Love is the most powerful force. Even the most logical person will do illogical things out of love. By the same token, all the logical solutions to society's problems have no effect if they do not address the problem of "the lack of love."

In an article in the recent Imprimis, Jeb Bush, son of our former President and recent candidate for the governorship of Florida, decried the attitude which measures compassion by amount of money spent to help the poor, rather than by the actual result of that expenditure. Money does not buy love; it does not buy justice; it does not buy virtue. What our society lacks is not money or material goods. It is love; justice; virtue.

Justice is the expression of love according to truth: life for the sake of others. Virtue is the practice of such a life. The root of both justice and virtue, then, is true love. Then, if we could find the source of love, we could exalt justice and virtue, and solve our social problems.

What is love? Love is the power which unites two into one. In the logic of love, then, one plus one does not equal two; one plus one equals a greater One. Greater in what way? Greater as a husband and wife, which is One married couple, is greater than two singles. This is because the greater One creates new life.

To take another example: my mind is one thing, my body is another. They are very distinct. If they are separate, there is no action, no life. I am laying in bed; my body is asleep; my mind is dreaming-- nothing is happening. But when my mind and body unite, when the two become one, then I am a functioning person. John Lennon wrote a line in a song, "When you're one/Really one/Well you get things done/Like they've never been done". Street wisdom echoes this, counseling the uncool person to "Get yourself together." The more erudite say, "become one with yourself", or "achieve oneness". For the enlightened among Christians, "atonement" equals "at-one-ment".

We celebrate the same in our love for the creation, with the sought- after experience of being "one with nature." In such a state, I and the millions of separate entities of this world are One! The ecological principle teaches that all creation is one; hence to destroy a part is to damage the whole. Or a football team, a winning team, is one in which eleven men work as one. The many become one. All of this is achieved through love.

From this point of view, our social problems manifest because we are not one. In other words, there is division. We have marred our national slogan, "e pluribus unum" - "out of many, one". The true American revolution was not the renunciation of the king of England; it was that the several states could give up their separate sovereignties to form one "more perfect union". The power of love created this nation; God-centered love rooted primarily in Christian faith. This was the political principle at stake in the Civil War as well.

Division means there are dis-united parts. The problem is not that there are parts, for there must be parts in order for oneness to be achieved. The problem is that the parts are dis-united; they are in conflict. That is, each part is living for its own sake, not for the sake of others, not for the sake of the whole. There is no one-ness. That is, there is no love.

Love demands the highest intelligence; namely, the intelligence required in order to figure out how to love someone. The highest intelligence is not to create missiles, bombs and internets--but to create happiness, to love others with a love which melts their hearts.

Why is it difficult? Because it requires the sacrifice of the self.

To come back to the question: what is the source of love? The source of love is not myself; it is the other person. But to liberate this love begins with the investment (i.e., the sacrifice) of myself for the sake of that other person. By totally giving myself, a vacuum is created, into which God is pulled. By this, I receive more energy, which I can further invest in others. This in turn pulls more of God's love into me, and an eternal cycle is created.

This is the secret of eternal love and eternal life. This, as far as I understand it, is what Unificationism refers to as vertical love.

Then there is horizontal love. It is also circular. I am investing in the other. I give and give, replenished by the vertical source. Eventually, the love returns from the other, from the object partner. I am then energized by the returning love (which takes the form of beauty) and am stimulated to give more love, which results in the return of more beauty. Again, an eternal cycle of giving and receiving is established.

From this perspective, we teach that love does not come from me; it comes from my object partner. In other words, the test of true love is in the object partner's response. Until the response comes, one has not fulfilled the requirements of true, absolute love. One is a clanging gong and a sounding cymbal.

This is to say that the secret of love, the experience of love and taste of love, does not come from "me"; it comes from "my partner", from the other. This is as true for God as it is for you and me, because this is the nature of love. Even God cannot violate love. Love is absolute. It sweeps away everything in its path. This is why, once love became self-centered through the fall, it became almost impossible to save this world, and it has taken so many millions of years.

Each person must be able to find, to possess, the source of absolute love. That is, each person must have an eternal, unchanging partner of love. And this partner should be multi-dimensional; it should relate to "me" from above, below, right, left, forward and back. God has provided each person with this eternal, unchanging, multi-dimensional partner of love: his family.

Each person begins as a social creature: with a father and a mother who love them absolutely, who will most likely die for them if necessary; who want them to be the greatest person who ever lived. These are people who are willing to sacrifice for many, many years for their happiness, and count it a blessing if they are successful! Where else do I find people who count it a blessing to be able to sacrifice themselves for the sake of my own success? That is God's gift: my parents, your parents, everyone's parents.

We all know the joke about each child thinking his dad is the strongest man and his mother the most beautiful woman in the world. It's true, and it's God's principle. Because I have a daughter, I am the strongest, most handsome man in the world in her eyes. I am Sean Connery, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwartzenegger all wrapped up into one package ready to be unpacked and climbed all over by my children. My wife is the earth mother, the source of life, the source of all happiness, right here in our house.

There you are: the source of love, all packaged, programmed, plugged in and ready to operate, is anxiously awaiting my birth, counting the days, with a name all picked out, and ready to pronounce to the world how unsurpassingly handsome or beautiful I am, how smart I am, and how I am lifting up my head, looking around and making funny but remarkably intelligent noises characteristic of one who is generally a very superior creature the likes of which the world has never seen.

