Our Right to Religious Freedom

In Jin MoonAugust 23, 2009
Lovin’ Life Ministries

In Jin Moon and Toru Goto.

Good morning, brothers and sisters. How is everyone this morning? Such beautiful faces in the audience! I have got to be the luckiest senior pastor in America.

I’m delighted to see you once again. This Sunday is a very special Sunday for me because last night I had a wonderful dream in which I was able to spend a loving and wonderful time with my older brother who has passed away [Hyo Jin Moon]. He was the one who was instrumental in bringing the vision of the Manhattan Center into fruition. He and I shared many years of laughter and tears, many years of suffering and great victories together. He remains with me every day when I come to work here at the Manhattan Center.

In the dream he was so beautiful. I saw him in his prime. His hair was flowing. He loved long hair and he loved to have it fly in the wind. In the dream we were talking about a lot of things, but one of the things that we used to love to do was get in a car, and he would crank up the stereo really loud and play some of his favorite pieces or songs he had recently written. Many times we would go through a whole catalogue of different types of music that we heard growing up, which he literally inculcated into my brain. We used to drive, with no particular destination, but just enjoying each other’s company and the power of music.

Music, for my older brother was truly something meaningful. Perhaps because I spent a great deal of time with him, I like nothing better than to spend a moment here and there to listen to my favorite tunes. And how lucky I am to have such a phenomenal band! Every time I hear the band, I’m reminded of my older brother.

One of the things we used to do when we were younger and our parents were encouraging us to experience the pioneering spirit and get a taste of what fundraising was like, my brother, and our siblings and I, with a bunch of blessed children, thought, “We have to spend some time in a van, and we’re going to live for the sake of others by dedicating ourselves to raise money for the great cause that our Heavenly Father wants to implement through the will of our True Parents.” But my brother always said, “If we’re going to do something, we might as well have a good time doing it.” Not only were we enthused by the spirit, but once we all got the van and my brother turned the ignition, the first song blaring out would be “Born to be Wild.” My brother loved that song so much because it had a feeling like the movie Easy Rider that was so famous and gave birth to a whole new generation of copycats, all these motorcycle gangs going around the country, wanting to experience America, being as free as the wind, riding the wind. This song represented freedom for my brother.

We would go on to Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, and then we would invariably find ourselves listening to Scorpions’ Holiday and Winds of Change. He had a whole litany of songs that would get him in the mood to hit the pavement for fundraising. The van was quite an experience because he had a great stereo system, so the minute you got in and the van took off, you could not help but shake and rattle together with it. By the time we got to our destination and were dropped off, we were feeling quite good, really wild, and excited about making our daily goals. These are the kind of loving memories that I have of my older brother.

I know many of the First Generation went this course, too. Maybe you didn’t have the added benefit of a special stereo system, starting your morning out with Born to Be Wild and going on to Stairway to Heaven and so on. But each of us went through the pioneering years fundraising and witnessing, right? Our Second Generation now has an opportunity to get a taste of that -- not to go through the same process over and over again like a never-ending churn of the water wheel, but the Second and Third Generations have an opportunity through different programs like STF to get a taste of what it was like to be a pioneer in the early days of our church and to experience what it’s like to live for the sake of others 24/7.

Think about the way we were in the time of the wilderness, and fast-forward 50 years later to celebrating last May 1 the 50th anniversary of the founding of HSA. Now we are entering the age of settlement. During all this excitement, roving around the country, and doing wonderful things, we were like bands of crusaders, totally inspired to wake the people up, to let them know the breaking news that True Parents are here.

But here we are, several decades later and we find ourselves with families, with these beautiful sons and daughters we call munchkins, and we realize that we’re getting older but our families are growing bigger. Many of us can even look forward to becoming grandparents. The face of our movement is changing.

Over the years one thing has remained constant through our life of faith. From the beginning, when my father received the order from Jesus Christ to carry on his mission and to establish for the first time on earth the first true family of humankind, he has worked tirelessly, ceaselessly, and obsessively to substantiate what God has been waiting for ever since he thought about the purpose of creation and created his first son and daughter, Adam and Eve.

Throughout all these years my father has been so consistent, so loyal, and so dedicated in the face of persecution and accusation. We as his children, following in his footsteps, know that, as our reading from the Hindu religion says, a life of faith is really like treading upon the edge of a sharp razor. It’s extremely difficult, and it’s extremely painful. We are here because we have been called to rise and awake, and we have been called to experience oneness with our True Parents and with our Heavenly Parent, our God. We have consistently tried our best to walk this life of faith.

There was an initial rush -- and I’m talking about the American movement here -- an initial rush of excitement of young people truly being inspired and galvanized by this new message that Jesus’ mission needed to be fulfilled and we had an opportunity to take part in it. The young people of America could not have been more excited. We had hundreds coming to various workshops, flooding our centers and our homes, wanting to hear this breaking news, this glorious message, this undeniable truth that we call the Divine Principle.

Over the years we got the recognition of our politicians; we were given keys to every state in the United States. My father was heralded as a great religious leader. But of course we know that when the American people realized that my father was getting too much power over the young people, there was an incredible backlash, and we started hearing things like “Moonies, Moonies, Moonies, Reverend Moon, the cult leader.” We saw countless pictures of my father looking something like Hitler on the front page of the Washington Post or the New York Times or the Boston Globe. The most unflattering picture you could pick of this adorable man that I call my father was shown over and over again, not just in print media but also on television, and ceaselessly we heard our church called a cult, something weird to be avoided and that should not be embraced.

Being children of such a father, my brothers and sisters also went through a difficult time of physical, mental, and emotional abuse because of who we were. We were on the front line just like you, brothers and sisters. Just as much as you suffered, we suffered along with you. During this difficult time when we were trying to stay together as a movement, we were in a huddle position, trying to protect ourselves from incessant persecution, accusation, and misunderstanding.

We saw the rise of the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) as well as of something hideous called deprogramming. We were seen as brainwashed zombies, not able to think for ourselves, and therefore we were deprived of something as important and crucial to human life as free will. God gave us free will so that we can make a choice as to how we want to live our lives. Probably one of the most important human rights was taken away from us because we were seen as brainwashed zombies, as simply programmed robots of the Reverend and Mrs. Moon. Therefore came the concept that we needed to be deprogrammed. We were turned into debased, unfeeling, unemotional, illogical and crazy robot-people.

This understanding of us as brainwashed zombies deprived us of free will and the freedom to worship, which are so fundamental to this great country of America. The Founders came here with the belief that they should be able to exercise the freedom to worship their Lord, and that is what gave birth to this great country of America. One of the most important additions to the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees our freedom and upholds this democratic country that we love so dearly, is the Bill of Rights.

When it was first introduced by James Madison, the Bill of Rights, The first Ten Amendments, was a series of articles. On the basis of his introduction of these articles to the first U.S. Congress in 1789, it was ratified by December 15, 1791. The most important amendment out of these ten of what we call the Bill of Rights, which is basically a set of limits on what government can or cannot do regarding personal liberties, is the First Amendment. It states that the Congress shall make no laws respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the exercise thereof.

It is this amendment that gives us the freedom to worship. It’s fundamental to our country; it’s fundamental to our way of thinking. It’s fundamentally a God-given right that Americans enjoy in this country. But what the Cult Awareness Network and different types of deprogramming associations did was basically paint our movement and us as something subhuman, not entitled to exercise our human rights or enjoy the right to worship in a manner that we would choose. To take away these rights, which are so fundamental to human beings, is the greatest crime, I believe, in this world. To be portrayed as an evil lot, something to be squashed, something to be thrown out, to be castigated, has been probably one of the most painful things that our movement has had to endure.

This Cult Awareness Network, what did they do to our beautiful brothers and sisters? And why did such beautiful brothers and sisters look brainwashed? A lot of you, before you were infused with the divine spirit, before you were inspired by this incredible truth, maybe led a life that was quite different. Your parents knew you as hippie / yippies, roaming around the country with your backpack, not concerned about anything, not wanting to be anything, maybe getting into trouble, dabbling in drugs and free sex, maybe even having a couple of visits to the police station. But once you heard the message by Reverend Moon, you became like enlightened saints. It’s almost as if somebody turned the switch on and you became a beautiful light colored with the color of true love.

Maybe when you next returned to visit your parents, the brothers’ hair was slightly shorter. Maybe the sisters in the room didn’t care about material things the way they did before because you were infused with a light. Maybe brothers and sisters who were partying with drugs and free sex, living the night life, had parents who wondered, “What happened to them? It’s almost as if somebody washed their brain, and they’re totally new people.”

The thing about most people is that we are afraid of change. Many times when we see change happening in our midst, the first response is fear. So when your parents saw this night-and-day transformation from a nightlife playboy or playgirl to a God-inspired saint like Mother Theresa, then I’m sure they were quite shocked by the change. Many times, the immediate response to change is fear. Then add that to the negative campaign that was churning out horrible things, the gossip, accusations, and lies about my father and about our movement.

When my husband was in the Ph.D. program at Columbia University, completing his doctorate in finance, there were quite a few Korean students there. We invited two of them to dinner in our apartment in married student housing. I prepared a good Korean meal for our guests. We wanted to have a wonderful evening of conversation.

The first thing they did was walk into our apartment, and on my bookcase was a beautiful picture of my mother and father holding hands and gazing into the camera. Immediately these two students and their wives looked at the various pictures there but zoomed in on the one of my parents. One said to the other, “Isn’t this Rev. Moon?” The other replied, “I think it is.” I said, “You’re right. They are.” Then they said, “Why do you have a picture of Reverend Moon? I said, “Why not? Don’t you think they’re beautiful people?” They looked at me with a shocked expression and said, “Don’t you know who they are?” I said, “I know them really well.” They said, “Don’t you know, they brainwash people there? They’re always talking about change of blood lineage. They make you drink blood.”

I said, “Oh, really?” They said, “Yes, and they send you off to these horrible places and lock you up until you’re brainwashed and then they let you out.” I said, really? They said, “You must get rid of this picture. It’s bad to have it in the apartment.” I said, “No, I think I’ll keep the picture.” Then I thought I should let them in on my secret, so I had to tell them, “Actually these two lovely people in the picture are my parents, whom I adore.”

Then the other student said, “They call Reverend and Mrs. Moon parents. All the members call them parents. She’s just calling them parents. Maybe she’s a member.” I said, “No, they are my parents.” They looked at me strangely. I said, “No, we’re not vampires. We don’t drink blood. But yes, we do believe in the importance of lineage and the change of blood lineage from the satanic realm to the heavenly realm. That we believe in.”

Then they said to me, “What about all the sexual orgies? I hear that every member can swap wives and have sex with another member.” I said, “Really? Nobody told me that one.” I might have thought about that one. But I said, “No, look. When we celebrate and worship together, yes, we’re looking at each other like brothers and sisters. We’re very, very close. But do we swap wives? Absolutely not. We believe in loving somebody for eternity. We believe in dedicating ourselves to somebody special who has been prepared for us, who has been picked for us. It’s our duty and a wonderful responsibility to try our best to create this thing called an ideal family, by dealing with all the day-to-day opportunities and problems that arise when you walk in this life of faith.”

Then we tried our best to have a wonderful meal, but the evening basically turned into a question-and-answer session. Later on we were able to bring them to a workshop so they could get an understanding of what we believed in and what we stood for. That was a little taste of the perception of our movement held by people not in it. Because we are so phenomenal or maybe because you guys are so brilliant in your light when you are switched on, it caused a lot of people to be afraid.

Your poor parents were like the perfect victims for something like the Cult Awareness Network (CAN). It was with the help of your parents that something as hideous and horrendous as CAN could kidnap our members and put them through deprogramming, literally CAN-ing them into something that wasn’t human anymore.

I’ve noticed one thing about people who have gone through the deprogramming, have not survived, and have left our movement. It’s funny how they can still never forget about True Parents. Either they have to live the rest of their life by helping at CAN, helping by hating each and every day the movement that you used to belong to, or many of them end up coming back sooner or later because they tasted something that was beautiful, something that was real and genuine. The thing about human beings is, once you taste something and you know it’s a good thing, you cannot live without it.

American members are lucky in that we are living in a country with a constitutional government. We can rely on the due process of law, and even though the law may not be most favorable to us at times, we can still put up a good fight. But one of the things that I want to do this Sunday is to raise awareness of what is going on in the rest of the world.

I’m sure you heard about our sister who was imprisoned in Kazakhstan for two months, and that we had a brother, a Palestinian, who was tortured and abused over a couple of years and just came back to reunite with his wife in America. One of the things that I would really like to share with you this morning are the horrendous stories of deprogramming that are going on in Japan.

When I first got a report of what’s actually going on in Japan and I talked to some of my outside friends, they said, “But Japan is a democratic country! Something like this just cannot happen. How can something like this happen?” Well, brothers and sisters, we need to know very clearly that ever since 1966 until the present there have been over 4,000 cases of deprogramming and kidnapping in Japan. Our brothers and sisters along the way have done their best to fight each case, but the difficulty is that in Japan the authorities are many times working in conjunction with the parents, and the parents are working in conjunction with different ministers that they are bringing in to participate in this deprogramming effort.

One person in particular, Mr. Goto, is a wonderful brother who was studying architecture. He’s a shy, mild-mannered man. He’s slightly over six feet tall, and spiritually he’s a giant. He is a wonderful brother who was actually witnessed to by his elder brother. But that elder brother ended up leaving the church and became disillusioned, and joined the president of a deprogramming company in Japan run by a man named Takashi Miyamura.

Mr. Goto’s family kidnapped him first in 1987. Mr. Goto was able to escape, but then eight years later they kidnapped him again. He was pushed into a car, taken off to an apartment, and was held for 12 years and five months, brothers and sisters, against his will. What is so horrific about his situation is that his family took part in confining him all these years. I want you to look at the different pictures of what Mr. Goto had to endure over the years. This is a picture of him when he was released. He used to weigh 150 pounds, but when he finally defeated his captors -- because they realized that after 12 years and five months, this man’s faith is not going to break, and they threw him out onto the street with a pair of shoes -- he weighed only 85 pounds. He lost half his body weight. As you can see, he could barely stand because of malnutrition and lack of exercise. His muscles had atrophied.

Even though the distance from where he was released to the nearest church headquarters was only 10 kilometers, he couldn’t even make it halfway before collapsing in the street. Luckily, by the will of God, the second person that he happened to meet was a sister. She was able to bring him to the headquarters, and then he was taken to a hospital.

When I first saw these pictures of his hands, it looked almost like the sign of the stigmata. Mr. Goto is the second son in his family, truly in the position of Abel and coming from the country that represents Eve, I felt that his suffering was truly a sacrificial suffering in that through everything he has endured, we can raise awareness of the human rights violations that are taking place in Japan.

