little piece of America, if you will, and invited not just the typical district leaders but also the young second generation now coming up in leadership. My feeling is this. When I grew up in the 70's I saw hundreds and hundreds of young American men and women joining the church, and I think at one point we had two or three hundred people coming to workshops every weekend to hear the Divine Principle, to hear and experience this one family, if you will.
You know, I've always wondered, where did that spirit go? What happened to those bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young American members? And as our movement grew and we had the opportunity to invite our Korean and Japanese leadership, who have really tried their best, tried their best to honor and, in a way, pull the church forward, I felt like, maybe the American members got lost a little bit along the shuffle during the years.
I am coming from a mother's position and always looking towards the future. We are always talking about, "How do we raise our children to be better?" Well, now all of you are my children, so I'm thinking about, "How do I make you better as people, how do I make you better as Unificationists?" Or, "How can I inspire the young people in the movement to want to be the best that they can be?" I think the best thing that I can do is to bring you closer to True Parents.
You know our True Father talks about the year 2013, kind of like a time limit deadline when he will retire, and he often talks about that date as if it's a physical retirement and he will retire up to Heaven. I'm hoping it's just a retirement into peaceful living for a long time. And hopefully my children, or my siblings and I can go forward with the works that he's been doing. But he has not such a long time with us in this physical world, so I want to give this new, young, and upcoming leadership time to be with him.
The interesting thing about the second generation is that the Americans are not just blond and blue eyed, or there are Japanese-Americans, there are Korean-Americans. Within our movement we have an incredible tapestry that represents different races of the world, and they were able to come and spend incredible intimate time with our True Parents, and intimate means, from 5:00 o'clock in the morning to 10:00 o'clock at night. In Hawaii I was meeting different leaders, talking about an alternative or a different style of witnessing or a different style of seminars or workshops, but we went right back to the formula course, straightforward Divine Principle lecture from the Principle of Creation onwards and it was quite intense.
But in those rare special moments when Father and Mother were able to come and greet the members, they gave all the members pearl necklaces and handed them out one by one, and the gifts of that special moment will become that person's family heirloom. They will remember that time for the rest of their lives. I'm hoping to bring more of you closer to True Parents, to in a way recreate the personal experiences that a lot of your parents had when they first joined the movement that the second generation has rarely had the opportunity to do.
As your brothers and sisters, we don't want to hog our parents to ourselves. We very much want to share them with you so that you can have kind of experience firsthand of how incredible they are, and how incredible your parents are for following them all these years, that allowed you guys to exist. So it was wonderful, wonderful time, and our True Parents were very happy to see them.
He is a rather big and burly type of a brother and on top of that he had a goatee and my Father, even though he looks like he is not really looking, he has very, very keen vision. In the background he said, "Who is that?" (Laughter) And I said, "Well, he is your son, Father. He is a second generation." And Father kind of just smiled at him. And that's the beauty of what we are as a community, you know. We are a family here.
Many of us are here in Boston because you are going to school, or maybe you are here because you are working for Saeilo out in Worcester, for my brother Kook Jin, or maybe you are just here because you are in charge of this ministry. But all of us, it really doesn't matter where we come from. The minute we enter this communion, if you will, this communion of worship, we become a family. And one of things that I would like to do, as a member of True Family, is to kind of extend our hands outward, to not just outreach towards the larger community but to kind of invite the community to come back as a family. To remind ourselves that we are a family. That means an appreciation of each other that means understanding of each other.
All of us had many different paths in our lives, right? Some of us had an easy course; some of us were blessed with a spouse that was just perfect for us, that was in a way easy, you know, you were both attracted to each other. Or, some of us were blessed to somebody who was just a nightmare, right? Married life took incredible internal battles; here is this one family just looking at each other, and the look on their faces just says it all. But they're here. And even in the True Family, every one of us has obstacles or has difficult things we need to work through.
There is this kind of an internal joke between my husband and me; you have to be careful what you ask for. If you say to God, I really want to build an ideal family that is exactly what he is going to give you. But what does an ideal family mean? In our minds, we are going to have these sinless, pure, angelic children that will cause us no strife, no worries, and they will just miraculously blossom into these angelic beings. Well, anybody that has had children knows that it is not a natural process. It is a working-out process, if you will. And I always like to say, "Ideal families means, I deal with my family." (Laughter) And if you want an ideal spouse, God will give that spouse to you, 'I deal with my spouse.' And if you want ideal children, well, God will give that to you; too, 'I deal with my children.'
