Reverend Kwak's comments on the nature of love at the time of the Holy Wine ceremony this past August were very thoughtful and penetrating. Herewith are excerpts of that talk based on notes from an unofficial translation

True Parents have taught us that God is the origin of love. God is the True Parent of love and we are his children. Above all, God is the God of true love.

When a person is filled with love, they feel the power of life. They have great energy. In this, there is no difference between east and west. This is because God as our parent has imparted the basic nature of love to all of us as his children.

Love cannot be inherited in the same way that wealth or fame can be inherited. Material things can be taken from your pocket and passed on, but love is not of that nature. Love, in fact, can only be obtained by experiencing it and growing in it.

As a child, one comes to experience his parents' love and learns the nature of parental love. No matter how many talks you hear about parental love, until you have children of your own and experience what it means to be a parent, you can't understand parental love. Similarly, unless one marries and becomes a couple, it is impossible to understand the nature of conjugal love.

Coming to know God who is the source of love and Creator of the universe can only be attained by coming to know love. Therefore, a process of growing and coming to experience love is involved in the experience of coming to know God.

It is not the external things in life that are important; rather, it is the internal process of coming to know God. Our internal being, our spirit body, requires love in order to grow.

As we grow and experience the various positions of love, we are able to grow spiritually and come closer to God. Even a small baby, as it becomes capable of looking into someone's eyes, can know intuitively whether that person loves him or not. It is inherent in our nature to know love.

A small baby does not know or care if its parents graduated from a university or have important positions in society or whether he has been born in a small cottage or great palace. He doesn't know or care. But through his nature of love inherited through God, a baby instinctively knows whether his parents love him and whether his parents are happy about him.

As a small baby grows into adulthood receiving love from his parents, the child first learns the nature of a child's heart; with brother and sisters, he or she comes to know the heart of a brother and sister and after marrying comes to understand the heart of a husband and wife. When a parent has a child, he comes to understand the heart of a parent.

In this way, a human being becomes a person of completed heart. We can understand that it is through love that we can attain a completed heart.

The family is the most important place to learn the nature of love and these four hearts in order to become a complete person. The family is the most important learning place for love. Therefore, the most important thing that True Parents teach us is the Blessing as the beginning of the formation of a true family. Among the many blessings of God, the Blessing of marriage is the

greatest. Through this blessing, you are able to find the complete meaning of love by creating a family. You are able to become couples and parents and through this, to create a foundation for happiness on earth and in the spirit world.

In God's creation of love, there is a difference between vertical love and horizontal love. In the case of parental love, it is possible to have one child and love that child completely, to have a second child and love that child as well and to have a third child and love that child totally also, all the while continuing to love the first child completely. This is the nature of parental love.

Because of this nature of vertical love, it is possible for parents to have many children and love them all. Similarly, God can love all humankind as his children.

The horizontal nature of couple's love, however, is very different. A couple in marriage want their relationship to exist only between the two of them. No one in his original mind is willing to have another person involved in that relationship. Because this is the very nature of love that God created, there is again no difference between east and west. This is the same everywhere.

Originally, each person was to become a perfected creature of love by experiencing love with God and in a family. The first stage is first to become true children and then become a true couple.

True children can only be born through True Parents. If one does not have true love, then one cannot become a true parent. Thus, in order to save human kind, God works his providence and then sends the Messiah.

The holy wedding ceremony is the way of finding true love, true life and new birth through true parents. This then is much more than a simple wedding; it represents rather inheriting the love of God.

Then why can we not be blessed as small children? Why is it that we are joined together in a wedding ceremony? This is because at the beginning Adam and Eve fell as a couple and the course of restoration is to reverse what went wrong. Therefore, restoration is accomplished by couples returning to the original position.

In our present day, people say that love between parent and child cannot change but that the love between husband and wife can. Husband and wife can become strangers if they divorce.

But if the love of parent and child is unchangeable, what is the nature of this love? Such love is the root of the child, the very beginning of his existence. Therefore, no child can ever accept the divorce of his parents. The divorce is not simply separation of father and mother. To a child, divorce of parents is destruction of his source of being, the pulling out of the root of his existence. Thus, true love, true life and true example of a couple cannot be passed on to the children.

Each of you must understand how absolutely important love is to the very nature of your existence.

Reverend Kwak went on to speak about other topics including the nature of the fall and process of restoration. I have not reported these due to limitations of time and space. However, I thought his insights regarding the nature of love were profound and worthy of our reflection. They are descriptive in a very deep way of what we are all about.

Download entire page and pages related to it in ZIP format
Table of Contents
Copyright Information
Tparents Home