The Words of Sun Myung Moon from 1985
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The Words of Sun Myung Moon from 1985 |
You make me feel very good today everybody looks bright and young. Today is the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Parents' Day. Actually, Parents' Day falls on April 20 this year but because of circumstances, we are gathered here today to celebrate it.
There are so many organizations and churches, but there is only one Unification Church, isn't that true? The Unification Church has a vast and profound philosophical foundation, but at the same time it has a plan of action that is equivalent in depth to the philosophy that it expounds. The teachings we follow are very deep and also the things that we do are quite profound. The Unification Church has a mysteriousness about it. Unless one actually joins the Unification Church, he or she cannot really understand the church in depth. The Unification Church has its own unique celebrations and holidays that stem from novel aspects of our understanding of God and the universe. An example of this is Parents' Day.
It is not common for a member of a particular faith or religion to worry about the salvation of the world. Usually people are concerned only about their own salvation, securing their own little "cubbyhole" upstairs. That is in fact a self-centered attitude toward salvation. It is also commonly understood that salvation comes only through one's particular faith or denomination. Many people think they can receive salvation by following their own special creed or doctrine.
The many different religions -- Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and so on -- are each trying to offer the world a particular way of salvation. Each religion looks at God from its own point of view. Throughout history, Christians have thought of God as being only the God of Christians. Muslims hive likewise perceived Him as being only the God of Islam. The other religions do the same thing. What about the Unification Church? The Unification Church believes in a God who is the God of the entire universe, the God of all people. We are trying to bring together all religions into one common understanding of that universal God: one universal faith.
Only one God presides over all of humanity. People are climbing up one great mountain; there are many different ways to get to the pinnacle, although the people who are climbing may not see them. But once everyone arrives at the top of the mountain, they will begin to recognize each other. They will say, "Oh, these people are here, too. They were seeking the same goal as we were." Eventually all humanity will arrive at the same destination. While we are striving to reach the pinnacle, we must try to embrace and unite with each other.
Everybody claims that his own religion is the closest one to God. For instance, established Christianity, Islam, aid Judaism all profess to have the closest position to God. But the time will definitely come when we all arrive at the pinnacle and meet each other.
Human beings fell from their original position; from that point, the upward journey of humanity began and it has continued to this day. All of humanity is destined to end its journey in one ultimate culminating point. When humankind arrives at that terminus, everyone will realize that all people have one common destiny.
The question then arises: Are there two different kinds of salvation, or only one? If people think there is more than one kind of salvation, they are denying the unique and absolute nature of almighty God. If Gad indeed exists as the Creator of all, then He must have one ideal, one purpose of creation: not two or three. He absolutely has only one plan of salvation and one purpose, one goal.
If there is one God, one will, and one salvation, would the individual path be different from the family path or the national path? Would they all go in different directions or should they all go in one direction? They should go in one direction. When we come to the final destination, then we will realize that whether the dispensational level is based on the individual, the family, the tribe, the nation, or the world, it is centered upon the same axis. The circle gets bigger and bigger, but the center is always the same.
God has many kinds of motion; He dispenses many types of energy. Besides the power of love, there is the power of life or the maintenance of existence. You must exist and you need energy to exist. There is also a certain energy that pursues the ideal. Human beings always strive to find or achieve something better; people have the inborn desire to pursue goodness, and are moving ever closer to the absolute good. When we attain that purity of goodness, we will never want to lose it, but will desire to abide in that state of absolute goodness forever.
God has three aspects of power: the power to pursue the ideal; the power to create and maintain existence; and the power to love. Does that threefold power exist in a random state, without order and discipline, just moving all over the place, or does that power pursue some common goal? What do you think? Among all these powers, which do you think is the central, focal power, the core of God's energy? The power to love. What is the difference between true love and not-so-true love?
First of all, in order to be truly loved, you need someone else with whom to have give and take. You cannot just be all by yourself. This is of crucial importance. Even God cannot derive joy from love if He is all by Himself. God doesn't sit on His throne and say, "I am almighty and I am enjoying absolute love." No matter how hard God might try to be happy all by Himself, He can't find happiness that way. If God didn't seek an object with whom to share love, would it be normal? It would be abnormal. The normal way is to yearn for an object; if God did not feel the need for an object, He would be crazy. Without that object, He has no way to fulfill His love. You are in the position of object of God's love. In order for God's power of existence to have meaning, that power must have a purpose and a goal. The ideal is that goal. But how can the ideal be fulfilled? Only through true love. Therefore love determines the purpose for all God's power.
What is the quality of love that a person seeks? When you are truly pursuing the goal of true love, even though you may be living all by yourself, all things will come and help you. If you as husband and wife must live separately, you still have a common purpose and ideal -- to fulfill the love in your relationship. So you can always feel that there is someone who loves you, and you in feel an exhilaration because of that.