When we ask for something we always want the easy way out, but the most meaningful and the most long-lasting things in life are things that need to be worked out, are things that you kind of have to break through and go through and come out victorious. Maybe you can do this with the help of your parents, maybe with the help of your colleagues, like the people on STF, or maybe with the help of small groups, like the ones that are turning into a major phenomenon in our church.
As a movement we are growing and dealing with many, many different things, but when we are hoping for the big pie in the sky, this incredible concept of one unified family, I often ask myself, "Well, what is it going to look like? What is that family going to look like?" I don't know how many times I've come across my friends in different faiths, my Jewish friends, my Christian friends or my Islamic friends, and they always ask me, "So here you are talking about One Family under God and everyone says that's wonderful and a peaceful world. But what does it really look like?" How has our faith transformed our lives, how has our faith manifested in the way we live our lives. How is our faith applied in our daily living?
Many times when I look at our movement and think about it as a model, here we are preaching incredible things. Basically my Father is saying he was anointed by Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday morning when he was 16 years old, to basically finish Jesus' mission. Well, what is that mission? To build an ideal family, right? And when you think about it, it's rather simple. But then many times, I've said to my husband, "Well, you know, Jesus took the easy way out because he was never married." I wish to God that he had not passed away but really he had it easy.
But in a way, when you look at True Father and True Mother and all the things that they have done in their life time, and all the things that they've gone through to try to build an ideal family, you realize that it's an incredibly difficult process.
When you're lucky enough to be able to drive, what do you do? You have to take a course on driving, right? And you have to get a certificate, you have to get a license before you are allowed behind the wheel and put out on the freeway, right? But I feel like many times as a movement we never had that process before the blessing. We had the most incredible gift that God could bestow upon us, but many of us we were not ready for the blessing -- truly understanding what an ideal family meant. Striving for something utopian or idealistic is great, but we didn't really think about the problems, the kind of obstacles that we would face.
So I often like to think that, well, here we are, all of us are blessed and many of us have had children without really thinking about, "How are we going to raise our kids?" We just naturally had kids because it was a natural process of coming together as husband and wife. But I feel like in our movement there was no cohesive or uniform educational track, if you will, for preparing the membership, the first generation, for the blessing, for helping them through their married life, and for helping them transition into parents and then, once the children come, for helping their children in age-appropriate workshops, if you will, or age-appropriate seminars, to kind of help our blessed children along the way.
So when I was meeting with different blessed children, several of them came to me and said, "In Jin Nim, I just wanted a moment of your time," and they told me their life story and they told me about their difficult suffering, and they said, "You know, In Jin Nim, I'm just so sorry because I wasn't able to keep my purity, I was not able to keep my faith. I was not able to keep pure in my heart when it came to feeling about True Parents, but I want to make a new start. I want to make a new start with you." And one of the first things that I said to them is, "You know, I as a member of the True Family need to apologize to you, that we couldn't, in a way, prepare for you. We didn't have an educational system in place that could take care of you."
And as a mother it is one of the first things that I feel we need to do as a movement is to strengthen within. I was shocked to hear from the district leaders that we have 17,000 blessed children but only maybe 5,000 are somehow associated or active with the church.
So if we could even simply invite all those blessed children back, we talk about a major witnessing effort, right?
Different programs have gone on because there was a demand in the church for care and nurturing, such as the witnessing summit that is taking place under Sheri Rueter. Somebody said to me, "Well, you know, they are spending a lot of money there, but it's really not witnessing," and I said, "Wait a minute. Yes, we used the 'W' word ("witnessing") so we could get the support of headquarters, but the witnessing summit is an incredible way to get the second generation re-inspired, if you will, to get the second generation understanding what our church is all about in a way that they can understand it." And I think that for a long time the first generation and second generation never really had that dialogue. But this is a platform in which what the second generation have to say has just as much weight as the first generation, and they are placed in a setting where everyone is treated equally, and everyone's opinions are heard and recorded and studied.
As the person who will be moving HSA forward, I very much want to support things like this, like the witnessing summits that are going on. There is always kind of a knee-jerk reaction whenever a new leadership comes, saying, "Well, you know, we haven't been growing for the last 24 years as a church so let's just install the typical witnessing program." And witnessing one by one is great and the way it was done is great, but you know, we don't have much time if Father wants the world to recognize who he is by 2013. And we kind of need to move a little bit faster. And even though our message was great, one thing we have to realize is that the generations are changing. The young people that were backpacking across the country in the 70's are no longer here. They are backpacking on the Internet. They want to choose their own religion in their own time, without being preached to.
