The Words the Hose Family
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The Words the Hose Family |
Chiyoko
Iwamoto-Drevici and Reinhard Jager
The thoughts I'd like to share with you today come out of two unique and solemn privileges given me in the past couple of months -- the attending of the Seunghwa services for Martin Bauer in the Dominican Republic and for Chiyoko Iwamoto-Drevici in New Jersey. Also a third person, our brother Reinhard Jager, gave his life just two days before Chiyoko in the state of New Mexico while selling roses.
Of course for us, physical death is by no means the end of a person, but the moving on to a new phase of life in the spiritual realm. In this context, the Seunghwa ceremony is, in a very warm, deep sense, an affirmation of on-going existence. But still, knowing that Martin and Chiyoko were taken before starting their blessed family life, and that Reinhard will not have the chance to physically raise his two little ones -- there is an undeniable sadness, I would like to ask you, in light of the lives of our two brothers and our sister, to do some serious reflection with me.
As I look back, in each of the three cases of Martin, Reinhard, and Chiyoko, they met death in a split second -- a moment.
Martin Bauer was one of the most vital guys I've ever known -- a man of 53, just full of life and with the kind of spirit and energy of a 25-year-old. He would have said he had no time to die too busy. One night he went to transact some business in a small farmhouse outside of Santo Domingo; little did he know that for three months the people in that farmhouse had been plotting to rob him and to do violence to him. On that night, after transacting business, he turned to go to the door, and as he turned the man behind him put a rifle behind his head and pulled the trigger. He was dead before he hit the floor. I had seen him just a month before.
It is a shock to hear that kind of news. It might be a shock for you that I should start my sermon out like this too. But as I looked down into Martin's final resting place and saw his face, which had been so animated a month before, I thought, how thin is the line between our physical life and the spiritual realm! How many 10,000ths of a second does it take for a bullet to pass from a gun through a man's head? Or for a sister to be run over?
I reflected in myself: How am I living day by day, and what are the contents of my thoughts? Where is my focus? What if tomorrow I get a bullet through my skull? What would be in my thoughts the moment before if I didn't know it was coming? Where do I expend my energy every day -- mental, spiritual, emotional, physical? This is a very important reality. And there is nothing that brings the questions home more deeply than a Seunghwa ceremony. It makes us think soberly about the quality of life we're leading, and the impact we are making.
We know of many people who have made an impact on history, but the kind of impact they made is important. Certainly Adolf Hitler had a profound effect on history -- he was a genocidal murderer. On the other hand, Jesus Christ gave rebirth to hundreds of millions of people down through the years. So the impact one makes on history, for good or evil, is ultimately the impact one makes on people.
Every moment I am on this earth I am making a historical impact on the world around me. But what direction it is taking? I got touched very powerfully by God when I was 22 years old. I joined this movement, and I thank God for it, so I could say, "Yes, I've been living for God for the last 18-and-a-half years of my life." But what does that mean -- living for God? You can equate it with living for history, or living for people. But does my living for God really equate with living for history or living f n people?
I'm the father of five children, and sometimes I hear the children discussing what they want to do when they grow up. There's always someone who says he wants to be a great person, someone who thinks that, sooner or later, time and events are going to roll something up to his doorstep that is going to give him the opportunity for greatness. We all have big aspirations. Particularly following someone like Father, we do not usually adjust ourselves to small aspirations. We see our brothers and sisters making good somewhere and we find ourselves hoping that they will go all the way. Somewhere inside we feel that for ourselves too. But we have to be careful that we don't get caught in what little kids do -- that is, having this dream that somehow the aspiration is going to come true when history presents us with the right opportunity, that it's going to come rolling up just like a big gift, and we'll just unwrap it and there it will be. It's going to happen one of these days. It's going to happen, sometime.
Things don't really work that way. Very, very seldom; maybe with Lotto but not with too much else in this life, especially the important things. But sometimes we tend to wait for these moments, and we can wait ourselves into the grave. The short years of our lives demand that we be initiators. The world needs godly people who can seek out opportunities to inject goodness, or to make, as someone once said, lemonade out of lemon situations.
Does history make the person or do people make history? I think we all know the answer -- people make history.
People who profess a faith, people who say they are living for God, are constantly faced with one problem: How do I bring the divine together with the daily? Divine and daily. The person who is sitting on a nice cushion of imagination, sometimes confused with vision, sort of waiting for the divine to enter his life, goes through thousands of days and doesn't realize that he could be making it happen daily, and while he is waiting, he is getting old and grey-haired and fat bellied. Nothing happens.
That's the way it is with the majority of the people in this world. And it could happen to you and me, because there's no magic "I've made it" formula that guarantees it won't happen.
Our planet is cursed with a tragic unconsciousness -- sleeping with the eyes open and the tongue wagging. It's a terrible thing to think about. Early in the twentieth century a man named Gurdjieff said, "People are more awake when they're asleep than when they're awake." At least then their deeper minds are active. Just think -- you and I live in a world where people are generally asleep, dreaming. In the moment there is nothing happening, or very little. "I'm hungry, I'm sleepy, I feel sexual desire, I'm angry, I'm happy, I'm this kind of person, I'm that kind of person"
What do we bring to the moments of our lives? It's such an important point. A historical person is one who has found a way to fill those moments with an inner richness. It doesn't come from outside of yourself, it comes from within yourself.
Have you ever walked down the street, looking from one set of eyes to another? I remember when I was a little kid, people on the street used to look each other in the eyes. I derived great joy from this because when you glance into someone's eyes something communicates. But hay e you noticed more and more today how people walk by and just look past you? It's sort of like avoiding the moment and looking into the mid-distant future, but actually, the future never arrives. It never arrives.
