Sun Myung Moon
March 23, 2004
Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, DC, USA
Coronation Ceremony for the King of Peace of the Third Israel and Ambassador for Peace Awards Ceremony
Photo date and location unknown
Respected members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives, religious leaders from around the world, distinguished guests: I would like to express my sincere gratitude for your presence here this evening in such large numbers, in spite of your busy schedules.
Ladies and gentlemen, The starting point to unravel the problems humanity faces today is in knowing God, with certainty, as the Parent of all creation and on that foundation the building of true families that live in attendance to God. This calls for us to establish and attend God in our families, conceptually and as the substantial Parent of us all. To do this, we have to first clarify the relationship between God and humankind. God is the original entity of true love, true life and true lineage, and God is the True Parent of all people.
Perfected human beings automatically go to heaven
If human beings had not fallen, we would have reached perfection in God’s true love as true children and lived in attendance to God as our Parent. God’s plan was for perfected human beings to bond as true husbands and wives, bear and raise true children so that they would live in the kingdom of heaven on earth, and then live together eternally in the heavenly world as families in the kingdom of heaven.
Think about it for a moment. If your father went to hell and only your mother went to heaven, what kind of heaven would that be? If your parents were to go to hell and only you children went to heaven, how could that be called heaven? The kingdom of heaven is where the whole family lives together in an eternal peace kingdom. On earth as well, God will reside where a whole family has established a kingdom of heaven. In such a family, the world of God’s original ideal, the kingdom of heaven on earth, takes root.
The path to realizing family heaven on earth
How, then, are we to bring about this family heaven on earth? First, each member of the family has to complete his or her individual character. Each person has to shed the fallen nature that has passed from the Fall down through the generations, and achieve the perfection of his or her character. Each person has to become victorious in the struggle between mind and body. Then the world of harmony will bear fruit in each individual’s perfected character, a state of one heart, one body and one thought. Fallen nature, which causes jealousy, envy, greed, hatred and all other evils, will never again take root in a person who has achieved this state.
Shedding one’s fallen nature is not easy. The reality of fallen human beings is that we vacillate even when trying to break habits like smoking or drinking alcohol, which are formed during the relatively short span of a few years or decades. We cannot expect, then, that it will be easy to cast off fallen nature, which we inherit through lineage going back thousands, even tens of thousands of years.
This is impossible by human effort alone. We need to stand on the foundation of absolute faith, and strive our entire life to establish God as our vertical axis. Even then, it is a difficult fight. We cannot think we will gain victory unless we enter a state of absolute love for God, loving God even more than we love our own parents and children, and attending God as our True Parent. We cannot hope to win this fight without a foundation of absolute obedience, following God even at the cost of laying down our lives.
Herein lies the reason why religions consider practicing spiritual disciplines such as fasting, sexual abstinence, sacrifice and penance to be of utmost importance. We can be born again, recast as new persons in whom Heaven can reside and with whom the spirit world can cooperate. In such a state, we will not have anything of which to be ashamed, even if our entire life and being is exposed before all of God’s creation. We need to be people of upright character, of “high noon settlement,” casting not even the slightest shadow. When we achieve this, Satan will flee from our presence for eternity.
Perfecting the four realms of heart leads us to the heavenly kingdom
Individuals who achieve maturity of character come together to form true families, and the members of these families work together to establish what I call the “four great realms of heart.” Such families resemble an individual who has accomplished the complete oneness of mind and body. The kingdom of heaven is a place we enter family by family. Not every family, however, is qualified to enter Heaven automatically. You need a foundation to be a true family and to complete the four great realms of heart. A true family that can enter the kingdom of heaven is composed of true individuals who have each engaged fully in the four great realms of heart and whose lineage centers on God.
What do I mean then by the four great realms of heart? I refer to the heart of parents, the heart between a husband and wife, the heart of children, and the heart of siblings. This is found in a true family bound by God’s original true love, true life and true lineage through a pure three-generational lineage of grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren. Here, the love between parents and children establishes the vertical relationship between upper and lower; the love between the husband and wife establishes the horizontal relationship that brings left and right into definitive oneness, and the love between siblings establishes the relationship between front and back. In this way, God’s ideal of creation is no longer a mere concept or dream. It is perfected in reality through the completion of the four great realms of heart centered on true lineage, family by family.
The realm of parental heart is acquired naturally as parents go through the process of bearing children and then raising and educating them with true love. In other words, it is the heart that enables the parents to own true love with respect to the children. With no relationship to children, no one can own love as a parent.
Next, the realm of conjugal heart is the love relationship that extends true lineage. In this, husband and wife each are grateful for the other having established them as an owner of love, and each learns true love through giving and receiving with the other. They learn and experience true love when the husband lives for the sake of his wife, even if it means sacrificing his own life, and the wife attends her husband with the heart of attending God. The perfection of the husband-wife relationship is possible only on this basis.
The moment a bride and groom share love with God’s blessing on their wedding night, they inherit the palace of true love, true life and true lineage.