Because I work with a lot of artists and a lot of musicians, many of them come to me and say, "Oh, I've just decided I'm going to be so and so and I'm going to be such and such, I just want to be a Buddhist for a day." And I said, "Where did you come to that?" "I was just searching on the Internet this morning and I've just decided I want to try it out." So for the last eight years I've been giving a lot of encouragement to the Japanese movement that in order to safeguard our children against future attacks and to also educate the children about what their church is all about, we have to revamp our presence on the Internet. And so here at HSA that is one of my main homework assignments that I've been working on.
So these are the different things that as a woman I bring to the table. Recently I spent an evening at a Democratic fundraising event for Barack Obama at the Manhattan Center. Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen and other artists performed. It was kind of interesting because here you take Bruce Springsteen on one hand and Billy Joel on the other and then you just stick them on stage to see what magic happens or what magic doesn't happen. And it was one of those rare concerts where magic did happen and the kind of interaction or the musical dialogue, if you will -- and if you are a musician you know how incredible or exciting that is. The impromptu musical dialogue that happens on stage was absolutely electrifying and absolutely exciting. Then Barack Obama comes on stage and gives his usual 16 to 17 minute speech to try to get everybody fired up and hitting the polls on Election Day.
I was there with one of my best friends, the actress Lyn Whitfield. I was also there with my new best friend, the president of Live Nation and also the executive producer BH1 and MTV. The four of us were just talking about the significance of a black man running for president. In the back of my mind I was thinking and later I told my husband, "You know, Lyn told me that it was unthinkable that she would see a black man running for the presidency of the United States in her lifetime. It was just unthinkable."
When Rosa Parks' arrest ignited the Montgomery bus boycott, she never dreamed that she would see such a day. When Martin Luther King was preaching, he had a dream of a time when a white and black couple can just walk down the streets safely, something difficult to imagine that the American society would come to accept. And yet it is happening every day of our lives. These impossibilities that these people dreamed about and these people fought for are becoming a reality.
Just as it seems impossible that one of our Unificationist children might be running for president of the United States in the future, it could happen as long as we do our part. So when I see Barak Obama, I see the future of our kids. He comes from a single-parent home with few prospects, and yet he finished Harvard law school, he was the editor-in-chief of the Law Review there, became a senator, and now he is running for president.
We need to be a movement that raises incredible children like these so that our children can bring benefit to the world. When Father thinks about America, he says that America is an incredibly important country. Why? Because America has the power. It's considered a superpower. But power in what sense? America has the power to influence the whole world. You know, in Political Science 101 they define power as the ability to influence. So when I look at a phenomenon like Barack Obama, I'm thinking, he is powerful because he has the ability to influence. He has the ability to ignite the imagination of young people who would not otherwise have gone into politics to say, "If that black man can do it, so can I."
Isn't that what True Parents are doing when they teach us about the importance of true love and building ideal families? They are saying, 'America is the most powerful nation and has an incredible mission to manifest the kind of families that God had wanted all along so that it can exercise its ability to influence the world and to say, 'These are the ways we need to educate, we need to nurture and we need to build our families and build One Family under God.'
So when I was watching Barack Obama, he was telling a story about how he went to South Carolina, and there was a little congregation there at the church and he met a 60-plus-year-old grandma, very short woman, about 5'2", with a wonderful Sunday church hat, and she started chanting, "Get fired up, get fired up." Barack Obama is quite tall, and he was the main guest of honor, but this tiny little hurricane of a lady kept chanting, "Get fired up, and get fired up."
She wasn't paying attention to anybody, she had her eyes closed and kept on. After a while Obama and everyone else became quiet, just listening to her chant, "Get fired up, and get fired up." Somebody whispered into Barack Obama's ear, "That granny is upstaging you, Senator, do something about it." But then he started getting into it, and he started chanting along, "Get fired up, and get fired up." And when the Senator did that, then in a way, everyone in the room started to do that.
When the granny realized she had the attention of the whole room, she said, "Get fired up, get fired up" and then interjected, "Are you ready to go! Are you ready to go?" And then it just turned into this incredible, almost like a pep rally if you will. Barack Obama came away from that, realizing the power of one person. You don't have to be handsome, you don't have to be beautiful, you don't have to be tall, and you don't have to be a man. All you need to do is just believe and chant and it doesn't matter if the Senator is in town to talk to your congregation. If need be, just close your eyes. Maybe we should start chanting, 'Ideal Families, ideal families.' You know, just something to get you going. That one grandmother changed the spirit in that whole room.