The happiness which everyone desires cannot come until the individual's existence and ideal meet with the permanent ideal: true love. Then the person takes the position of an object who can have permanent give and take with the permanent subject in true love. That alone can engender happiness to every man and woman. When you recognize the absolute Being as the subject who has an absolute purpose for existence and for achieving the ideal, and when you make yourself the object to that entity, then you can truly experience happiness.
If a reciprocal relationship is necessary to fulfill love, why are there not in fact two Gods, one who plays the role of object and the other the role of subject? If that were the case, there would be two pluses in the universe. Plus repels plus, so there could be no harmony or unity unless one God were the minus God, or the object God. What God needs is a minus God, and so the Almighty determined to create one.
The creation is none other than God's effort to create a minus God with whom to have a relationship. Do you think there should be a showdown between the plus God and the minus God to decide who should be subject and who should be object? That is already determined, already naturally organized for the sake of harmony.
In order for harmony to be created, there must be contrasting components, which are then brought together and united. If everything and everybody were identical -- God and human beings, men and women -- there would be no harmony, and therefore no joy.
That is why God created men and women to be different. When two hard things come together and crash, what happens? Both are shattered. However, when one hard and one soft entity come together, the soft wraps around the hard. Man is like the bone; woman wraps around him like the flesh. When man and woman, hard and soft, unite in this way, the man feels such joy that he can go out all over the world and accomplish great things. The woman, wrapped around him, gets a free ride!
Within the essentiality of God there is a subject portion and an object portion: the masculine or plus and the feminine or minus, as well as internal character and external form. These all harmonize together and create one giant plus character. Within the human sphere, there must also be subject and object: masculine and feminine, and internal character and external form. When these come together, they create a great minus God for that great plus God.
The ultimate destiny of man is to receive the love of God; our ultimate subject is God. In order to reach the love of God, people must come together as plus and minus. 1 his is why men need women and women need men: only together can we create the harmony with which we can reach the love of God. That is the entire purpose of creation.
When men and women come together in love, the impact is so great that they would be shattered if they didn't have God as their cushion. God gets squeezed in between the two, and is Himself ignited with true love. Once God is ignited in this way, there is no limit to the action that can take place. Actually, in that situation God is wrapped around by the true love of men and women. Everybody in that embrace is permanently welded together -- God, man, and woman. They never want to leave each other. God feels, "How wonderful is man and woman!"
In this sense, man can educate God. Through having shared in the bonding of man and woman, God can experience the impact of true love for the first time. Even though God is almighty, you can say to Him, "You cannot be fulfilled without us." And God will say, "I have learned a lesson from you! I have seen that true love is even mightier than I am! True love can do something that I alone could not do." But that will not cause any unhappiness to God; it will make Him totally euphoric. God will have found the state of joy that He has always been seeking. Once He experiences the reality of His true love He can say, "Now I feel accomplishment, having fulfilled perfection and the purpose of creation. Amen!"
But in reality this fulfillment of God's true love never occurred in all of history. Why is it that men and women were supposed to be in the position to return that true love to God, but they fell. Ever since the fall of Adam and Eve, men and women have never been fully restored.
God has never experienced the fulfillment of His true love through His creation. The world became satanic, filled with untrue, self-centered love. God's purpose has therefore been to restore humankind to the point where this state of joy could be realized. There is a lot of laundry to do. There is an incredible amount of dirtiness in mankind. The stains are so ingrained that a simple washing cannot suffice. Therefore, God has had to unravel the fabric and reweave it with new threads.
God thus needs a factory in which He can remake human beings. Throughout history religions have served as such mending or remaking factories. However, so far no factory has been able to reconstruct everything. One religion might be redoing the right leg; another religion might be redoing the left leg; another religion might be doing the arms; another doing the ears; another the eyes, the nose, and so forth. The whole process of remaking was divided among the different religions.
All this time, however, each religion has been working independently. Thus the left-leg religion and the right-leg religion each thought they had the complete and definitive plan. But now the final days have come -- the time for an all-encompassing religion to emerge and remake the whole body of humankind.
So far in history there has also been great separation between the races, particularly between black and white. God wanted the distinction between the races to be maintained until the time when the Messiah would come; in this way each race could highly develop its special characteristics. The Messiah is to bring these contrasting races together in one beautiful, harmonious relationship. They will be able to weep and laugh together and share everything together. But in order to create such an all- encompassing atmosphere of love, True Parents are needed. This is because the deep love that is necessary to bond all races together as one family cannot be engendered without parental love. Thus the Messiah must come in the position of a True Parent Without this basic structure of love coming down from heaven through True Parents there is no way to create harmony between the races.