The wife, through her husband, receives God’s ideal son, who is also Heaven’s older brother, Heaven’s husband and Heaven’s parent. The husband stands in the corresponding position in receiving his wife as Heaven’s older sister, Heaven’s wife and Heaven’s parent. When the realm of conjugal heart is perfected, the relationship between the husband and wife also becomes absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal, because God is absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal. The notion of divorce will become obsolete. Theirs will be a life of happiness, filled with only blossoming flowers of mutual respect and love.
Three generations of true love is the model of heaven
Next, how can we describe the heart of children, and how is it obtained? Parents are the center, in God’s position in the family, and it is impossible for a child to be born without parents. The relationship between parent and child is established not by human morality, it is established by a heavenly morality.
Thus the parent-child relationship is a vertical relationship, not horizontal. It is not a relationship that exists as destiny, by which I mean that human effort can change it. It is a relationship of absolute and eternal fate.
Children experience and learn the heart of true love as they attend their parents in daily life, placing their parents in a position higher than themselves. Through a natural process, they come to understand that the love, life and lineage that they inherit from their parents originate in God. Children who watch and learn from their parents in this way will grow up to become husbands and wives who have no fallen nature, and who ultimately obtain the position of true parents themselves. The cyclical and spherical motion of the family unit that continually repeats the three-generational pattern in this way is the basic model for building the kingdom of heaven.
Lastly, the realm of the heart of siblings is realized through brothers and sisters who live as a family in attendance to the same true parents. The heart among brothers and sisters establishes the relationship between front and back. True parents are a husband and wife living in truth, and children who attend such parents will naturally learn to live according to heavenly morality and ethics among siblings.
It will be a beautiful sight, where a younger brother or sister attends and reveres an older brother or sister and the older sibling looks after his younger sibling with a loving heart. The older sibling represents “front” and the younger sibling represents “back.” The older sibling represents the father, while the younger sibling represents the mother. The perfection of the realm of heart between siblings is the foundation for all people to live for the sake of others through love and service.
The importance of establishing a true family
Respected guests, as the number of “true peace family kingdoms” that have perfected the four great realms of heart increases, “true peace tribe kingdoms,” “true peace nation kingdoms,” and ultimately the “true peace world kingdom” will appear. This will become the original world of God’s ideal, the kingdom of heaven on earth, the eternal kingdom of peace on earth. I am declaring this here and now. Humanity has lived without knowing that to establish true families is the most serious and foundational commandment of Heaven.
A new era has arrived today. The number of people around the world who have received my teaching and are standing resolutely for the sake of building the kingdom of peace is growing by leaps and bounds. Heaven and earth are shaking with the cries of bright young people who are determined to build true families even if they give their lives in order to protect their purity. Already, we find hundreds of millions of Blessed families around the world. They are turning the tide of a world in which ethics and morality have been rapidly washing away.
That is not all. The spirit world is one step ahead of us in breaking open the age of the peace kingdom. Starting with the five great saints—Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates and Muhammad—more than one hundred twenty billion Blessed families are working day and night to cooperate with us on earth and prepare for the day that is to come. According to the Principle of Creation, God’s ideal world has to be completed first on earth.
God’s homeland and carrying out the revolution of true love
Although people today are descendants of the Fall, God’s unending love and the spirit world’s cooperation now allow us to understand the nature of the heavenly kingdom. Please recognize that it is time to accomplish a true love revolution of overwhelming proportions, taking as our example the miraculous transformations in the spirit world.
The time has come for you as well to open your hearts and receive the secrets that Heaven is disclosing in this age through me. In one sense, I am a human being living with a physical body like each of you. However, in the context of Heaven’s providence, I am God’s ambassador, sent to earth with full authority. I am sent to accomplish God’s command to save the world’s six billion people, restoring them to Heaven with the original goodness in which they were created.
The five great saints and many other leaders in the spirit world, including even Communist leaders such as Marx, Lenin and Stalin, central to all manner of barbarism and murder on earth, and dictators such as Hitler, have found strength in my teachings, mended their ways and been reborn as new persons. Emperors, kings and presidents who enjoyed opulence and power on earth, and even journalists who had worldwide fame, have now placed themselves at the forefront of the true love revolution. Together they have sent to earth a resolution expressing their determination in the light of my teaching of the true family ideal. They have declared to all heaven and earth that Rev. Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity’s Savior, Messiah, returning Lord and True Parent. This resolution has been announced on every corner of the globe.
Respected guests, it is now only a matter of time. Look at the world. Do you see anything that gives you genuine hope for the fixture? Sooner or later, we have to give what we have to our descendants and leave this world. What gift would be more precious than that of completing the family ideal in your family, so as to guarantee eternal peace and happiness for your children? Surely no one who has such an opportunity hesitates to take up the task of building the peace kingdom on earth, for which God has waited thousands of years.
I have reached the advanced age of eighty-five years, by the Korean way of counting. All the same, I will continue to work harder than anyone else until the day the earth overflows with God’s true families, guns in the Middle East fall silent and give way to fireworks of peace and joy, and shouts of eternal victory celebrating the unification of my homeland Korea echo across the Pacific to be heard in America.
I hope that you leaders, representing the world’s six billion people in this ceremony, will join hands with me. I call you to take the lead in building what is God’s original ideal and the desire of all humanity, the peace kingdom on the earth.
Thank you.