Even when he came to Manhattan Center he ended his speech with, "Get fired up, get fired up, are you ready to go, are you ready to go?!" And in a way that is becoming his mantra, his whole campaign. One beautiful, quiet, black woman ignited the civil rights movement by refusing to give up her seat on the bus that one day. And Senator Obama will never forget the spirit of this one granny. Every time I hear, 'Get fired up,' I'll think about this person, about how this one person transformed that meeting into something that's the beginning of like a locomotive. She is the one who helped Barack Obama come up with the phrase, you know, "The train's leaving, we're on a train, train's going, the train's leaving, get fired up, get ready to go, get on the bandwagon."
These simple things, one person can make such an incredible change, not just in our own area of worship, but has the ability to affect Washington, and who knows, maybe the White House. So when I see things like that, or hear stories like that I often kind of look into a room and say, "How many of us are here, how many Rosa Parks, how many Martin Luther Kings, how many get-fired-up grannies do we have?" And if we could really reignite the spark that many first generation had when they initially walked into the center, just think about how powerful a movement we could be.
I have this incredible opportunity to be working in Manhattan Center and I'm coming to realize the incredible foundation that's been already laid by our True Parents. When I got to Manhattan Center all the departments were fighting with one another and not communicating with one another. Nobody knew what they were doing and there was a CEO who would meet with different department heads in secret.
Later I found out that he was running his own business while running Manhattan Center, so you can kind of imagine what was going on over there. But when I got there, what I saw was a diamond in the rough. Part of the reason why I prepared the DVD promo was not just for marketing Manhattan Center, but to help show the second generation how incredible a foundation our True Parents and your older brother had created for all of you. In a way, the only thing I did was dust off, reorganizes, and gives it a common theme or a common vision so that different departments can come together and work together as a family or as a corporation. And when you do that, you realize what an incredible thing has been going on that nobody really knew about.
Especially the blessed children might think that our church is a bunch of losers or their parents are losers. Maybe they're financial failures, but they had the courage to believe in something, they had the courage to follow a dream, if you will; they had the courage to get fired up. And this is something that I would like the second generation to realize. Our first generation and our parents are not losers. They just didn't have all the different media at their fingertips that maybe we can bring to the table. I happen to know that my Father and Mother are the coolest people around. I've met a lot of cool people, but I haven't met anyone as cool as my parents.
So my job is, how do I let the blessed children know how cool their grandfather and grandmother are? My children know how cool they are, and I'm hoping that by using media and entertainment not only can I help express to the world how incredible True Parents are but also to re-ignite the second generation to realize what kind of gift your parents have given you. Many of your parents would not have come together on their own, right? They came together because our True Parents introduced them and that's why you exist. So all the blessed children were literally hand-crafted by God. No matter where I go in the world, every time I meet a blessed child I realize that they are uniquely gifted, uniquely talented, because they are uniquely blessed.
As a movement, as mothers, we must raise these children to become the future Barack Obamas, we must raise them to be not just spiritually excellent, but externally excellent. You know, in the church we many times deemphasize the external and emphasize the internal. But my modus operandi is to stress both. We need children who are excellent internally, who are spiritually connected, who are spiritually motivated and inspired, but are going to do something about it by manifesting the beauty within to the outside. By the kind of life that they lead, by how they represent themselves as ambassadors of True Parents, as ambassadors of your parents, people will know your parents through you. People will say, "Wow, Mrs. so and so must be a really awesome parent because her kids are so great." And I'm just so honored because I hear it all the time. You know, many people say to me, "Your kids are such great kids, so you must be a great parent." And that's my thanks to my children.
If we can have more of a movement where we can appreciate each other, maybe a little less finger-pointing, maybe a little more caring, maybe instead of saying, "You're not blessed, I am; you're Jacob, I'm not; you're fallen, I'm not; your parents are separated, mine aren't," maybe a little bit more of, "How do we come together as one family?"... Because you know what? I always tell my kids that, no matter how much work I do for the movement, I will be a failure in life if I don't have my team behind me. Every family is like a team. It's like a sports team, if you will. You have your goalie, right? You have your runners, you have your defense players, but you all have to work together for the common goal or you will lose. So in a way each family is like a sports team. And I always like to ask my husband and my children, "What kind of team are we going to be? How are we going to best represent True Parents? How are we best going to represent the movement?"
When I look at the political arena at the things that are taking place, you just cannot help but think that Father is truly incredible. He proclaimed the beginning of the Pacific Era. Our True Mother has been an incredible fighter for sisters and for women. Her endless and consistent dedication and loyalty to our True Father have allowed her to restore the position of Eve. She has restored the position as a woman and a mother, allowing us as sisters in the movement and as mothers in the movement to give us a chance to play an active role in our life of faith.
