Sun Myung Moon
May 1, 1994
Address at the Fortieth Anniversary of the Founding of HSA-UWC
Olympic Park Gymnastics Hall, Seoul, Korea
Photo date and location unknown
On this day, the fortieth anniversary of the founding of our church, I stand at this podium with profound emotion. In 1954, with former President Hyo-Won Eu and several close disciples, we hung the name board of the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity on a tiny house in Pukhak- Dong in Seoul. That official beginning seems like yesterday, yet forty years have already passed.
Reflecting on the forty years since the founding of the Association
The founding of our church was not for the attainment of some personal goal of mine. It was done solely to fulfill God's Will on earth. As I look back, I recall the tremendous persecution I encountered as I walked many different thorny paths. Not even my parents, my brothers and sisters, or my relatives could understand them. I have vivid memories of false accusations from various groups and nations. The most painful aspect was the opposition from members of the established churches whom God had prepared. Even today some of them raise totally unfounded criticisms. Truly I have surmounted many hurdles. During all these difficulties I am so grateful for God's protection and guidance, out of His deep love.
What is the duty of saints who are responsible for God's providence of salvation? What is God's purpose in raising saints? The saints for whom God is searching are not those who will be honored in history after they die. God is looking for saints who can save this evil world, and who can, in this age, transform it into the world of goodness for which God is longing.
God is looking for saints who will plunge headlong into the sorrowful world of sin in order to wipe clean the slate of the world's sinful history. He is looking for saints who take it upon themselves to solve the problems God is most concerned about, saints who will fulfill the providential Will by firmly standing up against the evils of this world. Therefore, the path of such saints cannot be smooth, and it is inevitable that persecution and misunderstanding follow them.
I pledged to God that I would accomplish His Will for Him during my lifetime, and whether awake or asleep I focused on that thought alone. I renewed this pledge countless times, and continually disciplined myself to keep going, even while in the bowels of prison and under severe torture that put me on the verge of death.
God's motive for creating humankind was true love
God's Will does not belong only to those who believe. The Will of God governs all people and all of creation. It is not something vague. The Will of God is the purpose of creation, that is, the ideal of creation that was in God's heart from the beginning of time. All things of the universe and humankind were created according to that purpose of creation.
Why would the eternal absolute God need to create? What does God absolutely need? Would it be material things, knowledge or power? If God wanted any of those things He could create them at any time. God can conduct Himself freely. However, the only thing that even God cannot control according to His Will is true love. True love can be found only through a mutual relationship with a partner. One cannot feel love by oneself.
This is the reason God needed the material world as a counterpart. God created the world for the ideal of true love. We can look at the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom or the animal kingdom, although they are at different levels, and see that they were all created in pairs of subject and object partners in order to be able to engage in give-and-take action, harmonize and complement each other.
Furthermore, human beings, as representatives of and the center of the world of creation, were created as the closest object partners for God's true love. For this reason, God needs human beings to realize His purpose of true love. From this perspective, we can understand how precious is the value of human beings as the object partners for God's true love.
God established true love as His ideal of creation, the highest and most absolute value. Even the absolute God desires to submit absolutely in front of true love. Likewise Humankind and the rest of creation, which were created through such a principle, become absolutely obedient before true love. All of life's energies are interconnected and directed toward the higher level of true love. The order of the universe and the value of each created being are decided based on this principle.
The relationship between God, who has a heart of true love, and humankind is a vertical relationship of parent and child. Adam and Eve, who were created as God's son and daughter, were the first to receive God's parental love and experience the heart of children as they grew up. During their growth, they could also feel the heart of brother and sister for each other. Next, after being blessed in marriage by God, they were to become a couple, and by loving each other they were to experience the heart of a husband and wife. Finally, after having children and loving them as true parents, they were to feel the heart of parents and also experience the parental heart through which God loved them as children. These different experiences of the heart: the heart of children, the heart of brother and sister, the heart of husband and wife, and the heart of parents, are called the "four great realms of heart."
The perfection of humankind requires a complete understanding of these four great realms of heart under the true love of God. The foundation for this is the ideal family. A family that embodies the four great realms of heart is the smallest unit of humankind that fulfills God's ideal of creation.
God, who is the origin and Lord of true love, is in the position of a father who intends to bequeath unchanging true love to all people as His children. Through true love, complete harmony and unity can be achieved. Furthermore, for those who receive this true love, the right to live together and the right to act together naturally ensue. Therefore, as God's children, we can all move and work together with God. People who are intoxicated by God's true love would have joy and the ideal, and they would naturally give true love to those around them and to their descendants. That would have been the fulfillment of the original ideal of the creation.
