Truth is My Sword, Volume II |
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by Bo Hi Pak |
Appendix 5 William D. Lay
Founding member, CAUSA International and former editor-in-chief, CAUSA magazine; currently, attorney practicing in New York City.
This collection of speeches spans some 30 years of the most taut drama ever played out on the international stage: the cold war between communism and democracy. In the midst of this drama, Dr. Bo Hi Pak, the author of these speeches, stood as the interpreter, and in many respects the liaison to the Western world, for Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church. In each of these speeches, given in a variety of venues around the world, Dr. Pak attempts to condense and weave together three interrelated strands: first, the theological content of Rev. Moon's new religious message; second, the wisdom gained by Dr. Pak in large measure through his discipleship with Rev. Moon on the value of integrity, honesty, love, and family; and third, for those speeches given prior to the early 1990s, an urgent warning that the free world must gain its footing and stand resolutely against communism.
I had the great fortune to work closely with Dr. Pak during that time, and I carry many treasured memories of him and our times working together. I observed that Dr. Pak as a matter of course makes it a point to engage himself on many fronts. In other words, he stays busy, and he does so on a very high dimension. In one day, he might be involved in financial decisions relating to a variety of business concerns, editorial and journalistic ideas involving a breaking news story, questions about the architecture of a new theater or school, the choreography of a dance production, and situations involving the lives and families of the many people that he loves and helps. He consistently brings enthusiasm and intensity to each of these tasks. (As Dr. Pak often reminds us, the word enthusiasm is derived from "en theos," which means "God entered.") However, it always appeared to me that the thing he most enjoyed doing was preparing one of his CAUSA lectures with slides, or writing up a speech for an upcoming event. At those times, there could be no intrusion. Both business and relaxation had to wait, because Dr. Pak regards conveying the truth as the highest calling and most noble undertaking.
I remember, for example, one evening in El Salvador in the early 1980s. At that time, the people of that extraordinary country were striving to establish a working democracy literally under the gun barrel of communist terror. Weapons were everywhere on the streets of San Salvador, and Dr. Pak required an armed escort in his travels around the city. When we were safely installed in our hotel one night, after a particularly stressful day of meetings, a number of us on Dr. Pak's team were sitting on a balcony of his room, watching a musical show that was taking place in the hotel courtyard below. We had hoped that he would join us and relax a bit, but he never came out. When we later went to look for him, he was sitting at a conference table covered with books, notes, and research materials, creating a new set of slides with a felt-tip pen and a notepad. The slides he drew up that night became the core for the CAUSA lecture series for many years afterward.
As president of CAUSA International and of the News World Corporation, Dr. Pak maintained a suite of offices on the fourth floor of New York's Tiffany Building at 401 Fifth Avenue. My office, functional though smaller, was on the seventh floor. I recall that on more than one occasion, Dr. Pak would look at his watch and announce to a crowd that had gathered in his office and in his secretary's office, that he could not deal with any further matters because he needed to prepare his remarks for an upcoming event. He would then leave his office, come upstairs, take off his jacket, and settle in behind my desk with a batch of red pens to work and rework with loving care a speech draft that was waiting for him. There was something about the smaller office, removed from many of the other pressing concerns, that allowed him to focus on the message he was preparing to give. Invariably, by the time he was finished, the speech had been extensively transformed and had become closer to the expression of his heart and soul that he longed to convey.
The speeches in this volume span from the time when the early Unification Church began to reach out from Korea to the world, to today when a great number of people who have been touched by Rev. Moon's message are challenged to apply that message to their lives and in their families on a daily basis. Dr. Pak, of course, has been a part of that process and of that history. Over and over again, Dr. Pak has found a way to take elements of Rev. Moon's message and translate them into the idiom and life fabric of America and the West. This is only possible, I believe, because he has such a deep love of, on the one hand, Rev. Moon, his spiritual father, and on the other hand, the Western world, and particularly America. The speeches themselves, I'm afraid, can go only so far in showing this aspect of Dr. Pak. There is so much that cannot be put into words the spoken word is limited, and much more so, in many ways, the printed word.
Still, as the speeches in this volume make clear, Dr. Pak is never content in his speeches to recite dry facts, or to separate the ideological conflict of the cold war from the deeply personal meaning that God, and true love, and patriotism, and the dream of world peace, have for each one of us. There are literally thousands upon thousands of people who were personally touched by the words contained within this book as they were spoken. I only hope that as you read them, you can feel something of Dr. Pak's heart, and through him, the heart of Rev. Moon, and through him, the heart of God.
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