How many of you American sisters in the 70's sat through speeches where my Father literally berated American women? I remember cringing every time. My sisters and I, Ye Jin onni and Un Jin, we would be listening together and going, "Oh no, here we go again. That sister is getting it real bad." And many times when you are growing up in a big family, the brothers would kind of take that as a cue to say, "See! See! American sisters! Women, Women!" And to see the brothers that accused us of being women, for them to become the biggest promoters of their sister now, is just a miracle in and of it itself.
I'm thinking all these American women that Father was berating over the years, it wasn't because he was saying you were horrible people, it's because he knew you were beautiful, he knew you were capable, he knew you were educated. And in a way he was challenging you to basically say, "You beautiful, educated young thing, what are you going to do with your life? Are you going to live your life for God, or are you going to live your life for yourself?"
Just the fact that you sisters have struggled and hung on; you are now seeing the fruits of your suffering, of your sacrifice. We have True Mother coming forward. We have a true daughter playing an active role; we have a true family coming together. And you guys are just incredible because whatever I can do, starting from here and taking the movement forward, is really because you guys were there first. It's because of your foundation that I can stand in the position I'm at now. And it's because of our Mother's victory that the true daughters can play an active role in our life of faith.
People who have not studied the history of religion do not realize the significance of that. But it is incredibly significant. Women have been much maligned and much abused, always accused of different things. And once I said to Father, "Every time I listen to Chapter Two, I as a woman just cannot help but ask the question, 'Eve seduced Adam but where was his responsibility?" I think, in a way, whenever there is a problem it was the women's fault.
Maybe this is a new age where we need to rethink what is the real, the ideal way of dealing with one another. We can kind of come to a new consciousness, or come to a new level of understanding, where we as a family realize that either we work together or we end up killing ourselves. We are at that point where we can be an incredible force that can change the world, or we can be a faction that just divides amongst themselves and literally dies.
The True Family is stepping forward and coming together and working together, Hyun Jin is doing an incredible job with UPF and reaching out to different clergy and reaching out to different politicians. Kook Jin is doing an incredible job of reorganizing the foundation and for the first time its cash positive in Korea and our movement is just poised for a huge growth. And we have Hyung Jin, the youngest one in the family that we like to call "Lovey" because he was so adorable and so cute. No matter how old he gets, to us he is always Lovey. And we have Lovey, in a way at the spiritual head of our movement in the World Mission Department and really giving his heart, and really reaching out to the members. The kind of work that he and his wife are doing is incredible. Then we have Sun Jin's couple in Japan overseeing True World.
I think most people don't realize how close we are in the True Family. We talk amongst ourselves and we discuss a lot of things. And I know that in the membership and amongst the leaders there might be a great deal of talk, "So much confusion." I recently spent some time with one leader who said, "Hyun Jin Nim says UPF, Hyung Jin Nim says the spiritual life and church, and Kook Jin Nim says 10 percent tithing. What's the most important, In Jin Nim?" And I just looked at this person and I said, "Isn't it obvious? It's all of those things." It's like basically saying, "What is more important, the thumb, index finger, third, fourth or fifth?" I said, "You need it all. I said, we need it all for God."
"So instead of thinking of our own positions, or our own entitlement..." I said to these people, "Look, if you are a leader it doesn't mean you are entitled to some benefit. It means you are there to serve the people. So it really doesn't matter what kind of position you hold. You can serve the people from the pavement, you can serve the people in a playground, you can serve the people in the bathroom even, if need be. You don't need titles, and you don't need positions. And if you're doing the will of God, and if you're doing the work that needs to be done, then the work would show for itself. "
So if America is thinking of itself as a country that's entitled to be great, a country that has a responsibility or a special position to be great, if we are thinking of just serving ourselves, we will never be great. America, because of its incredible providential position, needs to think about serving the people, serving other countries if you will. America as a super power with this ability to influence, ability to change peoples lives, change countries' destinies, has an incredible responsibility to exert influence in the right way, to remind the world of the importance of moral values, of the importance of having strong families, the importance of good education, the importance of taking care of our children, and of the importance of having a spiritual compass, and at the same time do our work by becoming humble, by not going to other countries and acting like we are the greatest thing that ever walked the earth, but really go to different countries and serve the other countries, serve different cultures.
In my mind we are a movement that really espouses three things. What we represent is interracial harmony, and there is nothing more beautiful than that. There are no children better looking than interracial children. Then, inter-religious dialogue. Especially coming after 9/11 we saw the atrocities that the world of religions, if you will, did to this country, in New York. How are you going to stop terrorism? How are you going to stop the hatred? The only way you are going to stop hatred is through love, right?
