Sun Myung Moon
April, 1999
February 7, 1999 was the culmination of a series of blessing ceremonies given by the Reverend and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon to more than 360 million couples worldwide, including those already married and those getting married for the first time. The following is a message from Reverend Moon to these couples that will soon appear in newspapers in all the major world capitals.
Dear Blessed Couples worldwide:
What is the most important thing, the one thing we need more than anything else? It is not money, power or knowledge. It is true love. True love is more precious than life itself and more important to us than air or water.
Why is true love so precious and important? Just as human beings desire to see God, God also wants to see true human beings. If God were to express a preference for either men or women, the other would surely complain. God’s only choice is to place love in the forefront. By placing love in the forefront, God can see, touch, and share with men and women at the same time, because men and women love each other. If anything other than love were to be recognized as the most valuable thing in the universe, men and women would fight each other to try and claim it for themselves. Once we realize that love is the highest value, however, we can then strive to live for each other and become one with each other to share the happiness of possessing love together.
Everyone likes love. Love is the only thing that can satisfy all human desires. God’s providence of salvation stems from the principle of love.
Fundamentally, love belongs to God. Yet even God cannot possess love all by Himself. Love requires a reciprocal partner. A man by himself or a woman by herself cannot experience love. Women exist for the sake of men’s love and men exist for the sake of women’s love. It does not matter how handsome or beautiful a person may appear on the outside. In their heart, every person desires a mate who can give and receive the highest level of love.
When we examine the universe, we see that all beings exist in pairs relating to one another as subject and object. In the mineral world, we observe the relationship of plus and minus. In the plant world, the animal world and the world of human beings, we see the relationship between masculine and feminine. This is because God created the universe in order to fulfill the expression of love. All beings desire the experience of true love through a reciprocal relationship. Love is the one power in the universe that absolutely no one can possess by themselves. Once we have a partner, however, love gives us the power to share the entire universe. Likewise, a husband and wife need children in order to experience the profound joy of parental love.
Thus, we can say that God created human beings and the universe as His reciprocal partners in order to bring about true love. All types of love – including love of children, love of siblings, love of husband and wife, and love of parents – come about through the unity of subject and object partners. When two partners become one in true love, it is impossible to separate them. If for any reason, separation occurs, true love is destroyed. Therefore, in true love, there is no concept of divorce.
When a man feels love, the feeling is not generated on his own. The feeling in his heart is awakened because of a particular woman. Likewise, the fire of love is kindled in the heart of a woman not by herself alone but by the man who is her reciprocal partner. In other words, our love belongs to our partner. Thus, we should honor our partners as even more precious than our love. Each person should be grateful to their spouse, and live their life for his or her sake. This basic reasoning will make it possible for the 360 million couples to live together eternally. When husbands and wives live for each other, respect each other and become completely one through true love, it will be possible for the lineage of Satan to be rooted out completely.
True love comes through both horizontal and vertical relationships. A horizontal relationship of true love is gradually elevated in a vertical direction until it eventually reaches the pinnacle. This point is the position of the "King and Queen of True Love." In this position, everything is synthesized, everything is embraced, everything is crystallized into love, and everything blooms. This is why all beings in the universe want to be transformed in love and live in the midst of love. We are born for the sake of love, live for the sake of love, and finally die for the sake of love.
Not only people, but all beings desire true love. This is why human beings, as the highest beings in creation, should embrace and love the masterpieces of God’s creation, and teach creation how to love. All creation is longing to receive and experience God’s love through men and women who have become one with God at the pinnacle of true love. It is a shame that we have not realized this degree of love.
All beings exist at a certain level with a reciprocal partner. At the same time, they are continually absorbed into higher levels of love. Thus, minerals want to be absorbed into plants, plants want to be absorbed into animals, and finally, all of creation wants to be absorbed into human beings. All beings want this so that they can participate in a higher level of love. Through this process, they ultimately reach the position where they can experience the love that is nearest to God, who is the origin of love. All beings have the essence of true love as their ultimate goal. In His wisdom, God created everything with a purpose. For example, creatures with elongated shapes, such as eels and worms that fish like to eat, provide ingredients for natural medicine. Creatures on a higher level are meant to consume beings on a lower level. Without this process, the universe could not exist.