We don't deal with this moment, this person, this event. And it can be fatal, because it really means we don't deal with ourselves. People who do not live in the present moment and bring their deep inner resources to the moment will find themselves with an increasing burden of their own unresolved reactions.
It is very easy to get stuck worrying about things going on around you, things that make you mad. But once you see the problem, the next question is -- what will you invest at this point? It's easier to get upset, to be hurt, to compulsively analyze (yes, sometimes what we call "analysis" is nothing more than unconscious compulsive self-defense), to withdraw into oneself or to go away mad than to stand toe to toe with the situation and call forth through quiet self-reflection and prayer the things that can really help you cut through the situation.
Three or four years ago, when I was involved in the Education Department, we had a lot of 40-day workshops. Trainees complained to me day after day about their central figures or about what someone had done to them. I got pretty burdened at that time, and not in a healthy sense. I began to store those complaints up inside without realizing what I was doing.
One time a sister came to me with a gripe about something in her life, a situation in her center that she really wanted to share. But before she got halfway into her story, I suddenly blew up and started to unload my pent-up burdens on her. She just didn't know how to react to me, so at the end she could only say, "Thank you very much, Rev. Hose." And I said, "Well, thank you very much. You gave me an opportunity to air some things out." But she was shocked, I'm sure, because she came for my ear, and instead probably walked out more distraught than when she came in. I too was shocked at the amount of junk inside of me.
I had to deal with myself shortly after this situation, because I recognized that I had some real bad feelings in me. While supposedly helping others deal with their problems I myself couldn't deal very well with them. I got completely affected by them. For all my "righteous indignation" at others' shortcomings I had to admit the fact that my own spiritual life was going downhill. I was losing a sense of wanting to invest in the situation, and I was beginning to derive a certain pleasure out of chewing on the ugly situations I had heard about. It's one thing to recognize the unrighteousness, to see the problems, but it's another thing to rise above them and add something godly to the situation; to not withdraw into a critical stance but to go forward.
This is the question -- do I live from the outside in, or from the inside out? What we've just been talking about is "outside in" -- being so affected by the outer situation as to lose ourselves and wind up bouncing like a rubber ball off of people, situations, and events. The other way is living from the inside out.
Once we have seen the problem, can we, through the process of self-reflection, self-study, sincere prayer, and often through agony, bring something better to the situation, something beyond the predictable?
Most people in the world are controlled by outside events. In other words, if I'm accepted I feel good, if I'm rejected I feel bad. If they're mad at me, I'm mad at them. If you love me, I'll love you. If you give me bad looks, I'll give you bad looks right back. We say we don't buy the communist worldview because they believe a man is a product of his environment. We have learned that the environment is a product of the individual. But many times, without seeing ourselves clearly, we are actually becoming an emotional product of the emotional environment around us. We find ourselves just reacting to it.
What this shows is a lack of gravity in our own spiritual lives. We are not able to pull the situations around us, but rather get pulled by them. There was a wise man, a street person, who once said: "Hey, brother, either you eat or you get eaten up." We get eaten many times -- nibbled at. If we are to let our lives be controlled in this way, little by little we will lose our lives, and it is no one's fault but our own.
So the question is, How I can I build and maintain true inner spiritual strength? How can I bring the quality of what I have built in my relationship with God and True Parents into the world, no matter what the situation, and never withdraw into uncontrolled passions?
The one who does this more than anyone else is Father himself. He is able to walk into the stormiest places, see the wrongs, the inequities, the hypocrisies, and the ugliness, and then invest everything he has in his hope for the future. That takes a tremendous inner strength. That takes a virtuous and powerful type of person.
It's so easy to justify oneself by the ugliness of the world around us, to justify inaction and resentment, and to walk away disappointed. Father has had more reasons than anybody to be disappointed. But he refuses to succumb to disappointment; and that's his victory -- the victory of love. He is not controlled by outside events but motivated by the love of God, living out of the heart of the redemptive, loving parent. We come from a history of hurt children, but we are trying to become true, loving parents ourselves who can heal other hurt children.
Being at those Seunghwa ceremonies really made me reflect on my relationship with Heavenly Father. How much I see a need to develop and maintain that real core, that gravity, that confidence that comes through a strong relationship with God. Instead of getting into a defensive posture we need to be able to stand out and speak from the heart in any situation.
The historical person is not one who is suddenly going to emerge in the teeth of a great, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The true historical person may never make it to Who's Who or even the newspapers. He or she may be completely unheard of. Maybe it's a family member. Maybe it's a crippled old woman who can't even leave her house, but because of her inner attitude, because of her relationship with God, she is contributing to a situation that no one else wants to touch. That person is having an historical impact, and someday we will come out and applaud her.
Perhaps the biggest challenge we have every day in becoming that kind of historical person is learning how to control this machine called the mind. We need to develop a truly centered and awakened mind -- a mind that is not pulled off by the "traffic" around us every day, by juke boxes, by chatter, by sudden senseless impulses. The mind is really the most holy place within ourselves. One who has developed a mind that is disciplined, quiet, concentrated, centered -that's the person who can make a powerful contribution to history. If you're letting your mind get away from you every day, what kind of a contribution can you make? You can't even gather your forces! That's our common challenge.
The only time to deal with that is now You can't do it tomorrow, you can't do it yesterday, only now If you have been having that struggle recently, take up the cause; you might drop it a million times but don't give up. We live in a world with so many scattering influences. Quantity has replaced quality. We are being asked to take the way of indemnity and go back and find that quality. We are in a historical position by the nature of those we follow and the time we are living in. Whether we can become historical individuals is up to you and me.