I mean, here I see bumper stickers saying, 'co-exist' with different symbols of religion, and all the liberals are like, "Wow! This is so profound" And I'm looking at that in horror! Co-existence does not really love your brothers and sisters. If I put a co-exist on top of my bedroom, I don't think my marriage would be a good one. If my husband were to turn to me and say, "You know, In Jin, darling, I just love co-existing with you!" it's just not going to inspire me as much as if he were to turn to me and say, "You know, I really love you," right? It's just that kind of thing. Or, "In Jin, in all my years of being married to you, I just really enjoyed tolerating you." If he were to say that to me, I don't know what would happen.
You see, the liberal media and this whole atmosphere of tolerance and co-existence may sound beautiful, but if you really look beyond it, it's basically saying, "Put up with each other but don't really love." But the incredible thing is that True Parents are saying, "No, no, no. You cannot just put up with each other. You have to really love each other. You really have to kind of learn to see each other as a family, learn to love each other as brothers and sisters."
My friend Lynn has an interracial marriage and her child actually started a blog on the Internet that grew to 160,000 people wanting to be a part of her conversation because she was saying, "Why do people always make me choose? I don't want to be black. I don't want to be white. I want to be love. That's what I am." That's what True Parents are saying. We all are children of love, right? And it doesn't matter what race you come from, it doesn't matter what religion you come from.
We are not here to co-exist. We are not here to tolerate each other. We are here to really learn how to love each other. And loving each other requires understanding. We can not truly love somebody without understanding them. We cannot truly love our Jewish brothers and sisters without understanding the beauty of their faith. You cannot truly love Islamic brothers and sisters without understanding the beauty of their faith. So by coming to appreciate what their religion stands for and their history then you comes to understand and then love and see the beauty in each different religion. And that's how we become harmonious.
And that's how we come to our third point which is intercultural appreciation. We have so many different cultures. We should not simply co-exist, we should not just tolerate each other, and we should not just put up with each other. But we really should appreciate each other's cultures. So at different centers I very much encourage them, "For your Sunday worship, what about an international food fair, where you celebrate the different heritages and invite the neighbors to come? Most people would say no when you invite them to come and listen to a workshop, but very few people will say no when you say, come and have some food. Or if you happen to be smack in the middle of the Bronx, where you have an incredible gospel contingent or a Hispanic community, what about putting up a Salsa ballroom dancing program together and get everyone coming? Celebrate each other's cultures, get people excited and allow them to experience our appreciation of their culture in a setting that's familiar and friendly to everybody."
As we move forward there is a lot of work to be done, and I said to my Father, "Why did you give me a double-edged sword here? Here you are asking me to be the pastor and a minister, and yet you want me to run the organizations, too. And at the same time I have to raise my family." I said, "Father, that's a really tough order." But he said, "As a woman you should be used to multi-tasking, so I don't want to hear about it."
I am really hoping that our Boston family will come together and start thinking about what are the shots that are going to be fired here that will be heard around the world? What are we going to be bringing out to the world about who we are? And maybe take into consideration some of my concerns, which are that we really need to be a church known for raising great kids. At the end of the day it doesn't matter what you do in life or who you are. I've met with presidents, I've met with congressmen, I've met with movie stars, I've met with artists. And at the end of the day if you have a family, it always comes down to kids. What are our kids doing? How are they doing?
Many times, just because of who I am and just because how wonderful the kids are -- and I'm not here to brag about my kids, it's still a work in progress here -- but it's a natural witnessing. When you get people in a position where they're asking questions, the witnessing is natural and it's long-lasting and it's quite immediate. They are asking questions, "How can I have a better relationship with my spouse? How can I have a better relationship with my children?" In the process of all these dialogues, the subject of our church comes up, True Parents come up, and what they are doing. People exclaim to me, "I never knew you guys believed in Jesus!" So I was very happy to hear a bit of the Bible here this morning.
Somebody asked me, "In Jin Nim, you know at Sunday Service should we be teaching Jesus' teachings?" And I said, "Of course you should. It's Jesus that asked True Parents to complete the mission." So if our children can understand how incredible Jesus is, it just makes True Parents even greater. And if our children are raised in an awareness of different religions and how the history of religion has not been a beautiful one, it's been quite bloody -- and we've experienced 9/11 here -- then we can kind of give our children a reason to want to be men and women of true love, to want to learn the different cultures, want to learn about different faiths so that they can better love their brothers and sisters.