True love takes the shortest and most direct route
Unfortunately, the first human ancestors fell because of the false love of an archangel. Consequently, they could not become a couple of true love. They had children without God's Blessing and became false parents and false ancestors. As a result, our ancestors could not be born from true ancestors or true parents; they were born of a lineage God did not want.
When we look at the natural world, even though all things are at lower levels, they are all in harmony in the order of love. Only in the world of Men people is this order not maintained. The result has been evil, conflict and suffering. However, God cannot abandon this world even though it is the opposite of His Will. So He has been working to restore this evil, fallen world to the ideal world of creation. That is the providence of salvation.
The providence of salvation is the providence to restore the purpose of creation. It is the providence of recreation. Following the Will of Heaven, religions have played the major role in the providence of restoration. Religions were established for the purpose of restoring the original ideal family and the ideal world, based on God's true love and the ideology we call "True Parentism."
The Messiah is the one who comes as the True Parent, with the crucial responsibility to get rid of everything that sprouted from the false root originating from the false parents, and to restore the original ideal world of creation. To restore this world through true love and true family, someone first needs to establish the internal position of True Parents. God called me for the sake of accomplishing this mission. Because of the Fall, the original ideal was not realized. To accomplish the providence of recovering what was lost, God established religions and then sent the Messiah.
God's unchanging purpose is to realize the ideal world of true love. The purpose of religion is fulfilled with the appearance of true love and the ideal family. Conversely, if a religion exists for a different purpose, or only for itself, then although that religion may talk about God, it does not have anything to do with Him. God and the world do not exist for the sake of religions. Religions were established for the sake of accomplishing God's Will to restore true love and the world of true families. My forty years of efforts in developing interfaith, academic, educational, ideological, cultural, artistic, media-related, scientific, technological, and business projects worldwide have all been directed toward this purpose.
I have devoted and invested my life to accomplish all this. I have lived with the heart of the Heavenly Parent and loved the different peoples of the world more than my siblings and more than my parents who gave birth to me. I surmounted imprisonment and miserable persecution, and transcended the fear of death. The way of true love is the shortest way. In the realization of true love, there can be no conditions or excuses, and nothing can stand in its way.
The only direct way is to sacrifice oneself and give to others. I am grateful to the many people who are showing their appreciation for my worldwide achievements. However, more important than the external results are the motives and processes by which they are achieved.
None of this work has been accomplished under pleasant conditions or in a favorable environment. All these achievements were built on the foundation stones that I laid with the single-minded conviction to accomplish the Will of God on earth, for which I mobilized all my enthusiasm and sincerity, and invested everything. Throughout my struggles, I continuously invested for the growth and protection of this righteous work by standing firm against all the winds of evil.
Establishing the true heart-centered culture and the Blessing
Ladies and gentlemen, God wants a religion that stands in the parent position to govern this age. God wants a religion whose followers live with the heart of parents. I myself have been teaching "True Parentism," which means to educate each person to become a true parent who embodies this tradition. I guide people to first become true parents in the family and then to become true parents of their tribe by fulfilling their mission as tribal messiahs. We have to become a religion that embodies and practices the heart of true parents in order to realize God's Will in this world of conflict, hatred and evil. Those religions that despise other religions and denominations and have contempt for them are a hindrance to the accomplishment of world peace and God's providence.
A peaceful world of harmony is destined to emerge. However, what is the reality of the world around us? Even though we say that the Cold War is over, there are so many tensions and conflicts that need to be resolved. Our task is to establish the age of the harmonious one-world family by fundamentally solving the conflicts between races and the struggles between religions. This task can be accomplished only with True Parentism.
We who stand on the foundation of forty years of pioneering by the Unification Church, and who have welcomed the True Parents and the Completed Testament Age, need to build a new world based on a true heart-centered culture. Each person becomes a substantiation of that ideal when he or she becomes one with God in a true parent-child relationship. That is what creates happiness, in the harmony of love.
Although this realm of heart, built with true love, is small, it is connected to the universe. The vibrations of everything happening within it are transmitted to all of the creation and the spirit world. This is because the entire cosmos, including the spirit world, exists under the same principle of the true love of God.
The vertical true love relationship between God and human beings is the source of ideal true love in human relationships. The perfection of that love is attained in the ideal family that manifests the four great realms of heart. A true heart-centered culture blooms in the realm of an ideal family, in which the heart of peace, happiness, freedom and ideals can be felt and experienced in life. In such a world, religion would not be needed. We would not require the special consciousness of faith, because our whole life would be one of attending God and living together with Him with one heart in the realm of true love. That would be the reality of living in the kingdom of heaven with God's blessings to "be fruitful, multiply, and have dominion over all things."
This is the fulfillment of God's ideal and His purpose of creation. In order to establish a world of true heart-centered culture, we need to develop our personality through education in true love and True Parentism, and we need to expand the movement that creates families of true love that have received God's Blessing. Under that Blessing, we can become ideal couples and families by continuously training ourselves through a life of faith in which we practice true love by living and investing for the sake of others.