In a way, the Unification movement can be described as the final remaking factory for human beings. Thus when you first come here, you will be given rough treatment, as if you were raw material being divided into pieces; this is because you have to give up your former self. Then you are fed by the milk of True Parents' love, for the first time in history. Ultimately, a new person will emerge, a person of true love. This is almost like a beast being transformed into a human being. This is what the Unification Church is all about.
The question of love is the central question for the Unification Church. This is where humanity went wrong. In the Bible, God gave Adam and Eve the commandment: You can eat of all the trees, but do not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Today's established Christian churches do not understand that the fruit represents love. God asked Adam and Eve to maintain their purity until He would bless them in marriage. When they broke that commandment, the fallen generations began.
We were all born to be the children of God, to be His princes and princesses. But what happened? The first ancestors joined with Satan; ultimately human beings became a part of the satanic lineage. This is the reason Jesus said, "You brood of vipers. How can you speak of good when you are evil? "That is why people must shed their blood in order to cleanse their blood lineage. And that is why the history of Christianity has been a history of suffering and martyrdom.
We need another phase in the process of the remaking of man. We need the final part of the process, by which all the remade parts of the body of humanity can be sewn together. Most importantly, the stained blood lineage of Satan must be completely cleansed, or else the reassembly of the whole body will be to no purpose. You have to know clearly what the responsibility of the Unification Church is: to get rid of the satanic lineage and transfer humankind into the heavenly lineage of God through true love. In that way we will bring liberation to God and humanity.
Therefore, the greatest of all revolutions has been ignited by Rev. Moon. He has brought the way for all human beings to rid themselves of the satanic lineage and be restored into the heavenly lineage.
According to God's original concept, He was to be united with Adam, Eve, the archangel, Cain, and Abel. All of them were supposed to be united as one, but instead, because of the fall they became divided as enemies. The Cain and Abel conflict has grown now to the worldwide level. The free world represents the Abel camp and the communist world represents the Cain camp. The central nation in the free world is the United States of America; within the United States, Christianity is in the Abel position and the government is in the Cain position.
Unless Cain and Abel are united, there is no way for humanity to return to God's ideal. Today the True Parents are tearing down all the barriers on every level -- religious barriers, national barriers, racial and cultural barriers. Thus people can more easily communicate and became one. Satan knows that we are approaching the final stages of restoration and so he is dealing his final blows. He is doing this through the destruction of love. Love has become extremely degraded and perverted. For example, free sex is completely opposed to God's morality; through its increasing popularity Satan is trying to block God's dispensation. At this time we are witnessing the complete destruction of the love tradition throughout the world. Knowing that, the Messiah is establishing this most crucial aspect of re-creation, the tradition of true love. The Unification Church and Rev. Moon have been working to accomplish this within modem-day society.
Marriage within the Unification Church has an extraordinary meaning. A man represents the plus aspects of the universe; a woman represents the minus aspects. God is bringing them together into harmony, and as a result God's joy can be fulfilled. The large weddings of the Unification Church are guided by this philosophy and purpose. When a man and woman come together in love, a tremendous universal spark is created. But that spark requires the input of God. The human spark of love alone is horizontal; it creates only a simple, plain light. However, when man's love combines with woman's love, it creates a base for the vertical love to come down and hit that horizontal love. When that vertical love is welcomed into the human relationship a rainbow of light is produced and it spreads all over the world.
Everything in creation will open its mouth and joyfully welcome that beautiful light, crying, "Oh! Come into me, beautiful light!" Only that perfect light can fill up everything, everywhere. Love is precious, but no one knew how precious it was until Rev. Moon came. We cannot buy true love even with the whole universe or God. Nobody in history has known that the cosmos was created to center upon the love between an ideal man and wife nor that this ideal has never been realized. This secret has been revealed in detail through Rev. Moon, and Unificationists have come to be convinced of its validity. This is why Moonies are so strong and courageous.
Wherever true love goes, it causes re-creation and transformation. No matter which continent it touches -- Africa, South America, Asia -- it does the same thing. Therefore, the Unification Church is bringing rebirth and regeneration to all of humanity. Without experiencing true love here on earth, no one is allowed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven in spirit world. For that reason, the Kingdom of Heaven has been empty until now. The keys to that Kingdom were given to Peter while Jesus was here on earth. This is the agony of Jesus, which no one has understood. Even though Jesus came here for the purpose of salvation, he could never open up the door of the Kingdom of Heaven because he could not freely disseminate true love centered upon the ideal of True Parents. It is only through True Parents that true love can be given to humanity.