Many times my politician friends turn to me and say, "You know, a peace movement is all great but it's just going to take so long." And I said, "Not really. There is a lot of good foundation that has been laid in place by many good people. Not just Unificationists, but by good Catholics and good Christians, good Mormons, good Jewish people." It's as though the different faiths have been throwing pebbles into a lake and all the kids are thinking their parents have gone bonkers, throwing pebbles into a lake. But after a while the pebbles build up, right? And then you realize, you see the first pebble sticking out from the water and, before you know it, you can build bridges and then you can build huge buildings and huge monuments.
I feel like right now we are at that point, and Manhattan Center is just an example of the foundation that is there. The kind of work that I am able to do is just going to be that much greater because of the foundation. The foundation that many of you don't see is already there. We are approaching this tipping point, if you will. When you are slowly pouring water into a cup, you don't realize that sooner or later it's going to overflow until it happens, right? And then it literally tips things over.
Well, I feel like we are approaching that tipping point, where people in different areas or different parts of the world have heard about True Parents. Most of them heard about the negative things -- which will be remedied by cleaning up the Internet and hearing about other things that our church has been doing -- but many, many people don't even know that Father spent over two billion dollars on the Washington Times alone to prevent the free world from succumbing to Communism. Just simple facts like that.
So I would love to circulate these little sound bites, if you will, "Did you know that Rev. Moon spent this much money for this?" "Did you know that Rev. Moon spent so and so much money building hospitals?" "Did you know that Rev Moon inspired volunteers to give a huge amount of time doing service projects?" These are all like liberal concepts, but people think that Father had no hand in it and he is just sitting up on the cloud in that wonderful palace up there in Chung Pyung. But Father has a history of not just preaching but living what he preached and he has done many, many good works that our blessed children sometimes don't know.
So using the media and entertainment, I want to create these sound bites for the second generation so that you realize how incredible our True Parents are and how incredible your parents are and can give each other the pride that needs to be lived, not just worn.
If you are going out into the society as a living monument to True Parents and you are that confident, that extremely educated, that extremely capable and yet incredibly humble, incredibly serving, the world has never seen such a combination. We have that combination in our blessed children. So if we can give them the hope and give them the encouragement to be the best that they can be, to really go out, "If you want to be a doctor, be the best doctor. If you want to be a musician, be the best musician"...
And I know that a lot of second generation kids of have formed their own groups and some are practicing really hard, but some are just using their bands as an excuse for social interaction. I always say to them, "Look, anybody can form bands but can you really truly practice like the way your older brother did? He practiced until his fingers bled because he wanted to change the world! Do it because you believe in something and because you want to share your music to inspire the younger generation to be part of a movement that you are going to be launching." And what kind of a movement is it that you are going to be launching?
We need to raise up a generation of peace. You have your generation Xers, generation Y, and right now we are up to the millennials, which MTV is calling the 'Show me the money generation." Do we really want our children to be part of that show me the money generation? I have friends in the entertainment industry who have everything that you could ask for and they are just so perplexed and so disturbed inside because the only thing that their kids think about is money, or the trust fund, or what are they going to get from their mom and dad. In a way mom and dad are just a means to get at the money. And the parents are saying, "What's gone wrong here?"
So we need to raise up an incredible generation of peacemakers who have incredible characters, who have incredible understanding of the need for moral values. I just came back from talking to some of the younger kids about a recent CNN video clip about a 22-year-old young woman who was basically selling her virginity on eBay, saying, I've finished college and I don't have enough money for graduate school so I want to pay for my graduate school by auctioning off my virginity. A non-Unificationist friend sent me the video clips and he said to me, "What is the world coming to?" He is a producer for the company that produced a couple of reality programs on MTV, where they follow around young people basically doing whatever they want.
I said to him, "Maybe this is a chance for you to kind of rethink what kind of programming you are letting out to the young people because you are basically letting the young people think that 'show me the money' or the 'what's your crib,' the MTV show that takes pictures of people's mansions and all their Lamborghinis and sports cars... Young people grow up on that. They want the big mansions, they want the big cars. And at the end of the day you realize they are hollow human beings. And this young attractive college graduate is a perfect example.
When the CNN interviewer was asking her questions like, "How did you arrive at this decision?" She said, "Yeah, I grew up on Cinderella fairy tales and I believed in my Prince Charming, and yeah, you kind of believe that but then you enter Junior High School and you still want true love but you come to college and realize that basically everybody is doing whatever they want then nobody cares about that anymore, and it's the only thing I have left to sell."
Is this what America has come to, the country that has an incredible responsibility with the power to influence the world in the correct way? This is a kind of litmus test. If young people are selling what is most precious to them by putting it on the Internet and auctioning it off for money, isn't this why our True Parents are so necessary? Many of you joined the church because you were lost in the 60's and 70's, right? Many of you gave up on love. Well, this child gave up on love and this child gave up on the possibility of having an incredible relationship, but imagine how wonderful if she could have known that she deserves to be loved, she deserves to be honored by a man who loves her as his wife forever. How much more beautiful!