In our parents (not to mention grandparents) God provides such a beginning for each one of us. With this beginning, we can endure those experiences of rejection, of alienation, of accusation and misunderstanding. Yes, we all can have that most absolute of possessions: SELF-ESTEEM!

Well, now that we've got this self-esteem established, we begin to stand up and look at the world around us. Sooner or later we realize that we were not created for ourselves, and we have special equipment which enables us to resonate with a certain other type of person: a member of the opposite sex. It seems that just as one's parents are programmed to love one as an infant, one is oneself programmed to love this opposite sex person.

That is, all of my being is meant to be given to one other, who becomes one with me, and we form a married couple, One body of goodness. This is an eternal, unchanging, unique and absolute bond, representing eternal, unchanging, unique and absolute love. Therefore, we are created to marry one spouse and maintain that marriage by the act of true freedom, for eternity. Thus, horizontal love dwells on earth, and is the foundation for vertical love to manifest its creativity in the birth of the child.

From the family, each person learns how to love, by being loved. There is no way to teach how to love other than simply, "to love". There is no way to learn how to love other than "to receive love". It is not easy, by the way, to learn how to receive love. It is only little children who have the true capacity to learn how to receive love. This is why the Lord said that you must become as a little child in order to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Parents naturally teach their children how to love, by loving them. Children naturally learn how to love, by receiving their parents love. And of course, as all teachers know, you really don't learn a subject until you try to teach it. And as all students know, the best teacher is the one who is always himself learning. There is a very close connection, then, between teaching and learning. By receiving love, one teaches the love-giver how to give love. By giving love, one teaches the love-receiver how to receive love.

The family invests love in the society. The parents invest love in the family. God invests love in the parents. Thus, when it comes to social action, to having substantial effect in a society, God works through parents, parents work through the family, and the family works through the entire society.

"What?" you might say; "It is individuals, not cumbersome families, which affect society. George Washington was an individual, so was Jesus. We act as individuals upon the society."

The answer is, in the Principle, the individual is nothing more than the representative of his family. To deny this is to fall prey to the false ideology of individualism. Feminists capitalize upon this to trash all history because is it HIS-story, that is, manufactured mostly by men. From an individualistic standpoint, feminists are right. History is a vast class action by men to suppress women from making any appearance. But let's not trash men; let's trash radical individualism.

Women have guided history through their men. (And I use the phrase "their" men purposefully. I belong to my wife. True love contains the right of possession.) History is the record of families. George Washington's work was the work of his family. His family's strengths and weakness were displayed on the historical stage in George. Let's take an example more close at hand. Newt Gingrich has a sister who is a lesbian activist. Therefore, Newt's family is ambivalent about sexual orientation issues. Even if Newt were to stand up for the righteousness of heterosexual monogamy, he evidently can't convince his own sister. The Gingrich family, then, cannot take a stand on this point. There are fewer and fewer American families which can. Therefore, despite the well-meaning efforts of our leaders as individuals, the nation is confused.

But here's the clincher: Newt's love for his sister transcends the question of her sexual orientation. And I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that Newt would proudly proclaim that he loves his sister. Bill Clinton's brother is into cocaine, and his father had problems too. So what can Mr. Clinton do? His family cannot solve the drug problem or spouse abuse problem. But he still loves his brother and father, and I'm sure he would proudly state that as well.

But the problem is that each person (Newt and his sister, for example) may be led by the conscience to a different way of life. And their consciences take their love in different directions, and this makes all the difference.

Therefore the concern is that the love which is natural within the family be channeled in one direction. Ultimately, man's love and God's love must flow in the same direction. This direction is determined by the family: man to woman eternally, and woman back to man eternally, and parents and children and so forth. This is the perfect standard of love which will last eternally. It is the source of true love for society and for each person in society. It is the dwelling place of God. The remedy for all social problems is the establishment of ideal families on the earth.

Governments have done their best to solve our social problems, using all the tools of power and logic. But a reading the classical authors of Rome reveals that Roman government was led by brilliant men, ever as wise and great as any of our contemporary leaders. But the Roman Empire collapsed. Not enough wisdom? No; they had plenty. Not enough technology? No; they had enough technology to build the Empire and maintain it for several centuries. Their problem was the same as ours: not enough people willing to sacrifice their own benefit for the sake of the world.

We need a model of health, beginning with the seed. To cure a sick person, you need to know what is a healthy person. To fix a car, you need to know how a car is supposed to work. To cure an ailing society, you need to know how a healthy society functions. Otherwise, you're just putting band-aids on cancer. Our lawmakers try to remedy this and that, but have no standard of a healthy society which they are striving to achieve. With no ruler, one cannot draw a straight line. The healthy society emerges naturally from the healthy family, the family centered on true love of God. True families create people who can invest love in others at their own sacrifice. Such people will create an ever-expanding ideal society, nation and world.

This is the purpose of the Blessing, which is the work of God to liberate true love in the family. Is this unrealistic, wishful thinking? NO. The power of the cross is behind it. The power of Mt. Sinai, of the Kaaba, of the Bodhi Tree. The power of every person who ever dreamed a dream, who ever lived and died for an ideal. They are the people of greatness, the people we exalt, whom we must vindicate in this generation.

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