Darwin's theory regarding the survival of the fittest needs to be reexamined in the context of this logic of love. Even ants and microorganisms want true love so much that they will die to become part of an entity of greater love. Because of this principle, human beings, who are created as the highest partners of God's love, can consume all creatures. We can enjoy everything that we desire, but there is one condition: that we do so with a heart that represents the love of God, the Creator.
God’s ideal was for one couple, Adam and Eve, centering on true love, to become the seed from which all the world’s families, clans, nations, and, finally, the multitudinous citizenry of the Kingdom of Heaven would be descended. Citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven can be created only in accordance with God's tradition of true love.
The words that I am sharing are in direct opposition to the theories of Charles Darwin. Yet it is through these words, not Darwin’s theories, that we will achieve a world of peace. This is because my words witness to the fundamental principles of creation.
Darwin proposed in his theory of evolution that species evolve through a process of natural selection based on random mutations. Such a theory implies that there is no fundamental meaning, order or goal in the development of the natural world. Today, scientists and others are debating between the theory of evolution and the creation theory. The word "creation" acknowledges the existence of God, the Creator. There is a purpose embodied in God's act of creation. Subject and object partners unite to achieve a higher purpose.
Communist theory, based on materialism, also lacks the element of purpose. God's creation embodies the purpose of true love, whereas Communism only has struggle and destruction. Thus, it is destined eventually to disappear.
In all creation, the most precious entities are human beings -- man and woman. The most precious part of the human body is not the nose, the eyes, the hands, or even the brain. It is the sexual organs, the main organs of love. Everything in the universe can be recreated through the love organs.
All living things – whether plants or animals – multiply through sex. The most precious and outstanding family begins with a husband and wife who are one with each other. Our love organs are the main sanctuary of life, occupying a position of incredible value where blood lineage and history are connected.
God's fundamental principle is to create through male and female. For a man and woman to share absolute love, however, they should have only one partner. We must not have two or more partners, but only one eternally. There is absolutely one man for each woman and one woman for each man. That is why God did not create two Adams or two Eves. Tragically, in the world today, we see children who have as many as ten stepfathers. How false and degraded love has become in this world!
When men and women uphold and preserve chastity, they are protecting the universe. The discipline of love between men and women is the foundation of the universe. We must not abuse our love as if we were animals. Love can only have one owner. The word "true" in "true love" does not allow for the possibility of more than one partner. There can only be one. This is an absolute law.
Not just anyone can say "true love." Only God can really love with true love, and only God absolutely owns true love. God's true life, God's true lineage, and God's true conscience emerge from true love. In this way, the most fundamental essence of God is true love.
To connect with true love, we must first relate with God. A child might say, "My mother and father don't fight and we live well," but that doesn't necessarily mean that this is a family of true love. A young man and woman may say, "We are so much in love that we could die," but that doesn't mean this love is true love. If God is not present, then it is not true love. True love always centers on God. To become God's son or daughter, we first need to connect with God's love, life and lineage.
Power, knowledge, money, and military might cannot insure that a person will be welcomed in the world of true love. Everyone wants true love, but that love is only possible when we live for others. We need to serve and sacrifice for our partner. Everyone will avoid a person who relates to others with the mindset that says, "You should live for me." This kind of selfish individualism is Satan's strategy, purpose, and tool. The result can only be Hell. We must live for the whole. If a person lives for others, sacrificing himself or herself and serving the whole, then everyone and everything will come and love him.
We are created as God’s children. As we grow in love, relating to brothers and sisters, becoming husbands and wives, giving birth and raising children, God is present each step of the way, harvesting true love. God observes and guides us as we develop, and He becomes the owner of love at each stage. In this sense, it can be said that human beings, through whom God comes to own all love, are more precious to God than He is to Himself. It is the same as when we attach tens of thousands of times more value to the person we love than we do to ourselves.
God invests Himself for those He loves and then forgets this investment. Then he invests again. He invests Himself one hundred percent and then forgets one hundred percent. That is why He can continue to invest.
In the same way, a wife who wants her husband to be a success invests herself in her husband and then forgets this investment. By investing herself and forgetting, she enables him to achieve his full potential in life. When we as partners continue to invest in each other and forget, the level of our love is elevated, and we will ultimately find ourselves connected to God. This is how we can establish a parent-child relationship with God and have eternal life.