The message that our Parents gave to your parents is an incredible one. The message that they are trying to share with the second generation is an incredible one, too. I say to my children, "You guys have it all. Your parents had to make that magic happen in their relationship and some are still struggling, but you guys can actually be introduced, fall in love. WOW!" My brothers and sisters were complaining, and Father and Mother were like, "What! What? What about us?" But because of what the first generation went through, the second generation can have it all. You can have love. You can have incredible romance, knowing that you will love each other for the rest of your life. And there is nothing greater than that.
You may envy the most beautiful woman and the most handsome man in the world, but at the end of the day if they don't have love, they are absolutely miserable. There is this incredibly handsome entertainer that I know who calls me every couple days. "Tatiana, my girlfriend left me." It's the same thing over again. He is just everything that you would think is awesome, tall, and handsome, extremely articulate, great with the ladies, but can never be faithful.
Can you imagine if we can raise our incredibly beautiful and talented and smart and capable blessed children to be all that they are and internally excellent? I tell my kids, "Anybody could do drugs, anybody can have sex. Not just anybody can live a life of fidelity, not just anybody can live a life dedicated to God and the community and for the sake of the world." I said, "If you want to be a rebel, don’t be rebels without a cause. Don’t be rebels for the sheer pleasure of being a rebel; do it with a reason. Be a rebel with a cause. In a way Jesus Christ at his time was a rebel. Father even now at 88 going on 89 is a rebel. He is reacting against society and saying we have to make it better."
Now if you are tempted by your friends to feel like you have to be a rebel without a cause, to just do whatever you want with your life just for the sheer sake of doing it, why not take it a step further? If you are going to be a rebel, be a real rebel, be a rebel with a cause. Be a rebel by saying, "My society is telling me to sell my virginity on the Internet but I'm not going to do that. My society is telling me to get drunk every night and basically have lots of sexual relationships, but I'm not going to do that. My society is telling me not to worry about my children, just care about my happiness, but I'm not going to do that." Be a rebel with a cause and instead of rebelling against your parents, if you want to rebel, rebel against the world. It's a bigger meat loaf to deal with. And then think about how you are going to live your life so that you leave something better at the end.
I'm hoping that if I do my job correctly, my contribution to the American movement will not die when I die. This is not about the cult of In Jin, and I want to make this very, very clear. This is not about one charismatic woman, not at all. This is about what kind of contributions I can make to your lives and to the lives of your children, and if I do my part you can all forget me but I will be happy knowing that my work is being continued. This opportunity that Heavenly Father has given me is an incredible opportunity for me to serve all of you. As an American sister -- I'm finally naturalized now. Actually my Father did not know I was an American citizen but in Hawaii I reminded him. I said, "I don't know if I shared with you, Father, but I'm actually an American sister." And he laughed so much.
The wonderful thing about my brothers and sisters is, and really an honor for me as an American woman to be serving you is, because I feel in your language and in my language, and my brothers and sisters feel that, too. So we have a lot of work to do but if we can kind of come together as a family we can use this as an opportunity to invite different people back.
People who have gone their own way are always so hesitant to come. They might say something like, "My child fell and they are no longer in the church and now they are in a relationship and it's just so horrible." I always say, "Look at it from another perspective. Yes, your child is in another relationship with somebody else, but can you make it so that both of them can come to the blessing? Then in a way this is your opportunity not just to witness to that child but also that child's parents and their in-laws and their families."
So instead of highlighting the negatives, or how we came up short, we should always look at it more as, "I'm in a really difficult situation but how do I look at this in a positive way?" It's an invitation for us to reach out to somebody new. Instead of kind of concentrating on what we're not, I would like all of us to look at what we are. And you as Americans are incredibly blessed to be able to say you are part of the allied forces that saved my Father that literally saved my Father's life. That's the reason why I am here and that is why we are all here. So in a way the True Family's lives are indebted to all of you. So if we can really kind of come together and work together and realize what an incredible foundation we have, I think we can do many, many great things.
Without wasting any more time, I would like to encourage all of you to be the person you want to be. Do it with pride and always think about internal excellence and external excellence and always think about how you are going to be the ambassadors for True Parents. Even in the way you present yourself, maybe a little bit more care about how you dress before you go and meet your neighbor. Little things like that, what I call packaging, that I feel is extremely important, then I think we can do many, many great things. So thank you for welcoming me to Boston and my family and I wish you a great week and I hope to see you soon. Thank you.