Mr. Goto is just one example. They held him captive in this eighth-floor apartment, where he was confined to one little space, Room 804. This picture was taken after he was released and revisited the place. When he revisited the apartment, he actually went down to the seventh floor apartment just below where he was confined. He asked the woman there, “Did you not hear my screaming? Did you not hear my kicking?” She said, “No, I did not hear anything.” In the course of the 12 years he was confined there, he realized that on the fifth floor the deprogrammers were using another apartment to deprogram someone else in the same way.

Mr. Goto’s suffering is the incredible suffering of one individual, but the awareness that I want all of us to have is that thousands of our brothers and sisters have suffered, and many are still suffering. Members in Tokyo right now are unaccounted for and are believed to have been abducted with the help of their parents, the police, and some ministers representing established religions.

Mr. Goto’s suffering is just one extreme example of such a prolonged confinement, but there are people like Dr. [Hirohisa] Koide, who was confined for two years and actually lived to tell about it in a book. He recounts how he would have daily debates with his captors: “Do you realize what you are doing is a violation of human rights?” He was so articulate and intelligent -- unlike the stereotype of what a brainwashed zombie is -- that they actually had to bring a lawyer to talk to him. The lawyer was making the case: “It is not illegal to deprogram criminal organizations like yours in Japan.” These were the words that the lawyer was using.

How can a lawyer, whose job it is to uphold the law, come to a place where somebody is held against his will, where his free will is thrown out the window, where all the windows are bolted and doors are locked, where he is given meager nutrition so that he would be easier to break, and kept under severe mental duress? For a lawyer to walk in and say that what they are doing is not illegal is absolutely ludicrous.

Then you have somebody like Mr. Kobayashi, who was kidnapped three times by his family with the help of a deprogrammer. The third time he was confined for over six months. At the beginning of this kidnapping, he managed to alert police who took him and his captors to the police station, where he expected relief from his confinement. But what did they do? They gave him over to his family, saying it was a “family matter.” Brothers and sisters, holding an adult who is over 21 years of age against his will, forcibly confining him, physically abusing him, mentally abusing him, and emotionally abusing him cannot be categorized simply as a “family matter.”

You have the case of Mr. Nozoe, who went home to visit his Christian minister mother, but unbeknownst to him the deprogrammers were there waiting for him, and they whisked him off for 23 days of confinement. He escaped by jumping out of a third-floor balcony. This is how desperate our brothers and sisters are. These are the things they have to endure to seek the freedom to worship.

I just named three brothers, but there are many sisters who, because they come from an Asian culture, have a very difficult time coming forward. The deprogrammers know we believe in the importance of purity, in the importance of fidelity in marriage. So some of these single Japanese sisters, as well as sisters who were already blessed, were raped to break their faith because they know that if these women are raped, they will be seen as dirty and feel incredible shame. But they also know that because the women are Japanese, they will not readily come forward to talk about their difficulty and the cross that they had to bear.

These atrocities are not happening 500 years ago. They are happening now. They are happening in a country that professes to be a democratic nation. And they are robbing the free will that every member of our community and every individual in this world should have. These poor brothers and sisters have been suffering in silence, but no more. It took about a year for Mr. Goto to come here and for us to finally welcome him to the country that was born from a concept of religious freedom.

Don’t you think, brothers and sisters, that as Americans we need to do something about raising the awareness of these human rights violations that are taking place in Japan? Absolutely. In the past maybe we treated the problems of Japan as Japanese problems, we treated the problems that the European countries were dealing with as European problems, and we treated problems we dealt with here in the American movement as American problems. But I said to Mr. Goto, “We are supposed to be a movement that represents one family under God. Japan’s problem is our problem.”

As long as our brothers and sisters in Japan are fighting for their right to exercise their freedom to worship, we need to be right there behind them. We need to be supporting them by talking to anyone who has an ear to listen, letting them know what’s going on. This is not an atrocity taking place in some unknown place with a name that’s unrecognizable. This happens to be one of the superpowers of the world in this modern day and age, a place where human beings should have the dignity to be able to choose for themselves how to worship God, our Heavenly Parent.

Brothers and sisters, I feel like this is a calling from God to the American movement. Our problems are nothing compared to what Mr. Goto and other brothers and sisters like him had to endure in prison; our small day-to-day problems are nothing compared to what our True Father went through over six times in different prisons, being thrown out for dead, having endured the extreme hunger, the extreme mental fatigue that comes from constant accusation, constant verbal abuse, constant emotional abuse.

When I saw the picture of Mr. Goto, I saw a picture of my father walking out of Hungnam prison, liberated by the allied forces. In those pictures, I see my father. These are the pictures that I want us to remember because our children should not ever be in that kind of photograph because of who they are or because of what they choose to believe in their lives. If we don’t stand up for our own, what are we going to stand up for, brothers and sisters?

This country, at the start of a new millennium, witnessed something incredible. We witnessed the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King realized in the election of President Obama to the White House. The impossibility of a black man being elected to the White House, built with the hands, with the blood, sweat, and tears of the slaves of America: That impossibility happened. We have broken down the barriers of race. But, brothers and sisters, what lies ahead for us and for the rest of the world is the barrier that still divides religion, that still divides and urges people to not love each other, to hate each other, to be fearful of each other, to attack what we don’t know, to malign what we don’t understand.

Different types of religion are like different fingers on a hand. We may be a different phalange, but we belong to the same hand. We belong to the same parent, which is God, our Heavenly Parent. So this issue of human rights violations, which is an infringement of every individual’s right to worship in the manner that he or she sees fit, is an incredibly important one. Instead of trying to squash something that people cannot understand or are fearful of, we have to say that at least understanding ourselves to be the children of God is better than not knowing that God is our Heavenly Parent at all.

So why can’t we concentrate on our common denominator? Why can’t we work on something that we can agree on? We might look different, we might smell different, we might come from different cultures, but we are all sons and daughters of God, and that’s what we need to concentrate on.

Father said to me many years ago, “America is providentially such an important country because from America you can manage the world.” America has to give birth to a new culture based on God-centered principles, based upon an understanding of God as our Heavenly Parent. I feel we have been so blessed to be a part of this country, to be citizens and enjoy freedoms that we take for granted. But these are the very freedoms that our brothers and sisters around the world are fighting for. We need to help them to the best of our abilities and fight along with them because their battles are our own, and their suffering is our suffering. Their victories are our victories.

My father said in a speech earlier that suffering and hardships are the instruments by which we give everything but gain everything. The interesting thing about Mr. Goto is that he gave everything; he lost 12 years and five months of his life. But God works in mysterious ways. Because he had an unbreakable faith, he had an infinite faith in his relationship with God, he developed a place where only God and he could go. He could channel this incredible landslide of emotion, this power of love, to light his way even in his darkest moments. So when he comes out, not only will he be a symbol of hope, like a saint who represents unbreakable faith, but he will be a living testament to the beauty of the human spirit, showing that regardless of what suffering and obstacles stand in our path, it’s the power of the spirit that will drive us into an incredible relationship with eternal God, our Heavenly Parent.

When I had the opportunity to have lunch with Mr. Goto, he gave me a brief outline of some of his ordeals. I said, “God works in mysterious ways.” Many times my father used to joke with me, saying, “Your husband spent almost 10 years trying to get a doctorate. It’s an arduous process. It’s a lot of work, of sleepless nights, of exams he had to pass.” In a way Mr. Goto’s incarceration was like a Ph.D. program. The exams that he had to take, the incredible amount of time he had to spend in truly trying to understand himself -- not only did he come out with a victory of true love, but he came out as a Ph.D. of all the negative and anti-Unificationist material available on the planet.

I said to him, “In the last 12 years and five months, God has been training you to become our spokesperson, to become our representative to the world in telling people about the importance of human rights, and the illegality of the human rights violations that are taking place. The best way to defeat the enemy is to understand the enemy. You’ve got a Ph.D. in anti-Unificationist literature. You probably understand the enemy better than anybody.”

How wonderful that the second son from this Goto family can now stand in this position as a saint, symbolizing unbreakable faith. Not only can he inspire, but he can also guide us as a movement in the knowledge of what these people are saying about our community and about our precious True Parents.

As a mother, when I hear stories like Mr. Goto’s, I am confronted with desperation to raise up this awareness and really support the young people to take ownership of their generation, to call themselves a generation of peace -- meaning they are going to revel in knowing that God is their eternal True Parent. Be people who celebrate knowing that we are the eternal sons and daughters of our Heavenly Parent. We are going to live lives of altruism, for the sake of others, just because. Not because we are seeking any reward or because we’re eschewing any type of punishment later, but just because we want to be good people and we want to help.

This generation of young people needs to instill within us this understanding of compassion. We must be kind people to each other, to our friends, to our families, to our communities -- kind in the sense that we’re loving. But kind does not mean weak; kindness can be incredibly strong. And we need a spirit of cooperation to stand together against violence of any kind, against injustice of any kind, against this horrific thing called deprogramming that is taking place in Japan, even as we speak.

If we can inspire our young people that we need to be the embodiment of excellence because we are truly the manifestation of divine light that God is just waiting to turn on like a light bulb, then can you imagine a world where every young man and woman can come together into his understanding of what the word peace actually means? In the understanding that we belong to the same parent, God, our Heavenly Parent? Then there is a natural desire to love.

Here we are on stage. The band was singing about the speed of sound, and we’re always talking in science classes about the speed of light. But here at Lovin’ Life Ministries we’re talking about the speed of true love. It is incredible. It is profound, and it’s instantaneous. The only thing we need to decide to do with our free will is to turn it on.

Brothers and sisters, each day that our Heavenly Parent has given us, He is giving us that decision to make again and again. Are we going to turn the switch on and allow the heavenly electrical current of true love to flow through us so that we can truly be a brilliant light in the world? Are we going to be the kind of brothers and sisters who are going to honor each other and stand by each other, not only in the good times but as true friends who stand by people in their darkest hour?

For a lot of our brothers and sisters in Japan, this is their darkest hour. What they’re doing by deprogramming -- taking the emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being of our brothers and sisters -- is something that we cannot stand by and watch, thinking that it is not our problem here. What’s going on in Japan is our problem as well.

Please, I encourage all of you after service to greet Mr. Goto and the others who have come here. Welcome them to America. Let him feel your love. Let him be engulfed by our love, by the love of our Heavenly Parent, so that at least when he is with us here he can forget about 12 years and five months of suffering and really celebrate the fact that he is here with us. Just last year he was matched and blessed to a wonderful sister. So his life has just started.

I was joking with him about that 12 years and 5 months. His numbers, 1+2+5, add up to 8, the number of a new beginning. Just as the snake sheds its old skin to start a new life, this is the new phase of Mr. Goto’s life. He was preparing to be an architect, but now he has been touched by God and put through this special training by God, and he has turned into quite a phenomenal activist to help raise awareness of the injustice that is taking place.

We have asked the support of ACLC, of ministers all around the country, to be aware of what is going on in Japan. I’m going to ask the new CARP leader in America, Hero Hernandez, to take up the mantle of raising awareness of the human rights violations that are taking place in Japan and elsewhere all around the world against our brothers and sisters, and to really help people see that, in something like this, we cannot just turn the other cheek. That’s what we did in the time of wilderness, but in this time of settlement, it’s time to face the world and look at it confidently as sons and daughters of God and love the world with the true love that is just waiting for them through your hands.

Please help me welcome Mr. Goto into our congregation this morning. I hope that you can truly have a wonderful Sunday and a wonderful week to come. Please speak to your neighbors, your children, and to your relatives about the injustices that are taking place and the need for our community to support something that is worth fighting for. God bless. 

Team Spirit and Unity

In Jin Moon
August 16, 2009
Manhattan Center, New York City

Good morning, brothers and sisters. I’m delighted to see all of you here again. I hope you had a lovely week. First of all, I’d like to thank all of you for so many Happy Birthday greetings. As a woman, once you reach the age of 21, you want to go backward, not forward. But I have such a loving community and such a wonderful team that never let me forget that I’m a year older, and hopefully wiser. Thank you for all the flowers, chocolate, and well wishes.

We just finished the SportsFest that we had for the Second Generation, starting August 14 and ending yesterday. I hear that later in the afternoon we’re going to have the opportunity to award some winners. I’m very much looking forward to that. With all these wonderful teams representing their states coming all the way here to compete in these games with a spirit of cooperation and of wanting to celebrate our community, what better way to spend Sunday worship than to talk about team spirit and unity?

Let’s look at the word unity for a minute. It comes from the Latin unis, meaning one. When we talk of unity, we are referring to bringing together the diverse parts or diverse individuals into a harmonious effect so that all these different parts, elements, and even individuals become bodies that act in unity with one another. When you’re looking at a successful sports team, you’re very much seeing the result of a great deal of practice that went on behind the scenes. For a team to be effective, it should have a mission statement: and not just a team but also a family, or a corporation like Manhattan Center, or any organization. If you want to be efficient and efficacious, running things in a smooth way, you need a common vision that everyone can adhere to.

Usually when you’re talking about a successful team (and that’s the case for a successful sports team as well), there usually is a sense of purpose or mission. For a lot of young people, that mission is to win. Of course, for a team to be successful, there needs to be a spirit of cooperation and understanding that each member of the team is incredibly important, like the different parts of a body. But in order for it to be a truly successful and awesome team, all members must know their own strengths and weaknesses. And they have to learn to work together so that they move as a unified front.

The spirit of cooperation is incredibly important. I’ve noticed, and heard back from different people, that a team’s spirit has to be quite strong and phenomenal. When you look at a team, you realize that good team members have spent a lot of time behind the scenes training their bodies. Sometimes it’s mind over body. Sometimes there’s a great deal of emphasis on proper nutrition, but also showing up at practice on time, listening to the coach, and executing the wishes of the coach in participation with your other team members are very important. This takes a great deal of practice.

For a team to operate like a well-oiled machine, it takes hours and hours of practice, with the members getting to know the different character types of the others. As a mother who has four boys and who is always thinking about how to encourage my boys to experience this team spirit, working together for a common cause and vision, I have found sports and music to be wonderful avenues of expression.

For me, sports are very engaging vehicles for character growth. You learn a lot of things on the field that prepare you for society. You learn how to win. Some people learn how to win gracefully; others learn how to win arrogantly. You learn how to lose. Some people learn how to lose gracefully, and some people are not very good losers. Also when you watch a game, you can see a lot of cheating going on. What happens when you start cheating? You get called off the field. First of all, it’s not good to cheat. Even if you just try to cheat, you are no longer have the privilege of being part of the team.

You learn how to work together, and you come to understand that it doesn’t matter who scores the goal; if your teammate scores the goal, the whole team wins. It doesn’t matter if it’s the right leg or the left leg that kicked the ball, it’s still a phenomenal victory for the whole body, the whole team.

When you look at different games in progress and see how the teams operate, you realize that discipline is a great foundation for the players to get up to par or win the privilege of actually playing on the field. But once you get on the field, probably the most important thing is teamwork, remembering what your coach told you before he put you on the field, recalling the different strategies that he asked the team to execute, and understanding that those strategies might change on the spot, depending on how the opponents are coming at you.