The entire teaching of the Bible centers upon one key point: the fulfillment of true love. Jesus came to expound upon true love. He was supposed to take the position of bridegroom and take a bride, and then teach about true love, with him and his bride becoming True Parents at that time. True love can never be found unless True Parents appear on the earth. This is a central truth. Thus even though Jesus came to be the Messiah two thousand years ago, he could not fulfill the highest level of true love here on earth because he could not go up to the level of True Parents. The fulfillment of true love means that the ideal of True Parents has been established on the earth.
The Bible teaches that in the Last Days the bridegroom and bride will meet. This means Eden will be restored. The Bible teaches that in the Garden of Eden, there were two trees, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. Christianity has not understood clearly what these two trees symbolize, but in fact they symbolize ideal man and woman, father and mother -- the parents in the Garden of Eden. At the time of the Exodus when Moses was leading his people through the wilderness, they were guided by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. These pillars symbolized, again, the True Parents, the father and mother who would come to lead humanity to the Promised Land. Furthermore, when Moses went up to the top of Mount Sinai and received the Ten Commandments, those commandments were inscribed on two tablets of stone. Why were there two? They symbolized the father and mother, the True Parents, who are the full embodiment of the word of God.
The dispensation at the time of the Exodus was symbolic of and parallel to the future era of the True Parents. Moses' course was intended to be a symbolic teaching for humanity, so that the people could be prepared for the coming of the Messiah. God educated the Israelites through the Exodus so that they would be ready for the advent of the Messiah, Jesus. Jesus was intended to fulfill the ideal of True Parents. However, as God taught during the time of Moses, absolute faith and obedience on the part of the people were necessary in order for the Messiah's goals to be fulfilled. But because the people's faith and obedience v. ere not rendered unto Jesus in his time, everything was destroyed. The True Parents and their love were not established on earth, and only spiritual salvation became possible. Physical salvation did not happen, so the Messiah had to come again. It was a great tragedy for history that we had to wait for the Second Coming.
If anyone in the world feels proud of himself or herself, that person should ask God what He thinks. God will say, "You cannot be proud of yourself. You were born of satanic lineage."
Satan's worst crime was that he stole love away from God. For that crime there can be no compassion, no forgiveness. In a way, the focal point of the battle within our society is the struggle for love. Satan is trying to pervert love and make it his. God is trying to restore love into heavenly and pure love. Rev. Moon is not a mediocre and compromising man. God needs people like me because I am absolutely committed to His work. Many people might say that Rev. Moon is too harsh, too strong, but he gives the prescription that this world needs. People come into the Unification Church with spiritual stains on them. But Rev. Moon takes them and pounds and pounds on them until they turn into pure, white seeds.
There are many holidays which people celebrate, but there has not been a day with universal value, representing the central theme of the universe, until this day.
Father speaks in English*:
There are many different days that people can commemorate, such as their anniversaries or special days of happiness; there are also memorable days for a nation. But until now, God has not had His own special days to remember. You have to think about that. God doesn't have happy days to remember. Until now, God has agonized throughout history, "Who will fulfill my ideal? I long to meet this man." That man is the Messiah.
Originally God created humankind but the result was fallen people. From that point on, humans were in a sense not real humans; they were twisted and stained. That is why God started re-creation, the history of restoration. God wants to meet the real man; He is yearning to see that day -- Real Man Day, Real Woman Day, Real Couples Day. He wants to see the people who can combine human love with God's love. From the couple it can multiply to the family, tribe, nation, world, and the whole universe. Where can we meet this kind of man and woman? God has been wondering about this throughout history. No one has understood God's situation. There have been many philosophers but they have never been able to understand the meaning of history; they have made up a lot of complicated theories.
Rev. Moon means a great deal to God's restorational history. It is not by man's power, nor by the power of armaments, but only by the power of true love that evil can be overcome. He was the individual who fulfilled man's purpose and accomplished the family purpose. Finding disciples one by one, gradually accumulating a foundation -- you have to know how many tears are behind this Principle, how much agony. Up until now I have gone to jail six times, almost five years altogether. I am not a bad person. When I was struggling to discover the Principle I didn't have anyone. I was alone. After finding out the whole of the Principle the intense fighting continued. I know the difficulties there have been up to this point; you don't know them. How many complications there have been in creating order on the right, on the left, in front, and behind, all so that now people can understand the Principle! There has been so much persecution, so much suffering, to bring the Principle and true love into substance and reality. It is priceless.
Translation from Korean resumes:
You must come to realize what a precious gift you have in the truth you have found through the teaching of Rev. Moon. You should also know how much Father suffered to reach and dig out that truth for the sake of humanity. You are the first recipients of that truth. You ought to come to the realization that you are not in a normal church; you are not living a normal kind of life compared with other men and women. You are in an extraordinary position, a blessed position.
* The tape did not pick up all of Father's words in English. This is the editor's reconstruction from that which was audible. -- Ed.