Everyone wants to go to Heaven, but those whose attitude is "Everyone should live for me," will not get there. True love begins with embracing and living for the sake of all God’s masterpieces of creation. The way we can reach Heaven is to live for all humankind and ultimately for God.
During our lives, each of us should have at least three experiences in which we dedicate our lives to someone or some higher purpose. This is how we can indemnify the fall of Adam's family, the crucifixion of Jesus, and all the persecution directed against the family of the Lord at the Second Advent.
Even if we have passed through death and resurrection three times, we should not ask for God’s praise but instead pledge our lives to Him even more. This is how we can meet God. When such people populate the world, this will be the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. This is the path that I am teaching, and this is the kind of world that I am building.
Children are the fruit of the love of the mother and father. We need to understand that children combine their parents' love, life, and lineage. Little children often say, "This is mine," but parents are the origin of everything that children refer to as their own. Parents are the root and the trunk. Without parents, we would all be orphans. We cannot live if we break the ladder of love that connects us to our parents.
We are the sons and daughters of God, the parent who is the origin of true love. Parents are the highest masters of love for children. The parent-child relationship is vertical and the husband-wife relationship is horizontal. The lines of these two relationships cross at right angles. The relationship amongst siblings forms a third dimension, a front to back axis. When all are equidistant from the center, and are freely circulating in love, their relationships form a sphere. That is why all beings brought about in love, and the universe as a whole, are spherical. All love is united and achieves a peaceful dynamic harmony in the central point of this sphere of love relationships. This center is where God resides.
The vertical parent-child relationship between God and His sons and daughters is the central axis. A man's love, life, and lineage are on the right hand side, and the love, life, and lineage of the woman are on the left. The love among siblings is in the front and back. The entire universe achieves balance centering on these relationships. God resides at the core, where all these relationships intersect each other. If we picture this three-dimensionally, we see that God is the ultimate origin of love, life, lineage, and conscience.
In the God-centered family, vertical, horizontal and front-back loves are united as one. Such a family will multiply to become a clan, society, nation, world, and cosmos of love. Always, though, the fundamental center is the one God.
If Adam and Eve had not fallen, they would have realized the ideal of the God-centered family and become the True Parents of humankind. As True Parents, Adam and Eve would have provided a model of true husband-wife love and true parental love – through which all mankind could have also become True Parents. God’s providence of salvation has been a providence of restoration. Throughout human history, God has been working to restore True Parents who can establish that model and pattern of the ideal of true love, true life, and true lineage.
Once Adam and Eve had children, who would have overseen the marriage of these children? Adam and Eve, as the parents, would have done this. We need to look seriously at the shortfall in parental involvement in their children’s marriages in today’s society.
The Unification Church, which has True Parents, is standing in the position of parents to give the marriage blessing to all the peoples of the world. These marriages don’t just transcend racial, religious, and ethnic differences. Even saints and evil persons are being blessed in marriage with each other. The True Parents reject evil love, evil life and evil lineage, but they do not cast out Cain, who murdered Abel. Everyone, including Cain, receives the same blessing.
In the ocean, there is a point during the changing of the tides when the forces of the outgoing and incoming tides are at equilibrium. There is a similar turning point in the Providence of Salvation (restoration through indemnity) in the balance between the forces of good and evil. By blessing good and evil people at the time of this turning point, Satan can be expelled completely.
The human fall occurred when there was an error in the Garden of Eden that involved marriage. Now, the True Parents are correcting that error by marrying people in the proper manner. By clearing up the problems created by Adam and Eve as fallen parents, the True Parents are eradicating Hell and giving the blessing to billions, even tens of billions, of ancestors in the spirit world. Fathers and sons who are in the spirit world can be united as one through the foundation of a family centered on true love formed by the descendants who are alive on Earth. In addition, such a family foundation can be the starting point for connecting the Eastern and Western worlds.
The ideal family is a family in which the parents and children, husband and wife, and the brothers and sisters all desire to come together in true love. This is the beginning of an eternal effort to enable all people to experience the full blessing and joy of love. This will mark the beginning of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth and the Kingdom of Heaven in Heaven will follow in due course.
I hope that in the coming millennium, the 360 million blessed families located around the world will become one with the True Parents, and lead a new family revolution centered on true love and a worldwide revolution of morality so that a world of eternal peace can be established on Earth and in Heaven.