This kind of spirit yields a team that can become incredibly successful, not just on the field but also in life. My father’s favorite game happens to be soccer right now. He owns a soccer team in Korea. We have a huge pharmaceutical company called Il Hwa, which has its own soccer team. This team has gone on to win many great victories. Whenever Father’s team is playing, you will find a room packed full of people together with my father and mother, glued to the TV, watching every move. My father, even though he’s into his 90s, turns into a little boy. When someone scores and wins a point, my father will be the first one out of his chair like a rocket, really celebrating the victory.

It’s very endearing. I know it’s not proper for a daughter to call her father cute, but he’s incredibly adorable. He’s not afraid to express what he’s feeling. He really doesn’t care who else is in the room. When he is happy, he is really happy. When he is excited, everybody knows about it. Just a gleam in his eyes and a flash of that fantastic smile can really melt the coldest of hearts in the room.

As my father is enjoying these soccer games and looking to me to produce a phenomenal soccer team from the United States to compete in the next sports festival, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about teamwork, especially how to raise up young people so that they’re not just externally excellent as soccer players but also internally excellent as men and women of character.

One of the most important teams that we can build in our lifetime is our family. When you look at a family, the coach in the family might be the mom or the dad. For instance, in my family we have four boys and a lovely daughter smack in the middle, thank God. She’s a nice “recess” from the two boys before her and two boys coming after her. These seven people of our family are a team. As a family we have a mission statement; I’m hoping all of you who have a family of your own have a mission statement, too, or a purpose as to why you exist and why you are building an ideal family.

Probably one of the most difficult things in life is to be a mom or a dad, attempting to raise a highly successful family. Our mission statement in our family is to inherit the true love of God; our mission is to be men and women of excellence, integrity, and service. This is the common vision that we all agree on in order for us to be an effective family team. My husband and I try our best to encourage our children in the spirit of cooperation, in helping them to see opportunity in something that’s difficult instead of seeing the difficulty in every opportunity, as Winston Churchill once said.

Probably the most important task of a parent is to encourage a child to live a life of discipline, to practice true “rubbing,” if you will, truly loving each other, living a life of service, living for the sake of others. These are the things we try to encourage. Even though I’m the senior pastor, I would not be doing my job to the best of my ability if my family were not here. Again, the importance of teamwork. Here we are, taking care of the congregation, enjoying another beautiful Sunday with our brothers and sisters. How blessed, how privileged, and how honored we are. It moves me to know that my teammates are there greeting all of you before I come and greet you myself. Being part of something larger than yourself is a wonderful feeling.

I shared with you earlier the speech that my father gave to a Korean audience on April 1, 1978; he was talking to them about the importance of understanding ourselves beyond being defined by the nation that we were born in. As he said, you must be able to think beyond the fact that you are Korean men and women. We must remind ourselves that we’re greater than that. We belong to God, our Heavenly Parent. We are his and her sons and daughters. We belong to one family, which is God’s family. We are so privileged to be the living children in God’s dwelling place. How much more wonderful than that could our life be?

My father was implying that when we pigeonhole ourselves as Korean, as Japanese, as English, as Finnish, or as Russian, we are limiting who we are, constantly bringing the baggage of our culture, not only its positive aspects. For instance, a Korean might want to be blessed to a wonderful American sister, and together off they go toward building this lovely thing called an ideal family. But if the Korean man comes into the marriage refusing to go into the kitchen, that might be a big problem for unity. That might be a big obstacle in overcoming each other’s different cultural backgrounds, standing together on the foundation of love, and formulating a mission statement that can work for them. Many times we bring cultural baggage, saying, “We don’t do such and such in our culture.”

When my husband and I were first married, I showed him the ironing board and said, “Here, I’m going to be in the kitchen for a while. Can you iron a couple of shirts?” The great thing about my husband is that he didn’t say no, but he did give me one of these looks like, “Huh?” The understanding is, “I don’t iron shirts.”

But because we had a mission statement that he and I both agreed on, all I had to do was remind him of that. “Honey, remember our mission statement? What is it? It’s to inherit the true love of God. And what else? It’s to live a life becoming men and women of excellence, integrity, and, most importantly, service.”

Then in the spirit of cooperation and understanding the importance of discipline, he learned how to practice being a fantastic ironing man so his shirts can look crisp and delicious for Sunday worship, and we acted together in unison and enjoyed this dance called teamwork. So by the time we could properly come out and greet all of you, we were a phenomenal team. That’s just a little example of the cultural differences of two people. My father stressed the importance of international marriages for many years, and he still does.

As fantastic as all the different spices are in the world, what good is a spice if you can’t use it to make a fantastic meal? Can you imagine if an incredibly expensive spice like saffron would refuse to go into paella? It’s the most important ingredient in paella, but it’s refusing because it doesn’t like the look of the pot. Maybe it doesn’t like being cooked in a wok; it wants to be cooked in its own pan that it’s used to. See, then it becomes a problem.

What my father is encouraging through these international marriages is for all of us to become fantastic cooks, metaphorically speaking, in using all the beautiful different spices that can yield the most awesome tastes and sensations on our tongues. Once they are melded together and masterfully prepared with a great deal of love, they end up making a most satisfying meal.

I’ve always believed that there’s nothing more satisfying than a wonderful family. The wonderful thing about international couples is that they provide the opportunity for people to rub up against each other. When you’re rubbing up against each other and against different cultures, you realize each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and you realize the beauty and the strength that are gained when you come together. As well, you realize how much beauty is lost when you cannot come together in this wonderful thing called a team. It’s really an invitation for us to grow.

For me as a mother, there is nothing more important for me than learning something new. Probably the greatest lessons in life that I’ve learned have been in the context of my family. Not only do I learn so much from my husband, but I learn so much from my children as well. When children grow up and want to experience all sorts of different things, mothers are always concerned about them, a bit anxious. Whenever I’m feeling anxious, I remind myself of my mother’s voice, which says, “In Jin, all you need to do is just believe in God. God is taking care of your children. Do not be anxious. Talk to them and work with them, but do not worry.”

God always has a way of reminding me that children need to go through a process. Each child is so different. You feel like you’re getting it right with the first one, and then comes the second one. Then you have to be a little bit more flexible and work with the second one. You feel like you’re finally getting some footing on this thing called parenting, and then you get the third one. And then you feel like, “Okay, this is a girl, I think have the hang of it. Maybe I have the advantage because I was once a girl, so maybe this is the way I need to work with her.”

But God always throws me a curve ball. Again, every difficulty is an opportunity to grow and to learn. My daughter and I have done a lot of growing. It’s so heartwarming for me to see her grow into this beautiful blossom of a flower. Just when I felt like, “Okay, three children. They’re well on their way, I’m good now.” then I look at the fourth one, and he is completely different. What you thought worked for the first three doesn’t work for the fourth. When you get to the fifth one, you realize, holy cow, you need another approach for this one.

Each child is so precious and unique, endlessly challenging but so deliciously inviting. You can never get enough of them, regardless of what they do or don’t do. You just love them with all your heart. Every time I find myself looking at them and realizing how much I truly love these munchkins, I’m reminded, “In Jin, God, our Heavenly Parent, loves you just as much, too.” God, our Heavenly Parent, loves us just as much.

So the parents in the audience know what I’m talking about, right? Many times when we’re with our kids we get lost in their beauty, in their awesomeness. The adolescent child might be thinking, “What are you staring at? Why are you looking at me like that?” But young people in the audience, it’s good to know that your parents love you so much and they really want the best for you. Despite all the challenges that life puts in your path in terms of growing up, going to school, and dealing with academic pressures, social pressures, peer pressures, and emotional pressures, you always need to remember that your teammates, your family, are right there with you. You are never alone.

When you’re young and the hormones start raging in your body, a chemical process takes place in the brain such that many times you have a strong feeling of loneliness. But just remember: Your family is your team, and they will not let you down. They will not leave a man or a woman behind, and they will always be there for you.

Whenever you’re feeling lonely, it’s a good time to remember this passage from the Bible, John 17:21: “The Father is in me, and I am in you.” We hold within us God’s divinity and power, and as long as we remember that we are the son or daughter of God, we become like a flashlight, a light bulb that turns on. Remember that we belong to this awesome team. We belong to God, our Heavenly Parent. Once you remember who you are and not what you are, then you open an incredible circuitry and allow this electric current of true love to flow through your veins. You realize that not only are you not alone, but you have a fantastic mom and dad and siblings that you’re working with, practicing together so you can become a phenomenal team, like the different teams that we saw at the Sports Fest.

If we remember that God is in us and we are in God, that we are part of one family, then God will be so pleased when he looks down upon his children in this fantastic and phenomenal community that we have here. How wonderful, how good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters dwell in unity, as Psalm 133 says. How glorious it is when we can truly take care of each other, appreciate each other, not suppress each other, and not try to kick somebody out because we are jealous.

If you belong to a sports team, wouldn’t you want all the other players to be better than you? You’d have a better chance at winning, right? I certainly would. As a member of the team, you want everyone to be better than you. So there is no room for jealousy. There is no room for First Generation members to look upon the incoming Second Generation, saying, insecurely, “They’re pretty good. I might be kicked off.” There’s no room for that. The only thing that the team should be thinking is “Wonderful. We’re going to win many, many games this year.”

Instead of looking at a beautiful young girl walking up to the team and saying, “Ooooh, why a girl? Get the girl off the field,” why not enjoy the fact that you have a beautiful teammate who can probably kick the ball better than you, anyway? How wonderful would that be? So do not judge a book by its cover. A beautiful woman can be a deadly weapon, too.

When you’re in this thing called a team, you want somebody like that. Maybe you want somebody so beautiful that the opponent might be a bit distracted and she scores a goal. God works in mysterious ways. So don’t be afraid to let a girl come on your team and play with you. Why not?

Instead of being jealous or being angry -- “Why didn’t you pass me the ball? I want to be the one scoring all the time!” -- instead of being angry that you weren’t the person to have kicked the ball and scored a goal, how wonderful would it be if team members could say, “Let me do all the background defensive maneuvering so the fantastic offensive players that we have can be put to the best advantage. I can give them several options from the background.”

If we have this attitude of wishing the best for each other because we know it doesn’t matter who scores the goal, when the goal is scored, then it’s a winning point for everybody. Again, when one family does well, it’s great for everybody.

It’s interesting for me because I’m in the awkward situation of my father having placed this responsibility and burden on me. He said, “You’ve done a wonderful job home schooling your kids. Now do the same for the rest of your community.” As a mother I want to share all that I’ve learned with different brothers and sisters. But sometimes there’s this look: “Yes, but you’re True Family; you’ve been handed a silver spoon all your life. What do you know about our lives? What do you know about our kids? Maybe the way you raised your kids is not the way I want to raise mine.”

As somebody who’s a part of this community, wanting to share with all of you the different things that I’ve learned, it would be great if you realize that sharing is a wonderful thing. I look forward to learning about how you’ve managed with your family and the different tidbits of wisdom that you’ve garnered over the years. I would very much love that, just as much as I would love a recipe from your family, which would make my menu at home that much richer.

If we think of ourselves as a community and as a team, then I’m in the situation where I have to be the coach and I have to come up with a strategy, a plan of action that we need to execute as a team in this thing called a worldwide family. It doesn’t matter how ingenious the strategy is, if there is no desire on the part of the team members to try it out, the team members will never realize whether it is a good plan or maybe needs a little adjusting.

The important thing is the willingness to unite with the vision or purpose of why we are doing what we’re doing. One coach might be very different from another coach. We have our individual styles, and we have our individual ways of doing things because we come with different experience packages, right? My experience is very different from that of somebody else. So instead of looking at it as, “Whoa, our old coach didn’t do that!” please realize that maybe your management asked me to come on board because they wanted to try a new method of running the show.

I am not here to say that my strategy for the game is the best in the world. But I would like to try it this way. If I can have the support of my team members, this community, and our worldwide community, I think you will see that quite a few games can be and will be won.

I’m looking at so many talented young people. It’s really my privilege to get to know not just the First Generation but also your children, the Second Generation, and the Third Generation (and now we’re on to the Fourth), and to see what a phenomenal group of people we are. Sometimes I’m lying in bed thinking, my goodness, we are the most successful new religion in the lifetime of the founder, and we still have the founder with us. How much more phenomenal can we be if we just keep this good thing going? Maybe with a little different twist, and trying different strategies on the field, but still under the same vision of God, our Heavenly Parent, and of our True Parents, who are with us, really celebrating with us each and every Sunday.

I think I should share a little secret with all of you. My father is a great fan of Lovin’ Life Ministries. When the camera scans the audience, he can see not just black hair, but yellow hair, curly hair, bushy hair, straight hair. And he sees all of you smiling and simply reveling in this team spirit. My father loves that, and he’s so busy looking at everybody. He becomes so happy because, as our father, he loves us the way we love our children. He loves all of you. He loves you probably more than he loves me. But he really loves his children, and my mother really loves her children because she can see the hope in your eyes. When they see the young people dancing up a storm here at the end, they can experience the power of the young people. It makes my parents feel young again.

Usually when I send them a DVD of Lovin’ Life Ministry, they like to watch it in the comfort of their own suite, but they like it so much that they show it the next day at Hoon Dok Hae. So, unbeknownst to all of us, it’s becoming a regular Hoon Dok Hae phenomenon, which is a wonderful thing because then we’re sharing our happiness and celebration with the rest of the world.

The only thing we have to do is remember and believe this whole concept that God is a living God, flowing through all of us, flowing in our veins, and that we are his living children. We’ve just got to believe, brothers and sisters. If we can do that, we are going to be an awesome, unstoppable, and undeniable phenomenon in this world.

As a mother who has tasted here at Lovin’ Life Ministries the possibility of what Generation Peace can look like, I can say that there’s not another minute to waste. We have to work on building our families. We have to work on establishing better relationships between spouses so we can create a great environment for our children to grow in. Once we get the young people inspired by the power of love and once our children realize who they are, not just concentrating on what they want to become when they grow older in terms of their career choice or goals, but really keeping in mind who they are and what God’s purpose of creation was when he created us and what we must do as competent and successful sons and daughters of God, then the sky’s the limit.

So brothers and sisters, I hope that you can help me celebrate the great victories of the winning teams shortly after a lunch break. We can really take the time to celebrate with them for all the hard work, all the great footwork, and all the great playing they did for the last couple of days. Also let’s take part in realizing that we are one incredible family. As long as we can remind ourselves of this every day, we’re well on our way to raising a healthy, emotionally confident, spiritually sound, and externally excellent group of young men and women, starting with our own here.

God bless. Have a wonderful Sunday. Thank you. 

Hero Hernandez -- New CARP President in America

In Jin Moon
August 15, 2009

NHQ20090815 No. 25

To: District Directors and State Leaders
From: Reverend In Jin Moon and Reverend Ki Hoon Kim
Re: Mr. Hero Hernandez -- New CARP President in America
Date: August 15, 2009

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Hero Hernandez as the new CARP President in America. His appointment was approved by True Father and we officially welcomed him as CARP President at the meeting of CARP representatives and students from around the nation in New York on Tuesday, August 4th. I sincerely thank Mr. Kenshu Aoki for his service previously as CARP USA President.

