The Words of Sun Myung Moon from 1983
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The Words of Sun Myung Moon from 1983 |
It's important to have Seminary graduates. The Seminary has been academically enriching, but so far spiritual education is lacking. Members tend to be young and energetic, but in pursuing religious life, you tend to become secularized unless you have a strong spiritual background -- a real backbone of faith.
In religious history, celibacy was long practiced as a means to such a spiritual strictness or discipline, but the family man is more apt to listen to his wife. A wife is more realistic and secular, and she might be influencing her husband toward that direction. Also your children will begin influencing you toward their point of view. Once this happens, comparison emerges and they begin to think, "Why can't we be like others?" If your faith is not grounded on the rock-hard foundation, the husband will waver.
Please understand that I am initiating a revolutionary movement where the wife is the "economic sovereign" who takes care of the financial needs of the family. Wives are more likely to complain, so they must take responsibility for the family's economic autonomy, and also support the husband spiritually. Unless the husband has his own rock-bottom foundation, he may be negatively influenced. Upon your strong foundation, you map out your principles for your eternal life.
If your wife is totally providing for the support of the family and supporting your mission spiritually, you have a real treasure of a wife; there is nothing more that you can expect.
Through your spiritual experience, you must absolutely know the principle of restoration by indemnity. You don't yet feel the need of indemnity to the bone! You don't know how the conditions you make are actually affecting your life and family and eternal life. You have no idea. If you haven't really tasted this restoration by indemnity, you have no qualification to be a leader.
So far, you have no way of knowing how much indemnity you should pay, yet just by listening and believing and following those instructions that I give you, already you are paying indemnity.
Some spiritual experiences you should not reveal too hastily. Sometimes you should mention them only after one, three, or even five years. Once you receive revelations, then you should work at it, whatever the message instructed you to do, or whatever guidance you received. Then, maybe even five or seven years later, you can reveal that you had received guidance. You should always take the time and care to analyze and interpret the content of your spiritual experiences.
I created the Unification Theological Seminary and I've seen that there are those who graduated with a big head, and that head just keeps getting bigger, so those members become "analytic" after looking at Unificationism this way and that way as theologians do; and then they may actually lose their commitment. This happens when they water down the Principle into "one good theory," and they easily forget that Principle is a life or death matter that they're involved with.
How can you prevent this from hindering your development of faith? Whatever amount of time is used for study, you must give far more time for gaining spiritual experiences. The practicing of religion is not the practicing of theologians' statements. People consider theology to be like logic and theory, but religion is not a theory. It is a principle and a practice.
Gaining Spiritual Experiences How can we receive the spiritual experiences very quickly? There are two ways:
(1) Deep prayer life, and practicing the Principle by voluntarily suffering and giving hardship and tribulation to your own body.
(2.) Getting persecution from an external source. You are already in suffering when you are persecuted.
The prayerful way is the internal way, opening: yourself up and exposing yourself to spiritual experiences by voluntary searching.
The second way is sort of a given way, the external way in that you are forced into suffering. Inevitably you have to receive spiritual revelation.
Either way, you deepen your spiritual experience with God and you become a true man of belief.
You must internally erect your spiritual foundation through good conditions; without this, spiritual experience cannot occur. These are our two ways: pray hard, dedicated prayer, and secondly, go out and fight and receive the persecution. If you are constantly progressing toward your goal, even a brief prayer can bring tremendous spiritual insights.
So you, who are the spiritual leaders of the Unification Church, either go out and receive persecution or really work hard making yourself totally knocked out by the work, in order to stay alive spiritually. This is what I am doing, minimizing the time of eating, time of sleeping, time of play.
When God knows you are totally committed to the task, then you can be given special understanding.
First you must be very inspired about bringing a great victory for God; secondly, you should be truly grateful.
When a man can consistently gain significant insights, I can commit that man to any mission, in any field, with confidence. Anything that needs to be done, he can do, because the spirit world comes down to him. No matter what or how great your thinking is, heart is the quality that is most crucial in a leader. Man can be awakened not by explanation, but by the touch of heart. Heart provides you with reason or explanation, but explanation alone cannot give you heart.
My suggestion to you is to develop a heartistic relationship of longing for God. You must go beyond logic to get to the deeper corners of the emotional heart. Meeting persecution is like meeting your lover! Only having those longing tears will fill your heart.
My unforgettable experience in life was in prison camp. In those lonely places, where there was no one to communicate with except for God, there I experienced that longing for the one love, the one God. In those times, I had the entire day committed to Him in deep devotion.
When I had that experience of longing this much, it was intoxicating, in a way; so even though I was lifting hundreds and hundreds of bags of fertilizer every day, I didn't even remember that I was doing it. During such times of total longing, the spirit of God is with you, helping and comforting you.
The tragic moment is when you leave that longing. If you slip just once, sometimes the consequences can make an awful impact that lasts weeks, or even several months.
Even one mistake causes much future spiritual damage. In order to restore that, it takes a lot of effort, hundreds of times over.
Having that lonely, longing experience of spiritual intoxication is the most precious experience. If you don't have it, you won't progress too far in faith. In all my life, I am only afraid of one thing -- and that would be to lose that quality. Today is the first time that I have revealed this to you.
If you will be leaders, you must show the way -- you must pass through this meaningful path. The person whom you are longing for becomes the master of your tears. When you cry with a longing heart, the entire universe will surrender to that heart -- that's the most noble heart you can ever imagine.
When you pray to God with such a heart it is the heart of the child reaching to the parent, but you must know that however intense such a love and such a longing is, it is the parent who feels so much more than the child. With this I have revealed the secret heart of the Father.
My conclusion is that you need spiritual experiences.