Sun Myung Moon
March 14, 1999
Excerpt
Belvedere, NY
Father Moon gave a sermon entitled "Everybody Wants True Love," at Sunday Worship Service on March 14, 1999 at Belvedere, New York. True Parents declared saying, "They will dedicate and present this sermon to the 360 million blessed families throughout the world." The excerpt below is summarized based on the sermon and was, subsequently, published in scores of newspapers throughout the world.
What is the most important thing, that which 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? It is because it is the means by which we can meet God. Just as human beings desire to meet God, God also wants to meet true human beings because of love. The love by which God can see, touch, and share with men and women at the same time, is the love by which 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 to claim it for themselves. Once we realize that love is the highest value, however, we can strive to live for each other and become one with each other, sharing the happiness of possessing love together.
Everyone desires love. Love is the only thing that can satisfy all human desires. It is humankind's, and God's, unfailing attraction to love that makes God's providence of salvation possible.
Fundamentally, love belongs to God. Yet even God cannot possess love all by Himself. Love requires a mutual relationship. 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. Regardless of external appearance, in our heart each of us desires a mate with whom we 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 mutual relationship. Love is the one power in the universe that absolutely no one can possess by himself. 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 its own. The feeling awakens in his heart 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 she loves. In other words, our love belongs to our partner. Thus, we should honor our partner's love as being even more precious than our love. Each person should be grateful to his or her spouse, and should live his life for the sake of the other. This basic reasoning will make it possible for the 360 million blessed 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 fallen lineage of Satan to be rooted out completely.
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 yet realized this degree of love.
All beings exist at a certain level in mutual attraction with another. At the same time, all beings want to be 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. Through this process they ultimately reach the position where they can experience the essence of true love, which is the love that is nearest to God -- the origin of love. God created everything with an intrinsic nature to provide value to a higher level.
Darwin's theory regarding the survival of the fittest needs to be re-examined 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, created as the highest partners of God's love, can consume all creatures. We can enjoy everything we desire, on one condition: that we do so with a heart that represents the love of God, the Creator. For example, creatures such as eels and worms which fish like to eat also provide ingredients for natural medicines for humans. Creatures on a higher level are meant to consume beings on a lower level. Without this process, the universe could not exist.