Hero is the eldest son of Rev. and Mrs. Mark Hernandez, District Directors in Texas for District 9. He is 25 years old and was matched and blessed by True Parents to Sylvia Santelli on December 26, 2004. Until now, he has been serving as the assistant state leader in Texas (in charge of all youth education) and as CARP coordinator.

Hero is fully committed to working with our young adults who are college and university students on campuses across America to establish CARP as a respected and vital campus organization, whose members personify academic and spiritual excellence and contribute in positive ways to their campus and community.

I congratulate Hero Hernandez on his becoming our new CARP President and I ask that our leadership throughout America welcome and support him.

Sincerely,

Reverend In Jin Moon
President - FFWPU-USA

Reverend Ki Hoon Kim
Continental Director - North America 

Future of CARP and Youth Providence

In Jin Moon
August 9, 2009

Youth Educators from around the country, attending the Equip U program held from August 7-10, meet for a special talk with Rev. In Jin Moon on August 9, 2009.

This is a great pleasure for me to be meeting with all of you, the young adult ministers from all around the country. A lot of things are changing here at Headquarters. We are still in the process of restructuring and reorganizing STF, and just last week Father picked Hero Hernandez as the new CARP president. I'm so delighted to have somebody of that caliber heading up CARP in the United States. And also CARP will be going through a severe restructuring and a rethinking of what it is supposed to be.

Historically CARP has been a campus organization that did a lot of good things, but the biggest problem with it is that it has never been part of the campus or the activities going on there. Many of the CARP leaders were auditing courses simply so that they could get on campus to witness and participate in different student activities. My feeling is that there is no reason why we as CARP members should be chased off campuses because we're not legitimate students. The whole question of where do we hold CARP events on campus? Well, it's a problem to try to hold a student organizational event when you’re not part of the university.

I remember when I was a Columbia University undergraduate, the university had a budget of almost $1 million to distribute to student organizations. I noticed that a huge chunk of that money went to Hillel, the Jewish organization on campus. Some went to ROTC, and a substantial amount went out to lesbian and gay organizations at Columbia -- I think one year they got something like $350,000 to put on their programs.

Here we have CARP being subsidized by HSA. So the big question that I would have to ask CARP leaders is: Why are we not plugged into the system so that we have access to that kind of support? Back then, when I was an undergraduate, you only needed three full-time students and the sponsorship of a professor and that was it: You were up and running as a campus organization. Depending on some of the ideas that you had for the yearly calendar, then you could make your case through putting together a proposal for funding. If the chairman of the finance committee, along with different committee members, thought that it was worth the money to invest in an organization like yours because you represented the university well, that's how most student organizations got funded.

Before we were in the time of wilderness, haphazardly trying to meet providential time lines and deadlines. Father pushed us to rise to the challenge of accomplishing many great things, and we did. The Washington Monument rally, the Yankee Stadium rallies: All these were wonderful things. All the ICUS conferences, and now UPF and GPF: these were all great events. They showed what great works our True Parents and our communities were doing all around the world.

As a mother and as somebody who cares about the future of my children as well as the future of all of you, I'm thinking that it's wonderful to do many lofty and grand things in the name of world peace, but if we're not growing as a community, if we're not doing well as families, then we don't really have much to talk about. We must inspire the young people of our movement by providing a uniform education track that will take them from birth to becoming a successful young adult. Many of our organizations have been acting independently of one another -- STF was doing its own thing, CARP was doing its own thing, WFWP was doing its own thing. We have been working under the umbrella of the label of world peace and the goodwill of the people, but many times it didn't take all of us through our growth stage, the different periods in our life, to really help us become successful, internally excellent, and externally excellent individuals.

As a mother, I very much see things like STF and CARP as stepping-stones to becoming a successful young adult. Here I am, launching this new thing called Lovin' Life Ministries. In the beginning, when I invited the district leaders to participate in this ministry and at the Manhattan center, the response that my team and I got was blank stares: What is this woman up to? Why the Manhattan Center? We have to drive to attend Sunday Service? We have our church in New Jerusalem, we have our church in West Rock, we have our church in Long Island, we have our church in Brooklyn and Harlem. Why do we need another church?

My desire was to create a place where our community members could feel like they are coming home each Sunday. It's really a chance for us to look around the room and realize that we are a phenomenal community. The problem with young people doing their own thing off in New Jerusalem and West Rock is that they don't really get to learn or care about the other blessed children in the area because they tend to coalesce, to stick together and hang out by themselves. But we have to know each other if we're going to work together. We have to grow together. We have to rub against each other if we're truly going to be a community that's like a family.

Kids have started coming from, for instance, Long Island communities where there are only five blessed couples. Don't you think it's much more exciting for the young people to worship at Sunday Service with over 1,000 people as opposed to five blessed couples, who may be very tired that Sunday? Maybe the music there is nonexistent or not up to the quality that we can provide here for all of you.

Immediately the young people, and even the parents themselves, could realize that there's something different here, something exciting. Instead of complaining about our different districts or regions, if we come together as one family and celebrate as if we're one family, then we're going to pervade the atmosphere of our movement with a contagious thing called true love. If people experience it here, they're going to want to share it with their loved ones. If they experience it here and they feel energized, that's going to help them carry on throughout the week, and so they will come back to feel reinvigorated.

What I'm trying to do is not that revolutionary, if you think about it. It's just something that needs to be done. It's the obvious thing that was overlooked for many years. As we slowly put the jigsaw puzzle together into a picture that I would like to create for the sake of our Heavenly Parent and True Parents, I am going to need the cooperation of the different pieces to help me create it together. I think we're well on our way.

The wonderful thing from my point of view is that I have the full support of my family and, most importantly, the full support of my parents. They are really behind all the changes that are taking place in America. They are behind the idea that we can't really take care of anybody else if we do not take time to care for our own children and our own communities. Our communities need to thrive in order to attract people to come and be a part of them. So it's a very simple way of thinking, but it takes your cooperation for me to effectively implement this idea in our community and in the organization that I'm trying to run here at Headquarters.

If CARP members are fundraising 24-7, even the good students who are undergraduates at their university have to give up an inordinate amount of time to fundraise so they can pay rent for the buildings that they are maintaining as CARP houses. I say, instead of trying to maintain physical buildings, if you become part of a campus organization, you have access to student centers. Your members don't have to be fundraising; they can be applying themselves and doing well, getting straight A's, being elected president of the student body, becoming the editor-in-chief of the student paper, being elected chairman of the finance committee, being elected chairman of the United Minorities Council. Become an integrated organization on campus so that when you have something to say, your fellow students will listen and you won't look like a parasite organization latching onto universities, trying to prey on their students.

In fact, CARP's new image should be that it's a phenomenal student organization that is really serving the community and encouraging young people to be excellent, internally and externally. Who's going to have a problem with that? How phenomenal would that be? At the same time, CARP can be a watchdog for our community and our faith on campus.

It is not right that CARP has been around for the last 20 or so years and yet every freshman sociology class at different universities across the country teaches about cults, using the Unification Church and my father as the prime example. What has CARP been doing about that? It should be the watchdog. Hillel is protecting the Jewish communities, representing them on campus. I very much would like to see CARP be the watchdog of our community and faith on campus.

When my children arrived as freshmen at their university, they received a packet of literature, together with a packet of condoms. A pamphlet introduced the students to the university and to the surrounding area, talking about shopping, where to dine and find entertainment, and other pertinent information that freshmen require. The pamphlet had a section about the different organizations and groups that they needed to avoid. On that list was the name of our community, our church. The pamphlet said that Moonies are the people you need to avoid and that the Unification Church is something that you need to stay away from. Here we are, on that list in the pamphlet given to every freshman in the country.

What is CARP doing about that? Don't you think that CARP as a student organization should be the first one to voice our opinion about how we do not want to be categorized as an organization or group that should be avoided? We have the dignity and the right to stand tall on every campus in America. We have the right to seek the highest education possible, made available to anybody else. Why should we allow a university to make us feel like we're second-class citizens? Or worse, why should we allow colleges to encourage our friends and our roommates to think that somehow we’re not a good organization?

These are simple questions that I've had for leaders of CARP and my reasons as to why things have to change. It cannot be business as usual. I do not want the younger children in my family to receive a freshman packet that says that the Unification Church and Moonies are people that you must avoid. I have incredible pride in who I am as our Heavenly Parent’s daughter and as a member of this community. So we must empower our young people to write letters to the university president and go to student meetings and voice these concerns.

We should be the watchdog for all human rights violations that are going on all around the world, not just for the concerns of our own community. We need to see how much of a service we can be to the community by being plugged in, by being integrated, by not being subsidized by HSA but by being a legitimate, efficient, and efficacious organization that deserves the right to receive support from universities.

There is no reason why CARP cannot be as phenomenal as Hillel. Do you know that in this day and age, when representatives of Hillel comment about the Jewish communities, all the editors-in-chief of major newspapers around the country, including the Boston Globe and the New York Times, have to listen? How wonderful if CARP could be such an organization, where all the editors-in-chief of newspapers that have given my father and our communities a great deal of grief over the years would have to listen? Don't you want to get there? I want to get there. I want to create a university atmosphere where I don't have to worry that my children are going to be discriminated against or be made to feel like they are subhuman or second-class citizens. There's no need to be that way anymore. You guys are incredibly gifted and talented, and we have some really fine talent coming up. How wonderful would it be if we could go to our universities as proud Unificationists? If I can have your help, I think we can get there very soon.

Here we have all the young adult ministers. I am so delighted to see the turnout. It's heartwarming for me to think that there are a lot of young people across the country really wanting to go into ministry. Being a young adult minister is basically like becoming a parent to a lot of children. These children are not even your own, but you have to love them, nurture them, and empower them as if they were your own. It takes a lot of love, a lot of patience, and a lot of persistence. But if we can do our jobs right, we are going to be instrumental in building up this incredible new generation of peace that I know our Heavenly Parent is waiting for.

If we can reinvigorate ourselves by looking at each other and seeing what a great group we have to work with, then even though the day gets long and there's so much to do that you wonder if you can get through it all, if we can just look into each other's faces and find strength in each other, there's really nothing we cannot do.

Does In Jin Nim have a vision? Absolutely. But just like a mother knows that you have to unfold your vision in a way that depends on the extent to which your children are ready to share the vision, I feel that certain things have to be in place. My hope is that Lovin' Life Ministries can be the engine in the caboose and that young adult ministers can be like different trains. Here in New York people are going to workshops and bringing their family and friends. Many members are bringing their parents who tried to deprogram them 20 or 30 years ago; those parents are saying, Now I get it. I thought you were crazy, but now I get it.

Our Heavenly Parent is giving us a wonderful opportunity to do something exciting, something meaningful, and something that is going to be lasting in our relationships and in our community. People may say, Lovin' Life Ministries, that's In Jin Nim's pet project. It is not my pet project; this is our project. This is our attempt and our heart to really reawaken and re-inspire not just our community but also the American people about how precious our True Parents and all of you are.

Unlike some people who want to become fixtures in their jobs, I don't look forward to becoming a fixture in my job. In fact, I would love to raise up great men and women, senior pastors all around the country, so that I can retire and maybe open up my Divine Cheesecake Bakery, which I've been trying to do but I keep on being promoted to this and that. I had a whole business plan, a contract with Harvard University; we were in talks. I was dropping off cheesecakes to my kids, and suddenly I became Mama Park, and Mama Park was the one who delivered all the goodies. They liked the taste of them because I like playing around with very strange flavors. I'm a big fan of fusion cooking, so I have no problems creating a bittersweet chocolate cheesecake with a bit of ko-chu-chang. Nobody knows what it is, but they know that when they have it, it's kind of like molé. I got the idea from Molé because it's a chocolate sauce with hot peppers, which is a delectable, rich chocolate sauce that you can never get enough of. I thought, why not try that in a cheesecake? And voilà, it was a hit! The kids seem to love it. They don't know what the ingredients are, so don’t tell them!

This is what I really wanted to do. I just wanted to be a really good mom because I thought that the way to change the world was by becoming a great family. If I could put five kids out there in service to the world, then I would feel totally satisfied with my contribution to world peace. But unfortunately my older brother passed away, and then, thank God, my father and mother survived the helicopter crash. Now here I am at HSA, and I'm realizing that there is a mountain load of work to be done every day.

But the thing that excites me each and every morning is that if I can raise these kids faster and get them excited enough to be great senior pastors, then I can be relieved of my job and go back to my real dream of opening up a lovely bakery, to which all of you are welcome to come.

This is where I would like to see our movement go: where the First Generation and the Second Generation are so happy in knowing that the Second Generation and the Third Generation are well on their way and that our movement is in great hands. I just cannot wait for the day when I can sit back and watch all of you shine, watch all of you shake up the world, watch all of you make the kind of changes that we have all been waiting for.

So stand on our shoulders, young people. Stand on the shoulders of the First Generation and the Second Generation, and dream the dream that you are going to be the agent of change. Don't wait for me; don't wait for your mom and dad. Don't wait for your politicians or religious leaders. Look inside yourself. Tap into that divinity that all of you have, and think about how you can be the light unto the world.

I'm looking forward to fantastic things in our movement. As we roll out different programs, please participate. I look forward to hearing your feedback about our different ongoing programs. Please take a moment to realize that this is an incredible time and an incredible opportunity. So seize the day, each and every day, and make each day count.

God bless, and I hope for the successful conclusion of the Equip U workshop. I was told that it would go on through Monday. As I've said before, you are in good hands. Heather Thalheimer is a fine woman, and she comes highly qualified. But, just like me, she's approaching the different programs we are rolling out with the heart of a mother and with a feminine touch.

Please do your best to work with her, and please be supportive of the new CARP president that we have here with us. Have a great week. Thank you. 

The Power of the Word

In Jin Moon
August 9, 2009
Manhattan Center, New York City

Good morning, brothers and sisters. How is everyone this morning? Have you been fired up by the band? The thing I appreciate the most about working as senior pastor in Lovin’ Life Ministries is that I get to work with great men and women here. Not only are these men and women super talented in what they do -- you just saw the performers -- but behind the scenes there are lots of great, talented men and women also working to make sure that this worship experience is a phenomenal one. These people are really putting their hearts into everything that they do here.

In particular, these super talented musicians here on stage, if they have the right to become arrogant and strut their stuff even at Manhattan Center, they could very well do that. But they are so humble; their spirit of cooperation and their desire to work together as a team here always move me every time.