The only way the world and all humanity can expect to have a bright future is by surmounting the habits of extreme self-centeredness, individualism and materialism. This is the only way we can protect people from immorality, the corruption of youth and the breakdown of families.
Only though the family-centered movement of true love, established through international holy weddings, can we solve the conflicts between peoples and races. These weddings achieve the miracle of establishing ideal families of true love according to the Will of Heaven, overcoming the barriers of religion and race. Next year, many more religions will participate in the international holy wedding of 360 thousand couples.
Also, I am educating people about the concept of a "mother of true love" through the activities of the Women's Federation for World Peace. When all women raise and educate their children with the heart of a true mother, ideal families will be formed. Now the time has come for the women who understand God's Will to educate fallen men. This movement will spread to all parts of the world.
Projects to support the development of a heart-centered culture
Religion carries great responsibility for the process of establishing a true heart-centered culture throughout the world. World peace cannot be realized without harmony and cooperation among religions. I have been investing all my energy to accomplish this goal. In the future, too, I will take the lead in breaking down the barriers between religious people and organize a concerted effort to realize God's Will on earth. I will endeavor to help religions see the good in each other by actively supporting the Interreligious Federation for World Peace, distributing copies of the book World Scripture, and educating people. In the future, religious people will realize God's Will through practice, cooperating and setting an example.
Many different organizations that I have established will become increasingly active. They include a variety of organizations that have been laying the foundation to solve the substantial and real problems of the world.
The Federation for World Peace, composed of former and current heads of state, will continue its endeavors to mediate in the conflicts of this world and the tensions among nations, as well as to maintain peace. The International Federation for Victory over Communism and the Citizens Federation for the Unification of the Fatherland, equipped with Godism and head-wing thought, will continue to actively refute the philosophies and ideologies that promote hostility among the nations of the world. We can foresee that, with the advances in science and technology, especially the ongoing revolution in communications technology, humankind in the future will transcend and reformulate these ideologies.
To mention another issue, people's boundless pursuit of self-centered desires has given rise to environmental problems such as pollution of the atmosphere. Our ability to correct these conditions will have a direct bearing on the future of all humanity. What future is there for humankind if we fail to educate the leaders of the next generation to resist self-centered thinking and carnal desires?
To solve the problems, we have to establish absolute values, based on True Parentism and the practice of true love. When humanity is safely settled on the foundation of families that are based on unchanging love, vertically and horizontally connected in the four great realms of heart, the modern conveniences of civilization will lead to authentic happiness.
This is the value of the dedicated educational and practical efforts of conscientious academics as expressed in the activities of the Professors World Peace Academy and the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, affiliates of the International Cultural Foundation. I also plan to publish an encyclopedia in an effort to educate the new generation. My work maintaining various educational organizations and supporting academic activities have the same goal. Beginning with Sun Moon University in Korea and the University of Bridgeport in the United States, I have plans to establish a world university federation. It will be an educational foundation for the coming world of true, heartcentered culture.
Greeting the information age by supporting the mass media industry, newspapers and broadcasting worldwide, we are, through a well-directed media work, offering social education on a vast scale.
No one knows the heartbreak of God over the situation of starvation in the world. I have been developing industrial technology and transferring it to the developing nations. In this manner, I have continuously worked toward the equal distribution of technology in all countries. Just this year I founded the World Peace Institute of Technology so that it can contribute, along with other existing institutes, to redressing the worldwide imbalance of technology.
For the past twenty years I have invested in marine business ventures for the purpose of safeguarding the food supply through the efficient use of marine resources. We have made substantial achievements through the activities of the International Relief Friendship Foundation, and by providing education in agriculture and light industry in Africa and other regions. We also established two foundations for social welfare in Korea this year.
Let us become inheritors of the Will
Honored guests, ladies and gentlemen, and beloved Unification members, before ending my speech this morning, I would like to once more offer my gratitude to God. Throughout my life my motivation has been purely to live for the sake of God's Will. God has watched over and guided me at all times, yet the difficulties and suffering He endures are thousands of times greater than my own. I offer all glory to God, for how could the achievements of the past forty years be only my own?
I am deeply grateful to the church members who have worked so hard, and to the many who have lent their support. The will of God that I began to fulfill is actually His original Will for all humankind. I therefore ask all of you to become my representatives and representatives of the True Parents. Please become the inheritors of God's Will and multiply the fruits of righteousness and goodness. Let us invest our efforts to quickly realize the original world, the true heart-centered culture that God yearns to see on earth.
Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to all honored guests from Korea and overseas for blessing us with your presence on this occasion.
May your families and your work continue to be blessed by the presence of God.
Thank you.