After they perform every Sunday, one of the things they have to do is take all this equipment back to various studios or to their homes. It’s so heartwarming for me to see all the singers and musicians really helping the crew onstage move all the equipment away, in the spirit of really helping each other and working as a team here. Whenever I see that, I always get the warm fuzzies because I realize that these are not just talented individuals who’ve been touched by God in a very special way, but they’re so beautiful as men and women and as sons and daughters of God. It is they who make my life worth living. Today is no exception. Chris Alan and the band gave such a phenomenal performance, yet I feel they are such a great support for me, for this ministry, and for everybody here in the room. I hope you felt that way as well.

Here at Lovin’ Life Ministries, we are constantly in the process of developing new programs to get people connected to the breaking news that our True Parents are here with us and that they are walking together with us, breathing together with us, smiling and sharing in our triumphs, being supportive when we maybe trip and fall and skin our knees. They’re always here.

I started thinking about a new program because my daughter Ariana is a fine ballroom dancer as well as a classical pianist. When she dances, she just comes alive; the movements are so beautiful, but the smile on her face is priceless. I thought maybe we should make dancing one of our own programs here at the Learning Center on 43rd Street. This last Wednesday was the kickoff for ballroom dancing. I hear it was a huge success. Reverend Sakamoto used to be the reigning champion of ballroom dancing in Japan, but then he joined our community and wanted to live his life in service of others. So he sacrificed his great talent and put all his trophies in the closet, even though he was quite famous in Japan.

Now we’ve asked him to dust those trophies off because we have a new program here. He was so energized and elated, saying to us, “I wanted to give up my great love of dancing in service to God and in service to humanity, in service to all the people who might want to experience my great love. But I realize that God works in mysterious ways, and here I am, after two decades of living a sacrificial life for God, True Parents, and humanity, coming full circle.” He taught the class, together with my daughter Ariana. I know he felt the mysterious power of God working with him that Wednesday. I was delighted to hear back from different people who participated in the program that they felt it was one of the best programs we had going.

I think just yesterday they had the second class, and I hear it was just as well attended. This whole spirit of allowing ourselves to express our love for the universal language, which is music, means that now we not only have the chance to audibly enjoy, but to allow the music to flow through us and express itself in the beauty of the human form, in human movement.

The great thing about ballroom dancing is it’s so cultural, a very prestigious and an upper class thing to do. Everyone has formal ways to approach the partner. How wonderful it is in this “ice age of the heart” for a young man to approach a young woman, saying, “May I have this dance?” instead of saying, “Want to grind on the dance floor?” Don’t you think there’s a difference here?

The different steps are formal and structured, but when you get used to these movements, you can roll around and float around on the dance stage. It’s such a graceful thing to watch. I think it’s a healthy way for young people, especially kids going through their difficult adolescent years, to approach the opposite sex in a respectful, beautiful, and enjoyable way: for each other to appreciate the partner and the distance between the partners, as well as the closeness.

I feel many times our community is paralyzed by fear of what our children are doing if they just hang out together, but we don’t realize that we are suffocating our youth by not allowing them to express their God-given divinity in many ways. If you can find a constructive and beautiful outlet where they can learn etiquette and social protocol, and at the same time have a great time, I think that’s a beautiful thing.

I know I have great support from many of you out there, but there are also some who question what this woman is up to. She wants to institute dancing classes, of all things, at the learning center? But I’d be the first one to say, “Why not?” Dance is an expression of the universal language.

Unbeknownst to me, my husband is a fantastic ballroom dancer. When we were growing up, going through our teenage years, whenever we had a dance set for blessed children, everyone shied away from my husband because he was well known for being the smartest kid on the block but also the worst dancer on the planet. He was famous for one move, which I don’t think I can replicate right now. The other girls immediately shied away. He had a knack of somehow wanting to dance with me. At occasions like that, he would come toward me, and I would try my best to dance away from him because I didn’t want to be attacked by the famous Jin Sung move.

For somebody who’s been well known in our community as a miserable dancer -- God works in mysterious ways. Before we got married, I knew his younger sister attended the Royal School of Ballet in Monaco, and he went over there to visit. The ballet teachers saw him and thought he was a dancer because he has the perfect physique. He has no waist; it’s all legs, and he is very thin for a man. For a dancer, it’s perfect. But when the teacher asked his sister, Hoon Sook said, “Yes, I know he has a perfect body and a natural turnout, which is priceless for a ballet dancer. but one thing about him is that he’s not flexible”. He has perfect form but he’s extremely rigid. When you ask him to bend over, the only thing you see moving are his arms, but the head doesn’t move. That’s how inflexible he is. So his parents could not help him to become a ballet dancer.

But here we are. I’ve known him all my life as a miserable dancer. My daughter, who discovered ballroom dancing when she got to Harvard, said to me, “Omma, there were a lot of people that came on Wednesday, but only one or two stood out.” I asked, who are they? She said, “Omma, you’re not going to believe me”. I listed all the names, but lo and behold she said, “Dad is a fantastic ballroom dancer.” I said, maybe it’s beginner’s luck; you’d better wait until Saturday. Then yesterday she came back and said, no, he’s really good. Again I was thinking how God works in mysterious ways because I thought one of the things I had to give up in my marriage was the ability to enjoy dancing with a partner. But through my daughter maybe this is one way I can enjoy dancing again.

I’m hoping that all the parents, all the husbands and wives, might want to come to this class. Sometimes the day-to-day difficulties can leave us feeling isolated, even in a marriage, and lonely and unappreciated. But I hope with different programs like this, not only can the young people enjoy themselves, but this might be an opportunity for married couples to enjoy another spark in their life or find a common hobby or love they can share together.

As a community, here we are in this modern day, wanting to share with the world the beauty of true love and the importance of understanding the historical significance of this providential time-frame when we have our True Parents. We talk about the power of love all the time, and even in my father’s speeches he says, “People talk about love, about breaking down different barriers and creating unity.” But how are we going to go about that in a community such as ours? We have all different races and religions. People come with all different cultural or religious baggage, or emotional baggage. Here we’re trying to live as one family under God. How do we go about that? How do we infuse our environment with this feeling of love?

I often think about how I can inspire my children at the beginning of the day -- and I’m always taking one day at a time, realizing my responsibility as a mother and as a wife, as somebody who grounds the family and drives the family, like what a bass player does for the band. Usually I like to start my morning with a bit of meditation, a bit of silence, and then report to our Heavenly Parent what I would like to do for the day. During those moments, one of the things that I remind myself constantly is that words are incredibly important.

In the Bible, James 3: 6-9 [1], which I shared with you earlier, it talks about the responsibility of the tongue, how with our tongue we bless and we honor God, our Heavenly Parent, but also with our tongue we curse each other. This is something I think about every day because I’m a firm believer that words are vehicles of emotion. Used properly, they can inspire your children, inspire your spouse, and empower them to want to do great things. It can be used to support them in times of difficulty. But I also know that words can become a vehicle of emotion that can be extremely destructive when misused and abused, when used with malicious intent.

We want to create a peaceful world, but my father always says that in order to create a peaceful world, we have to begin with ourselves. When we address our loved ones within the context of the family, it’s probably one of the greatest responsibilities we must think about.

I’ve heard countless times over the last year that I’ve held this post people coming to me for advice and saying, “My spouse is so abusive to me.” There are many forms of abuse -- physical, emotional, spiritual. When I hear different people’s experiences and opinions on the matter, it always comes down to the same thing. They say that words are like knives when misused. Words are like daggers. When you’re constantly being stabbed every day with these words that feel like a knife wounding your heart, it’s difficult to love and difficult to be inspired.

But I’ve also met couples who have told me, “My difficulty is that I’m not attracted to my spouse; I don’t find my spouse exciting.” When I ask them to tell me something wonderful about their spouse, they always tell me, “Even though I have my own battles to overcome, one of the things I truly appreciate about my spouse is that he or she always tries to say something meaningful or thoughtful. Like a simple thank you or a simple remark like, ‘You look wonderful,’ or, 'You did that really well.'" Those simple, kind words become a vehicle of emotion in which the other person feels totally understood, embraced, welcomed in the home. With this feeling of being comforted and embraced, then he or she can go on toward the next day, overcoming their struggles of the day.

I’ve always wondered, since I’m still a home-schooling mother, what would be the best way to inspire my teenage kids to strive to be better students, to invest themselves in their studies? My mind turns to the Russian method of teaching. I have two children who are quite good -- actually, they’re fantastic -- in classical piano. I found a Russian music teacher who specializes in musical prodigies. She doesn’t take just anybody. If she decides to take you, it means she knows your kids have something special. Since the music educational system in communist Russia was organized by the government, these teachers are very adept at picking out talent because they’ve had to do it year after year with thousands and thousands of students. There are particular things that they look for to evaluate whether someone is going to be a talented musician or not.

When I took my kids for their interview with this Russian teacher, she asked them a simple question: “What keys do you like on the piano?” She played them phrases in a couple of minor keys and in a couple of major keys and asked, “Which ones do you like?” My second son, Rexton, said, “Well, I like the minor key.” My daughter in her interview also said, “I like the minor key.” The teacher asked them each, “Why do you like the minor key?” They said, “Because it’s sad. It makes you want to cry.” Then the teacher asked them each to play a scale, from C to C and back. And she watched very carefully how nimble their fingers were. That was it.

I thought, okay, here she is, a very prestigious teacher -- it’s very difficult to get an interview with this woman -- who specializes in children. All she wanted to know was whether they liked the minor or the major key, and then she wanted to see their fingers on the piano. After they went out, she turned to me and said, “Tatiana, I want your kids.”

At first I was very happy that she wanted to take my kids. I asked her, “Why do you want to take my kids?” I just had to ask, “How do you know that they’re talented?” She said, “I know.” The Russians have a manner, like, “How dare you ask me this question? I know!”

I said, “I’m sorry but I’m just curious. How do you know?” She said, “Why do you ask?!” I replied, “If I’m going to commit to bringing my kids to lessons with you, I just want to know. I need to know that I’m going to support them in an area that they’re talented in.” She said, they’re very talented. So I said, “Okay, how do you distinguish my children from the other children who come to interview with you?” She said, “Your kids love sad music. Musicians, if they don’t know how to feel sadness, they cannot feel happiness. If they don’t understand what it sounds like, the notes that play suffering, they will not understand what notes sound like when they inspire. Your kids have incredible, nimble fingers. That’s all I need.”

Then she put them into the Russian method program. It was basically six months of scales and different arpeggios, four-octave scales. In the beginning it was very difficult. But they kept on consistently applying all their effort and all their dedication into their art. Before we knew it, their fingers were literally flying on the piano, and it looked almost effortless.

My husband, having played 10 years of classical piano, was transfixed every time he came home and saw them practice their scales. He asked them, “How do you play so freely?” The Russian teacher said, “The faster you play, the more relaxed you need to be. The problem with a lot of musicians is that you want speed, you want more control. But when you know that you have the fundamentals, then the more speed you want, the more you have to relax your muscles and let your brain take over.”

My husband said, “How come my piano teacher never taught me that?” He could never get up to the four-octave scale because he wanted to emphasize each note so much that in emphasizing each note he forgot the whole picture. Even in a simple exercise like doing your scales every morning, details are extremely important, but keeping a sense of the big picture is important as well. The faster we want to go, instead of thinking the more controlling we have to be, the more relaxed our muscles need to be. I feel that as a movement we need to relax a little bit. Our muscles need to be a little bit more flexible, and that is how we’re going to get more speed: and incredibly, interestingly, more precision.

The reason why I’m telling you this story about the piano teacher is because she was very masterful with her encouragement and her discipline. She knew my kids were very talented; within a year, they received an invitation to perform at the Gnessin School in Moscow, which is a school for child prodigies. But whenever they were in a class with her, she would be very strict, very formal, and very organized in terms of her compliments. After they played their pieces, she told them, “Yes, that was good. Now work on this.” And if the kids played extremely well, she said, “Yes, that was very good. Now do this. It was always a compliment, but not flamboyant, elaborate, or totally effusive with emotion. She was very stoic, almost, and very serious. But her words -- it was good, it’s very good -- -- could be understood as, “You’ve finished Level One. Now let’s go on to Level Two.” It was not like, “You are so awesome, fantastic,” that the child is glowing with excitement and floating off the ground with feet no longer touching the ground, becoming maybe arrogant. The Russian teacher was very grounded in that she complimented the child each time along the way, but she was very serious, and each compliment meant an invitation to go a step further.

In some instances when she was watching the kids, she was really happy. I noticed that she would say, “Yes, that’s good,” and she would make comments, but her jaw would start to flicker up and down. She was literally biting her jaw. In the beginning I looked at her surreptitiously so she wasn’t aware that I was looking at her, but as time went on I realized that when she started biting her jaw with her lips closed, it was because she was trying to suppress a smile. When the kids got to be really, really good and she had other teachers come to watch their practice sessions, I would see a lot of jaw movement. Sometimes the other teachers would be looking at my kids in amazement, like they couldn’t believe what they saw. But there she was, sitting in her chair, “Very good, yes, do the next one. Very good,” but she’d be chomping on her jaws like this.

Then I realized she would do this when my children would start playing really well. At first I was thinking, “Why is she doing that? Maybe she’s suffering from an involuntary movement of the jaw or something, or maybe it’s a bad habit.” But later I found out that the reason she did this every time the kids played really well is because she didn’t want the kids to see her smiling. She didn’t want the kids to see that she was so happy. It was her way of making everything calm, serious, focused. When the lesson finished she would try to give them hugs, and she would smile before she sent them off. I watched this with a great deal of interest.

Here we are, in this liberal age when children literally run over their parents and pretty much have their way in the house. Many times parents have lost their position as parents in the home. But the Russian education tradition is that the vertical tradition of what the teacher is, or what the parent is, is extremely clear. When you are in the classroom, when you are working, it’s extremely clear who the teacher is and who the student is. But when you leave the classroom, then the teacher may become loving and start to laugh and enjoy.

In really loving and supporting our children, we have to be there for them constantly, and be there with our love. But I realized the importance of our language in the classroom or in the home. Maybe the parents should think about how it might not be a good idea to be called by their first names. Maybe there is wisdom in maintaining this vertical tradition of a parent being a parent, so it’s always Mom and Dad in the home and elsewhere.

The wonderful thing about our community is that not only do we have Eastern notions of duty, honor, obedience and respect, but we have the Western component here that stresses communication, sharing, and cooperation. When we put these things together in a household, we get a wonderful mix, or what I call the heavenly tradition ingredients that really can make a house a wonderful home for the kids. That is, the parents, from the day the children are born until the day they are delivered back to their Heavenly Parent, are and always be the parents.

There is no need to relinquish our position as disciplinarian or almost a martinet of the scheduling that needs to take place to make the house run efficiently. In fact, children seem to thrive in a structured environment far better than in an environment with no structure at all.

If we can teach our children the importance of honoring their parents, maintaining the parents’ position and yet at the same time teaching them to not just talk but also to listen to their parents and to work together really as a team, then there’s hope of creating a wonderful environment for every member of the family.

I’m from a family of 14 brothers and sisters: seven brothers and seven sisters. My husband always says, “You guys all are blessed and cursed with the Moon blood in that you tend to be extremely talented in different fields and you tend to follow your passions. But at the same time you’re cursed because you are so stubborn and so obsessive, just like your father.”

Anybody who knows my father knows that he has a 24-7 obsession with God, our Heavenly Parent. That’s not necessarily an easy recipe for somebody like my mother to deal with. Noah’s wife had to go through over a hundred years of her husband building an ark for God. He was literally obsessed about building the ark. My father is obsessed about seeing world peace realized in his lifetime. So being his wife has not always been easy.

I know that many times because my father had to do so many different things, he has not always been there for my mother. But the most incredible thing about my mother is that, despite all her difficulties and despite the boxes and boxes of Kleenex tissues she has used over the years, she has maintained an image and persona of elegance and dignity. She is my model for what I would like to be in terms of my goals as a wise mother. I would like to be like her. If I could be even a little bit like her, I would be extremely satisfied.

My mother understood the power of the word. She was raised without a father in her life. Her mother was very busy trying to raise her up, and I’m sure she did her best. But my mother would tell me, “Sometimes I really wish I could have heard my father tell me, ‘You’re God’s daughter. There’s nothing you cannot do, and you will be as great as you believe yourself to be.’”

My mother said this to me many years ago. She may not have had a father to say these lovely words to her, but she certainly made sure that she said these words to all her children, and in particular to all her daughters. So she and her words made me feel that there is nothing I cannot do, that my sex doesn’t limit me in any way from doing God’s work. In fact, she said, “The best is yet to come. There’s going to be a time when you and your sisters are going to do many, many great things, not just for the country of Korea. (She always made a point of saying that.) You have to be the representative of Korea and of God and True Parents to the world. You need to remember that not only are you a daughter of Korea, not only a daughter of Rev. and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon, but you are a daughter of God, our Heavenly Parent, and that you must never forget that.”

So her words were incredibly empowering. My family was brought over here in the winter of 1973 and thrown into unfamiliar schools, not speaking a word of English. Soon thereafter our church went through the backlash from being a successful movement, meaning there was a great deal of persecution. We children were like little reeds in the wind. That’s what we felt like, constantly blown this way and that by all these forces that did not wish the best for us because we were Moonies. We belonged to a strange cult. We came from a strange country. There was a great deal of persecution that my family had to endure.

At different moments of my life, when I was confronted with “Moonie, Moonie, Moonie!” droning in my ear, I had to find a way to overcome my difficulty with that word. Again, it was the power of a word itself. The word moonie in Korean means “a beautiful design.” So every time somebody called me a Moonie, I would say, “Thank you. It’s not every day that you get to be called beautiful 20 or 30 times a day. What a blessing it is to be called a Moonie, that I’m a beautiful design” in the world, or in my school, or in my classroom, or wherever I happened to be at that time.

I remember leaving my classmates aghast: “I knew she was a little different, but boy, maybe she doesn’t really fully understand English. Every time we try to make fun of her by calling her Moonie, she says, thank you.” I understood that word, and even though they projected it to me in a negative way, because I interpreted the word to mean something beautiful in my native tongue, it became a source of great inspiration. So the more people tried to put me down, the more strength I got from that, and the more empowered I became in who I needed to be.

When I was growing up, not only did we have difficulties outside the home because I belonged to this very interesting religion, but growing up with 14 siblings was not a walk in the park. Especially when you have a lot of brothers, there is a lot of testosterone trying out manhood that’s fed by the barbells clanking each and every day. Sometimes brothers can be so cruel.

One of the closest relationships I have in my family is with my older brother Hyo Jin oppa, who passed away. He was instrumental in understanding my father’s vision for the Manhattan Center. He and I had an interesting and unique relationship. He’s my older brother, a couple of years older, and we always grew up together. My first living memory of him is of him hosing me down. In this little courtyard that we grew up in in Korea, we had a hose for the garden, and every time he saw me, it didn’t matter if I was getting ready for school with my uniform on, he would start spraying me with the hose. I don’t know many times I would just cry because I didn’t know what to do. He was such a difficult older brother.

But then I realized that little boys often have difficulty expressing love to anyone. Many times it’s expressed in the form of cruelty. When I arrived in America, I went into third grade. Looking at yearbooks from that time now, I notice a beautiful German boy. I didn’t speak a word of English. Back then miniskirts were in vogue, and he used to follow me around, always pulling up my skirt, sometimes with tape to stick it to my back. He would make me cry all the time at school. I would try to avoid this boy whenever I saw him.

In Korea we don’t have Valentine’s Day, but when my first February in America came around, this boy who just tortured me mercilessly, following me down the hallways, putting up my skirt all the time and making me cry, gave me a big box of chocolate and a huge bouquet of flowers. I was barely learning how to speak English. I just looked at him, “What are you doing?” I thought maybe the chocolates were poisoned, and maybe the flowers had some fragrance that would make me start to cry. I couldn’t believe that this was a heartistic gift. When I went home I opened the box and saw a handwritten note, “I love you! XOXO In Jin.” That was when I realized that little boys show that they care for you in very strange ways.

In time I realized that this older brother, who was always hosing me down and giving me a difficult time, was doing that because he really, really loved me. My brother was not well known for writing letters. In fact, he only wrote cards to our True Parents on special occasions, but he rarely expressed his emotions by putting pen to paper. But I realized over the years that he consistently wrote to me, telling me how much I meant to him. Now those precious letters are my life’s treasures.

Of course, as we grew up, then he would verbally tell me how much I meant to him, how much he loved me. But in those beginnings, when we were in elementary school, there was a great deal of difficulty. My older brother would make fun of me, saying, “You’re the only snake in the family,” meaning, I’m the only one born in the year of the snake in Chinese astrology. Imagine being the only snake in the family, growing up in a religious movement like ours where the serpent is not highly esteemed.

So many times he would reduce me to tears because he would say, “You’re a s-s-s-s-snake. S-s-s-s-s-s!” I just didn’t know what to do. One day I was crying so much that I refused to come out when my parents were looking for me. Again I felt the power of the words because my mother called me into the room and said, “What’s wrong?” I said, “My brother called me a snake again and I don’t like it and it’s painful. It makes me feel I’m the worst thing because I’m the something that caused the Fall and caused all of us to suffer, so I must be really horrible.”

I remember my mother grabbing my arm, pulling me to her. She said these beautiful words that liberated me for the rest of my life. She said, In Jin, first of all, your brother loves you. And you know what? Being born in the snake year is a very lucky thing. Your brothers might make fun of you because snakes have a forked tongue. (That’s what they always said, “Your tongue is split in two, so you’re a s-s-s-s-snake. You’re just something not worth living.”) But a, forked tongue can mean different things. You’re very good in the languages that you’re learning and speaking. Because it’s forked means you speak more than one language.”

For me, the light bulb went on. Not only did the forked tongue become something positive, but she emphasized the talent that I had and made me feel so liberated, so empowered, and so embraced and understood. To this day, when we get together as a family and just as a joke “you’re a s-s-s-snake” would come up, I remember what my mother said. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and so loved.

We as human beings have this really great gift that God has given us. Not everything that God created has the ability to speak and to enjoy words, which I call vehicles of emotion. Just as words can be a vehicle to inspire and to give life, words as a vehicle can be used to destroy and to crush somebody’s soul forever. We have an incredible opportunity to decide how we want to use our words, every day -- whether we are going to use our words to uplift or to suppress, whether we are going to use our words to inspire or abuse, whether we’re going to use our words to empower and love and not to destroy and to kill.

Think, maybe when you start out each day, “How am I going to drive today?” Not your car, but how are you going to drive today, meaning utilizing your words. How will you drive your family? Will you drive your family with the emotion that will destroy and be abusive, or will you drive and ground your family with the power to empower, to inspire, and to love? I’m hoping that you will make the same decision that I make each and every day, and that is that I want my words to empower, to really exercise this power of love that my father is talking about, so that instead of talking in haste (which might be the cause of all the world’s ills, as that poem indicated earlier), maybe we can take a step back and breathe a little and realize that, yes, it’s important to express ourselves, but in order to really love each other as a community and as a family, it might be a good idea to really practice love.

For me, love means a couple of things. When you truly love somebody, you’re listening to that person. You’re letting that person know that he or she is being heard and understood. And when you truly love somebody, you are open with that person, willing to decide to open up your heart. When you truly, truly love someone, you’re willing to be vulnerable, absolutely vulnerable. You’re willing to have the courage to love. You’re willing to even risk rejection, but you’re willing to love just because. When you truly love somebody, you always have, as your foundation, the eternal love of God, which is absolute, unchanging, unique, and eternal. What more could we want out of life than to simply and elegantly practice what love is all about?

On this beautiful Sunday, thank you for being with me here at the Manhattan Center. I encourage all of you, together with me, to walk this road of building a world of peace by starting with ourselves and our families. I believe that the best way to create a wonderful environment where we can truly work out the process of building ideal families starts with the environment that we create with our words. Words are incredibly powerful, so use them wisely and use them lovingly. And use them to truly empower and encourage each other.

I hope that all of you can take this day to appreciate that every Sunday here at Lovin’ Life Ministry is an invitation to celebrate our lives. And we concentrate on the word celebrate because it really is a celebration because we are so grateful that we have been given this opportunity to live out our lives in the company of God, our Heavenly Parent, and True Parents.

So God bless you, and have a wonderful, wonderful week. I hope you can go forward truly loving your brothers and sisters. Thank you.

Notes:

1. James Chapter 3:6-9

6: And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is an unrighteous world among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the cycle of nature, and set on fire by hell.
7: For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by humankind,
8: but no human being can tame the tongue -- a restless evil, full of deadly poison.
9: With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who are made in the likeness of God.  

A House Divided Can't Stand

In Jin Moon
August 2, 2009
Lovin' Life Ministry
Manhattan Center, New York City

How is everybody this Sunday morning? I’m delighted to see all your beautiful faces here again. I hope you all had a wonderful week as well since the last time I saw you.

First of all, I want to thank you for the many e-mails that I received after last Sunday’s sermon, when I stood here and said, “You know, I had a really tough week.” I talked about the lovely e-mail that I received from a friend that left me with a warm and fuzzy feeling. Then all throughout this week I received many, many e-mails from many brothers and sisters, encouraging me and leaving me with a warm and fuzzy feeling all week long. I felt so loved and so comforted.

One sister actually dropped off homemade chicken soup at my office. She said, “Yes, your friend was not Jewish nor your mother, and I’m certainly not your mother, but I thought you could make good use of this chicken soup made from my heart.” She is the wife of someone who was imprisoned in the Middle East for believing in the words of my parents. He was tortured for years.

A couple of weeks ago I had the honor of meeting this couple here in the States. It was such a heart-warming time for me to see this brother come back and reunite with his loving wife. So for that sister to take the time to make this wonderful chicken noodle soup was not only soothing to the soul, but it reminded me once again what an incredible community we have in each other.

I think maybe God, our Heavenly Parent, was watching me this week and maybe even laughing to him or herself: “Maybe this child is having too much of the warm and fuzzies and friendlies.” He knew the topic I wanted to expound upon this morning, to really share and discuss with you, is Matthew 12:25, that a house divided cannot stand.

God has a wonderful way of showing me that he is watching me, taking care of me. Because he knew I was preparing for this sermon in particular, he was having a great deal of fun with me last night. My husband and I have been married for over 25 years; it’s amazing to me that we’ve lasted this long. When we first got married, one of the most difficult things for me to overcome was his snoring problem. Not only did we not get along -- we’re almost like from two opposite extremes of human character -- but when I went to bed hoping to get some rest, it was extremely difficult to get a good night’s sleep. It still is.

I’ve had to be very creative in coming up with different ways to Band-Aid my situation. Last night was no exception. In fact, last night was quite severe. I was watching the time, and for me it’s a lucky evening when I can get to bed before 1:00 or 2:00 am. That’s what I call a lucky day. But it was getting to be around 1:00 in the morning, and I was looking at the clock thinking, okay, the thing about my husband, the minute his head touches the pillow, the snoring starts.

I’m thinking, I have to somehow fall asleep before that. So it’s always a race for me to see if I can fall asleep before he starts snoring. Last night I was not successful. He hit the ground running with the first snort.

Over the years we’ve developed different ways to remedy the situation. I tried to tune out the sound and focus on sleep, but it just was not working. The usual thing I do is tap him on the side and say, “Honey, can you sleep on your side?” I found out -- for those ladies who are having the same problem -- that if you ask your husband to sleep on his side, somehow changing the way his head rests on the pillow can sometimes lessen the snoring. So I thought, “Okay, let’s try that method.”

So I turned him onto his side. The first several seconds seemed promising, but then it started up again, with great ferocity. I thought, okay, I’ll give him 30 more minutes and then try to have him turn the other way. But it just wasn’t working. So I remembered that in our bed stand we have a thing that you put on the nose like a Band-Aid. It’s supposed to expand the nostrils so you don’t snore as much. I thought I’d try that. I quietly tried to get his face in position so I can put this on his nose.

Of course, now when I think about it, it’s quite comical. It looks like something out of “Comedy Store,” but, when you are really desperate for sleep, it’s really serious. Here I was, quietly taking the little strip out of its wrapper and trying to put it on his nose. But it wouldn’t stick! Usually he puts it on his nose before he goes to bed, but now that he had had something like an hour’s worth of sleep, it wasn’t sticking.

So I had to get a towel to try to wipe his nose before I tried to put on another strip, and then my husband was moving around but still sleeping through the whole thing. He was trying to slap me off, but I persevered. With the second strip I was successful, and it stuck. So I thought, let’s try again. But again it did not work. We were approaching almost 4:00 o’clock, then 5:00 o’clock, and I was really getting desperate because Sundays tend to be my long day: I want to be alert and ready and able to greet the congregation in the best way I possibly can.

I was feeling so desperate that I felt my anger rising. I watched this man sleeping. He seemed so peaceful; his hands were outstretched like this, and his legs like that, and he was enjoying this glorious sleep. Here I was, getting more and more angry. There he was, not only enjoying his sleep but sucking in all the air in the bedroom. Would he leave any air for me to breathe, let alone for me to sleep in and revel in? I was really struggling.

But then I remembered something in the back of my mind and heard a little voice, my mother’s voice, saying to me, “In Jin, let this one pass.” In the past, when I heard the voice, I let things pass. But last night I responded, “But Mom, I can’t let this one pass because I have to give a sermon tomorrow morning.” But I heard her voice again, “In Jin, let this one pass.” Usually when she said these things to me when I was growing up and she knew I was upset about something, she would always end those words with a big smile. Even though I’m 40-something, I’m still a child when it comes to my mother. I still hear her voice as loving, comforting, and something reassuring. She is truly the voice of my conscience.

So when the voice of my conscience was telling me, “Let this one pass,” I saw my mother’s face and the way she ended her words. It was with a most magnanimous, most brilliant, most comforting smile. Then I realized that maybe I should just have a sense of humor. If God is having fun with me because he knows what I would like to talk about the next day, maybe I should just laugh it off, laugh along at how comical the situation is and how desperately comical I must look because I’m so frustrated and ready to have another volcanic eruption. God must have been laughing at me the whole time.

I said to myself, let’s just laugh about it. So I smiled. Then I started thinking, “Okay, maybe I won’t get to experience that glorious sleep that my husband is so enjoying, but at least he will have a great day tomorrow. Maybe he can be well rested for me. If I’m tired, maybe toward the end of the day he will do the dishes without reminding me that he’s done this. Or even better yet, he will take out the vacuum cleaner -- hint, hint -- and vacuum the room before we sleep. That would be glorious to me.”

Then I started laughing. Because I was laughing, letting this one pass, and not taking things so seriously, I realized that if I were to see myself on TV, most likely a reality show, I would probably be in stitches by now, looking at my husband and me, trying to deal with each other: two different people trying to figure out how to live together, how to sleep together. Then it wasn’t so bad. I realized that once I calmed things down, then I could just relax and fall asleep. Of course, before I knew it, it was time to get back up. But that 30 minutes of rest was glorious, and I have never experienced such phenomenal pleasure in having 30 minutes of rest ever before. This is a first for me.

Here I am, looking at my husband, my partner in life, my partner with whom I have to walk the road of eternity. This is God’s way of reminding me that a house divided cannot stand. When I look at myself as somebody wanting to build an ideal family of my own -- and I’m sure all of you in the audience are going through the same thing; we want to build an ideal family of our own -- I think this is God’s way of telling me that I have to be united with my husband so that we can stand together as a house undivided, not divided.

This is a reminder for every husband and wife in the audience that, if we are on the road to build an ideal family, we must be a family undivided. We have to be a family that’s truly united, a husband and wife who truly love each other and truly do their best to overcome any differences in character, cultural background, or in the baggage that we bring to our relationship. In working it out and dealing with all these problems, we can truly create an inviting environment for the future generation, our children.

This was a wonderful reminder, as a wife, to be patient. It was a wonderful reminder for me to genuinely try to love, however difficult the situation might be, and to try to have a sense of humor, maybe not taking things so seriously. If the other person seems to be having a better day than we are, then we can find a way of overcoming the difficulty of the situation and truly be happy for that person. In the end of our days, the only thing we’re left with is not what we make or what we hoard throughout our lifetime; it’s the wonderful memories that we can share between husband and wife that make us feel like we’re a part of history. It’s history in the making; it’s the memories that have brought us along together, that we’ve created together, that truly become the treasure for a couple’s life. It’s something that only the couple shares.

If we can learn to be grateful in our relationship and treat each other in the best way that we possibly can, then we’re well on our way to building an ideal family. But if we can’t even work on our relationship as a couple, there’s just no way that we’re going to be on our way to building an ideal family because the children learn more through observation than through being told what they should be. They learn more by looking, they learn more through osmosis; they need to see their parents truly loving each other and overcoming difficult situations with a sense of humor and gratitude in tough situations. God is giving us opportunities to go really deep and come out at the other end as mature human beings. These are the lessons that children naturally learn, even before they start their school years.

This might be a good reminder for wives to really try to love husbands in such a way that we can be empowering, nurturing, and supportive. I know, women in the audience, that we have the difficult task of dealing with the perfunctory responsibilities of running a home, which are routine things like cleaning and cooking, and many times we feel we’re not appreciated. When a husband comes screeching in from a long day at work, throwing his shoes about, maybe the wife might be tempted to yell back, “What are you doing? Do you not have any respect?”

I think every woman needs to be mindful that words are incredibly powerful vehicles of emotion. Children are listening all the time. They are like tape recorders permanently turned on since the day they were born. They’re listening to every word that their mother says to their father, that their father says to the mother. If children grow up in a home where the mother is verbally abusive to the father or the father is verbally abusive to the mother, they begin to think that parents being verbally abusive is okay or that’s how couples should be. Or, worse yet, if a husband and a wife have no relationship whatsoever and the only thing a child experiences is the icy coldness of a home where there’s no heart, no laughter, no sense of sharing, then the child will desperately seek warmth and love. If the child is not getting it from the home, you can pretty much rest assured that the child will get it elsewhere.

This is a reminder -- God’s way of telling us that even before we can think about the blessing and going forth as an ideal couple, we need to work on ourselves. Considering a house divided, when you look at someone, you’re talking about mind and body unity; if these two things are constantly at war with each other, someone cannot be a whole person who is spiritually, emotionally, and physically sound. Likewise, a couple who is constantly fighting, who is not united in a common purpose as to why they’ve received the blessing and responsibility to take their family to the next level and to invite children into their lives, then they’re not going to be able to create the kind of environment that will be conducive to raising great kids.

When Father and Mother say that the family is the true textbook for building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, they are absolutely right. The family is the place where you have no room for selfish individualism. There is really no room for a husband to be selfish; there is no room for a wife to be selfish. If you are the father or mother of a great bunch of children, you have to think about them and about your spouse.

Many couples came up to me over the course of the last year that I’ve held this post, seeking advice. Sometimes the men say, “My life is not exciting. In fact, she’s boring. Before the movement I lived a hippie-yippie lifestyle. I had all the excitement that I wanted, and here I am, living a sacrificial life, wanting to build a wonderful family, but my wife just doesn’t turn me on.”

This is what I say to people like this: “It takes two people to turn each other on. If you’ve already decided that that woman’s not going to turn you on when you’ve had children and you’ve built a family with that person, then you’ve already basically taken yourself off the team. If you are thinking you want a woman that’s like a Playboy model, to really excite you in the bedroom, your wife might not fit that image. But what about not looking at just the physical but the spiritual aspect of the woman? Maybe if you open up your spiritual eyes, you’re going to realize that your wife is Bridgette Bardot times ten. Maybe if you make her feel like she is the most glorious creature, the most beautiful woman on earth, she might be inspired to please you in whatever way you want in the bedroom. Maybe you haven’t done your responsibility of inspiring your wife to want to be that passionate, exciting woman in the bedroom.”

I have told people, “Instead of complaining about how your wife falls short, maybe you can spend a little more time thinking about how to get what you want out of life. It’s really not that difficult. Every married couple knows that the more love you want to receive in the bedroom, the more you need to give because the more turned on you are, the more turned on your spouse is going to be. Then you will have a wild and crazy circuitry of love and passion going on. Then you will wonder what you were complaining about. In many instances it really starts with us.”

When my father is expounding on the great ill of society now as individualism, he does not mean individualism as in individuality of each person. My father says that this is a wonderful thing. It’s actually a divine gift to every one of us to be a special and unique someone. But what my father means by selfish individualism is a person who decides to live not for God, not for our Heavenly Parent, not for his or her brothers and sisters, but simply for him or herself. Basically such a person replaces God with I, me, myself. I think a lot of people all around the world, and not just the young people but the older generation as well, are suffering from this selfish individualism.

English is a phenomenally interesting language for me. When I look at the word selfish, for me it sounds like cell. What does sel mean in French? It means salt. And fish -- you know what a fish is. And it’s interesting that Christians all throughout the centuries have been symbolized by the figure of a fish. In this word selfish you have what seems to be salted fish.

In Korean, when you call somebody a salted fish, it’s a great insult. It’s basically saying you’re a horrible person and not even human. When a person is selfish, you’re like a salted fish. First of all, salted fish smells really bad. It’s interesting that when we meet someone in the course of our lives, in school or in social settings, we may say to ourselves, that person is fishy; something’s wrong with that person. When you say that somebody is fishy, or doesn’t smell right, it means that something is off, right?

When you’re not connected to God, or when you have cast God off to the side and replaced him with you, yourself, then you become like a smelly person; you become somebody who does not invite the divine fragrance to emit from the glorious being that is the true you to imbue this world with the beautiful perfume of God’s love. You become simply smelly, offensive, and a source of discomfort and distaste.

Another aspect of a salted fish is that it is totally dried up. Human beings are two thirds water. We’re like walking saline solutions, like seawater. And without water, we become like salted fish -- dried up. Without the water of life that comes from God, his words, and his teachings, and without us swimming in it and being gloriously grateful for this opportunity to live and enjoy our lives, we become dried up. In different segments of society, people seem to have a concept that a religious life cannot be a fulfilling life; it must only be sacrificial, as if God commanded his children to suffer and be miserable for the rest of their lives: “Live a life of poverty. Live a life of suffering. That’s what I want for you because I wanted to realize true love.”

This does not go in line with God’s purpose of creation. God’s purpose of creation is to experience love, to enjoy true love. No matter how great he is as an ultimate subject, he cannot do it alone. He needs an ultimate object, and that’s why he created the universe and his children.

Contrary to a lot of religious thinking, namely that the only way we can be fulfilled in our religious life is to live a life of denial, God, our Heavenly Parent through our True Parents, is saying, “No, we have to become ideal people, ideal parents, ideal families”. God wants all of us to experience the glorious power of true love. God wants all of us to be successful in his love but not in the satanic sense of successful, of only thinking about money, power, and the pursuit of wealth.

So for many religious people, money, power, and knowledge are things that they had to throw aside to the curb. One had to live a life of denial because these are forms of temptation that had to be overcome to be a true son or daughter of God. I think a lot of people, even different segments of our own community, feel like maybe the Unification Church is too prosperous. We’ve been blessed with so much money; maybe this is not God’s way. Maybe we need to return to a lifestyle of abject poverty like Mother Theresa or Jesus Christ.

But anybody who knows the Bible and understands the Principle realizes that Jesus Christ had to take a particular course because he did not have a John the Baptist to declare to the Israelites that Jesus was the Son of God. What resulted was the road that he had to take to build a foundation on his own in the hope of having a wonderful wife and building an ideal family. But because he was crucified, he never had that opportunity. So the 33 short years of his life, a life that, ideally, he should not have lived, became the model of Christian piety.

Many people, even in our own community, are confused, saying, “Why is Father so blessed, has so much, and is so rich in all these things? It’s totally contrary to Jesus Christ.” But Jesus Christ was born to be the King of Kings. He was born to be heralded as the Son of God, and his wife was to have been heralded as the daughter of God and the wife of God’s son, Jesus Christ.

So, brothers and sisters, where we are right now is that we are continuing the saga of what Christian and religious piety should look like. On the basis of Jesus’ life and his model, many Christian men and women have lived single lives for the sake of faith, for the sake of piety, for the sake of living for the sake of others. But you know what? Anyone who has children, anyone who has lived with a spouse, knows that probably the most difficult thing in life is to raise a family. I don’t know how many times I’ve thought, “How glorious and delicious would it be if I could just be alone! Maybe we should turn back to Christian piety, to our understanding of how Jesus Christ was.”

But the thing is, in order to have extreme satisfaction and extreme fulfillment we have to restore the Human Fall of man. What Jesus came to do was restore the Fall, but his life was cut short after only 33 years. When True Parents came and said, “We have to fulfill Jesus’ mission,” my parents, Dr. and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon, were continuing the saga of what a faithful and a pious life should look like. Truly the movie that is playing out is our True Parents, a man and a woman.

For me, that is the most glorious thing about this community and movement. We’ve had many examples of great male leadership, and we’ve had stories of many great pious women, but we’ve never had them together in this wonderful thing called the True Parents. So the concept of what a religious, pious life should be or of what the proper role of women should be has yet to be written.

I must say that I’m here because of all of you sisters’ suffering, persistence, and dedication to God and True Parents. I’m thinking that if I can do my job, rather, if my sisters and I can do our jobs, then we are paving the way for the next generation of great women leaders to come. This time around, unlike the fathers, the brothers, the uncles and the men of religion who have for centuries abused and mistreated women as second-class citizens, we need to do it right, sisters. Not by condemning our brothers and fathers for not understanding the proper role of women but by our example of what a true, pious, successful and excellent woman can be, we can raise our brothers and our fathers to be even greater men.

I encourage young people to be the kind of people who serve the world with integrity, service, and excellence. We are not only working on the internal, our spiritual aspect. What our Heavenly Parent and our True Parents are asking is for our internal needs to fit with our external: We need to be beautiful spiritually, but we also need to be beautiful men and women in how we behave in our daily life.

Instead of thinking that we should live alone in order to find God, here is our Heavenly Parent saying, “Take on a spouse, and take on the opportunity and responsibility of building an ideal home, having glorious children. When you have a child and you hold that child for the first time, you can understand how much I truly love all of you.” Giving birth to a child, you feel you cannot push even once more, and it’s only then when you feel “this is it” that the baby is born. It’s almost like you’re dying to give birth.

My husband called me quite strange because there are epidurals and medications to ease the birth process, but I wanted to experience what my mom and my grandmother experienced when they gave birth. I wanted to experience what my grandmother experienced when she gave birth to my father. They didn’t have medication back then. My husband thought I was quite strange for not wanting any medication. Some people in the hospital thought I was a Jehovah’s Witness or something. But I said, “No, I simply want to experience this.”

When the contractions started, I thought, oh, it’s not so bad. Then it started getting more intense but it was still bearable. Then it really started coming. Of course the first birth takes hours and hours, and I was thinking, “This is what you have to go through to give life to someone? Is this what God, our Heavenly Parent, was experiencing when he created his first son and daughter?” I felt that the pain was so intense that I couldn’t bear it any longer.

But the horrible thing about being born into a public life is everybody in the hospital knew who I was. Next to my bed was a woman screaming at her husband, “You did this to me; it’s all your fault.” She was at it, and I secretly said, “Thank you, God, I can live vicariously through this woman.” But I had to remain silent. It was actually cathartic for me that this woman was voicing what I was feeling exactly. The poor husband was going from room to room to get his wife ice chips, but she didn’t want any of them and she was throwing them at the husband. The nurses had seen this many times and were watching, smiling at each other.

My husband was carefully watching this couple. Just when I thought I was going to die, we heard the cry of the baby and I was like, “Thank God it’s over.” To this day I cannot believe what my husband said to me afterward. He said, “You really must be an alien or something. That wasn’t too bad now, was it?” I looked at him like, what are you saying?! He said, “You didn’t utter a peep. That wasn’t so bad.” I said, “Yobo, you have no idea what we just went through.”

Childbirth is incredibly painful and unbearable. You literally feel like your body is being ripped in two; that’s what it feels like. Young ladies in the audience, if you feel like you’re having it bad every month, just wait until the time comes. Bad will take on a whole new meaning. I felt like I can’t go on any more; I feel extreme emotions of almost anger at my husband for doing this to me -- I had to bear the extra weight for nine months, but he was in perfect shape, and he didn’t even sweat or bother to bring ice chips because I didn’t make any sound.

But when you look into the face of your child, it’s like you turn into a tabula rasa. It’s like someone erased every pain, every horrible thing that you just went through. The only thing you can feel and experience is this incredible love and beauty. For the first time in my life I realized the meaning of the word beauty. I realized that when I say someone is beautiful, it’s what I feel about that person inside. When I say someone is beautiful, I’m not talking about physical beauty. I’m talking about the beauty I feel when I gaze upon that person’s face, and that is what epitomized my experience when I first looked at my eldest son.

This is how much God loves all of us because we are all his children. We are all his sons and daughters. When God is looking at all of us, he is hoping for the day when we can grow in his and her love, we can grow in the appreciation and understanding of who he and she is, and that we can come to a place where we’re mature enough to live a life of gratitude, and to want to give back everything that he and she have given. What has he given us? He has given us love, and he has given us life. So shouldn’t we as his and her children give them back our love and our life?

At Lovin’ Life Ministries, we are here to celebrate each other, but more importantly than that, to truly celebrate God and the opportunity that God gave to us. He is hoping that we can be excellent people who practice living for the sake of others so that we can create unity wherever we go, drawing people with the natural fragrance of attraction because we are simply excellent people. Let’s not think in terms of who’s better or who’s worse, or who’s richer or who’s poorer, or who’s smarter or who’s dumber, or who’s skinnier or wider. Let’s simply revel in the fact that each of us is born with the gift of the divine. It’s within our hands to craft ourselves to be the kind of excellent people that we were meant to be.

As we move on from the first generation on to the second, third, and fourth generations, we need to think about how to make this transition a beautiful one. How do we overcome the problems of the different generations, going from one generation to the next? By sacrificing ourselves and practicing the art of true love, so that instead of the generations fighting each other, it becomes like a 400-meter relay race at the Olympics, with four contestants on a team, each running 100 meters.

Let’s say each member represents a generation. The First Generation takes off, does its lap, and then comes back and hands the baton to the Second Generation, saying, “Go, run on the foundation of what I’ve just completed.” The Second Generation starts running the course, does its lap, and comes back to the third member of the team, saying, “This is the foundation you’re running on, the foundation of the first and second team members, the First and Second Generations. Remember that and run hard and run as best you can.” Then the Third Generation does this and comes back to the Fourth. When the fourth runner finishes the race and finally hits the finish line, is it just the Fourth Generation or the fourth member who is celebrating? It’s all the members of the team who are celebrating.

So imagine for a minute, brothers and sisters, a hypothetical situation in which we are watching a 400-meter relay race at the Olympics and the first member of the team runs fast and hard and gloriously and comes back but refuses to give the baton to the second. So the second member is running along saying, “Give me the baton.” But the first one is saying, “I want to win the race. I’m running.” It would almost be a comedy, would it not?

By the time the second lap is completed, it’s time to pass the baton to the third runner, but the first runner never gave it, so the second one can’t give it to the third one, and the third one starts running, wondering, “When is the baton going to be passed?” This is a poignant lesson that we need to think about. The job of each generation is to give birth to the next. The job of each generation is to become excellent human beings, excellent sons and daughters of God, so that that wonderful tradition is continued and actually taken further by the upcoming generation.

Let’s look at our own community going through this digesting process. With my father well into his 90th year, people are wondering how much longer he will be here with us. There are a lot of questions in the air about who is going to inherit. It’s not a question of who’s going to inherit what. The only thing we are here to inherit is the true love of God, and our True Parents and our Heavenly Parent have already given that to us.

Instead of thinking about who or what or when, what we really need to do is concentrate on ourselves. My father, always ahead of the curve, can see where we are as a community. He’s doing us a favor by making things very clear to all of us. He had the coronation ceremony on January 15, anointing the youngest son of my family to be the spiritual head of our community and our movement. I see tremendous wisdom in picking the youngest son. All of you know of the True Family as almost like a cardboard cutout. We’re all public people that you grew up with. We were pictures in a magazine, in newsletters; we were video clips that you grew up on. But truly the one who knows who the perfect and right person is to be the head of this body called the True Family is God, our Heavenly Parent, and our True Parents.

Just as God has been an anchor in our life of faith, True Parents have been our anchor in our life of faith also. Our anchor and the head is clearly telling us, “Do not be afraid, brothers and sisters. Do not be confused. After me will come a body of true children, but the spiritual head will be the youngest son.” How appropriate this is even within the context of the family. You don’t know the True Family, but we know each other very well. The whole family has given the nickname “Lovey” to the youngest son because he has really been the symbol of love. He is a man who gets it. He understands the importance of women, which for me is incredibly heartwarming. He wants to raise up his sisters and his brothers, and he has led an exemplary life of faith and of obedience. So what better person for the job?

Just as we know Lovey to be, he is not the one saying, “I am the center; you all listen to me.” He is saying, “How can I help you?” Following his example, I see myself as one of his hands. My question to him will be, “How can I help you?” I hope that all the parts of the body called the True Family will have this heart: How can we help you so that we can be an incredible team, like the team that just won the 400-meter relay race, so we can truly be united in our spirit of cooperation and love, not talking about what belongs to who, or who belongs to what, but simply concentrating on the most important thing, which is our Heavenly Parent and our True Parents. That’s the only thing we need to concentrate on.

Brothers and sisters, have no fear. Our True Parents are with us, and they will be with us even more strongly and in a more profound way when they go to the other world, just as in the way God is so real and so there for us each and every day of our lives. I did not at first think about what a great sense of humor God had last night, but it’s a wonderful reminder that God has a sense of humor and it’s good to laugh. It’s good to laugh and to tickle each other, to keep ourselves from being so rigid, and inviting each other to enjoy the warmth of human touch. Next time your child gets mad at you, try tickling him. Or maybe the next time your spouse gets mad at you, try tickling him or her. The end result will be vastly different from how it started.

Brothers and sisters, I am always so grateful that I have such a wonderful community of great sons and daughters of God whom I get to experience every Sunday. To me, that’s the greatest gift. Truly I thank you so much once again for your lovely e-mails and for your words of support. Have a great week, have a glorious day, and God bless you. Thank you. 

13th 7.8 Jeol (Declaration of the Realm of the Cosmic Sabbath for the Parents of Heaven and Earth)

In Jin Moon
July 31, 2009

NHQ20090731 No. 24

To: District Directors and State Leaders
From: Reverend In Jin Moon and Reverend Ki Hoon Kim
Re: 13th 7.8 Jeol (Declaration of the Realm of the Cosmic Sabbath for the Parents of Heaven and Earth)
Date: July 31, 2001

May God’s blessings and True Parents’ love be with all of you.

We will be celebrating the thirteenth 7.8 Jeol on August 1, 2009. Please celebrate this special Holy Day in your local churches at 7:00 AM local time. Please follow the basic program used during the commemorative events for the eight major Holy Days.

Significance of Chil Pal Jeol

1) This Holy Day is a declaration of God’s realm of Sabbath which was established on the foundation of the victory of the 3.6 million blessing, which is a global blessing ceremony of the perfection stage, and of the fact that God ushered in an era in which he can exercise his full authority. From 2007, the commemorative event for Chil Pal Jeol has been held on August 1 (solar calendar).

2) In the Bible it is recorded in chapter 2 of the book of Genesis that God created the heavens and the earth over a period of six days and rested on the seventh day. True Father emerged on the foundation of six-thousand years of the history of restoration through indemnity. He declared Chil Pal Jeol and entered into the realm of Sabbath at that moment when the number 7 (the number of rest) overlapped eight times, signifying the restoration of the number 7 at the 7th second of the 7th minute of the 7th hour in the morning of the 7th day of the 7th lunar month of the year 1997, in which True Father turned 77.

3) The realm of the Sabbath signifies a realm that transcends Satan’s accusations. Consequently, an era ushering in heavenly fortune began where God was able to exercise His full authority as He should have.

4) There are three providential factors that enabled the declaration of Chil Pal Jeol. First, is the establishment of a foundation of victory of having restored the three rights (restoration of the right of the eldest son, right of the parents and kingship) centering on True Parents’ family, on the foundation of having restoring these three rights on the vertical standard that was victoriously established.

Second, during his prayer for this declaration, True Father prayed “I thank You for the grace of allowing this day to be established through the emergence of a time of victory for a transnational blessing ceremony of 3.6 million couples, which can go beyond the satanic world.” Through this prayer, it can be seen that as of July 15 that day, more than 3.6 million couples worldwide were secured for the blessing ceremony.

Third, on April 10, 1992 True Mother founded the Women’s Federation for World Peace, ushering in an era of the liberation of women worldwide. Based on the success of her speeches delivered at the US Congress and UN Headquarters, True Parents successfully held the “Korean Leaders Convention for Practicing True Families for World Peace and Unification” held from July 22 to August 8 in 1997.

Sincerely,

Rev. In Jin Moon
President FFWPU -- USA

Rev. Ki Hoon Kim
Continental Director - North America 

The Providential Meaning of the Original Divine Principle Workshop

In Jin Moon
July 27, 2009

NHQ20090727 No. 23

To: FFWPU District, State and Church Leaders, all Blessed Central Families
Fm: Rev. In Jin Moon and Rev. Ki Hoon Kim
Re: The Providential Meaning of the Original Divine Principle Workshop
Dt: July 27, 2009

The Providential Significance of the Education Session Proclaiming the Completion of the Liberated Realm of the Portion of Responsibility in God’s Providential History

The First Workshop

The first “Education Session Proclaiming the Completion of the Liberated Realm of the Portion of Responsibility in God’s Providential History” was held in two parts. The first part was held in Kona, Hawaii at the Hawaii King Garden and Hawaii Queen Garden on October 10-14, 2008, and the second part was held at the Chung Pyung Heaven and Earth Training Center in Korea on October 19-21, 2008. True Children joined in this workshop, along with 160 Blessed Family representatives. Since the age of the providence of salvation, which was necessitated by the Fall, had passed, True Parents could hold this workshop in their direct dominion, and the certificates for completing the workshop were given in True Parents’ name.

True Parents considered those who attended the first workshop to be in the same position as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. Though the level of each participant’s internal standard of faith varied, and they had different external positions, during the workshop, all participants stood in the same position. Although most attendees may have had fallen nature within them when compared to an absolute standard, True Parents related with them as though they had no fallen nature and taught them content on the portion of responsibility that God had taught Adam and Eve before the Fall. Moreover, True Parents taught content that God did not teach Adam and Eve but would have taught them, had the Fall never taken place.

Also, notably, True Parents made a proclamation asking God, the five great saints and all the spirits in the spirit world to help people on the earth during the first workshop.

The Hawaii King and Queen Gardens and the Pyung Hwa Shin Gyeong The Hawaii King and Queen Gardens symbolize the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve would have lived had they completed their portions of responsibility. The Hawaii King Garden was dedicated to God on March 9, 2007. On March 17, 2007, the “Pacific Rim Era” (which represents the age of God’s sovereignty) and the “Age of the Dawn of God’s Civilization” were proclaimed at the King Garden.

The King Garden is also where the Pyung Hwa Shin Gyeong was passed on to all of humanity from True Parents. Father explained, “the Pyung Hwa Shin Gyeong is “God’s Constitution that allows us to directly attend God.” The Pyung Hwa Shin Gyeong is comprised of all the Peace Messages as well as selected messages from the spirit world.

True Father, as the Returning Lord, proclaimed the core of the truth he has discovered in the form of the Pyung Hwa Shin Gyeong. Through the Pyung Hwa Shin Gyeong, people can understand what their portion of responsibility is, how to fulfill their portion of responsibility, and what the result would be of its fulfillment. Through understanding those points, it becomes possible to “proclaim the completion of the right of liberation of God’s portion of responsibility.”

In the place of Adam, who is a false parent, True Parents proclaimed the Pyung Hwa Shin Gyeong, which teaches about the portion of responsibility human beings had before the Fall. Through proclaiming the Pyung Hwa Shin Gyeong, True Parents completed their portion of responsibility as human beings who did not fall. Since True Parents have completed their portion of responsibility, God, who is using the bodies of True Parents, could proclaim the “completion of the right of liberation of the portion of responsibility.” Father said, “The right of liberation of the portion of responsibility includes the responsibility of God, True Parents and children. It is to be established on the foundation of absolute sex.”

A New Beginning for the Providence of God’s Ideal of Creation The purpose of God’s providence of salvation is to send the Messiah. The purpose of the providence of restoration led by the Messiah is to restore humanity to its original state before the Fall. When both of these providences are complete, then the providence of God’s ideal of creation, which was interrupted due to the Fall, begins anew.

Within the first 40-day period after the helicopter incident on July 19, 2008, all those who were on the helicopter were discharged from the hospital. On that foundation, True Parents proclaimed July 19 to be the “Day of the Perfection of Rebirth,” August 7 the “Day of the Perfection of Resurrection,” and August 27 the “Day of the Perfection of Substance.” On the last day of the second 40-day period after the helicopter incident, October 7, True Parents came to Hawaii and checked the workshop preparations and set spiritual conditions in preparation for the workshop. From a providential viewpoint, the Hawaii workshop signified the end of the providence of salvation, in which the focus was to save humanity, and the new beginning of the providence of God’s ideal of creation.

Who is qualified to teach this content?

The only people who are truly qualified to teach the content of this workshop are the True Parents. God taught Adam and Eve before the Fall from the position of the True Parent, True Teacher and True King. Had Adam and Eve completed their portion of responsibility, in principle, they should have then established an ideal family and educated their children themselves. True Parents, who stand in the position of Adam and Eve having completed their portion of responsibility, are the only ones qualified to teach the content of the workshop. True Parents, who were in such a position of being the only qualified lecturers, educated the participants as if they were children who had not fallen.

Although True Parents were the only qualified lecturers, they established Rev. Jeong Eog Yu as their representative to give lectures when they could not directly give the lectures. To prepare him, True Parents trained Reverend Yu at length and gave him experiences of how the Garden of Eden would have been, were it not for the Fall. True Parents recognized all the lectures from Reverend Yu during the workshop period as True Parents’ own words.

True Parents have now given the blessing of allowing this workshop to take place in each continent. America has received the special grace of having this workshop take place under the direction of In Jin Nim and the continental director.

All Blessed Families should attend this workshop True Parents originally intended the second part of the first workshop to be a tour of Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and Hoover Dam. Each of these locations has significant providential meaning. Though this could not happen due to logistical difficulties, this workshop, which previously was held in Hawaii and Korea, will be held in Las Vegas, which is considered part of the Pacific Rim providence.

Although most of the workshops in the Unification Movement until now have been for the sake of fallen human beings, the Original Divine Principle workshop is for human beings before the Fall. This workshop, which has brought about a great turning point in the history of God’s providence, is a special direction from True Parents, and it is a workshop that all Blessed Families should attend.

As “false people,” we do not have the qualifications to attend this workshop. True Parents brought about the end of the “age of restoration through indemnity” and are giving us the special grace of attending this workshop because we have set the condition of participating in True Parents’ works while they are on the earth. Therefore, we should give infinite gratitude, glory and praise to True Parents for the special grace of allowing us to attend this workshop. Through attending the workshop, we can be reborn as our “true selves” and advance toward January 13, 2013 with new determination and conviction.

Thank you for your faith and dedication to God’s providence.

Sincerely,