Sun Myung Moon
January 6, 1991
Many of you here have passed your forties and are in your fifties. If you were asked what you had accomplished up until now, what would be your answer? Perhaps you will die within the next ten or twenty years. Imagine the moment when you come face-to-face with death and look back on the course you have taken after you came to know God's will. Then think about how God could not claim His rightful place and remove the servant-like mask of unsatisfied desire from His face because of your failure to complete your responsibility to restore human beings, who remain the devil's descendants. Will you be able to keep from bowing your head in shame after you enter the spirit world? How will you go there and walk around with your head held high? How will you live there? You will just have to go hide somewhere. Everything about you will be revealed for everyone to see.
You cannot avoid going to the spirit world. We are all destined to go there. What are you going to take with you? Let us look at the example of a daughter in a poor family. Her pitiable appearance would make it difficult to present herself to her relatives. Worse, without taking a dowry with her, how could she face marrying the son of a rich family with more than a hundred clansmen in a home shared by layer upon layer of people from four generations? How could she withstand the ridicule if she were to go emptyhanded? Her in-laws would proudly tell her, "According to our family tradition, so-and-so did this, grandmother and all the other women did this, and big sister did it this way, and so did everyone else." If she is seen as a failure in the family, how could she hold her head up in front of them or sit down to eat? How could she even pick up her spoon or chopsticks?
It is terrible to be unable to fit in to a group. What will you take with you? If you were asked, "If you have been a Unification Church member for forty years, then what have you brought with you?" how would you respond? Is the spirit world where you are going to a place where you are worse off or better off than here? Is the place where you are going after you die worse than here or better? It is a place that is tens of millions of times better than here. It is a world where you can accurately measure everything.
It is a place where each individual feels the pain of knowing exactly where he is situated. If you want to raise yourself up one stage, it will take you a thousand, even ten thousand years.
Because you received the precious thing called the Blessing, the door is open for you, but you cannot enter because you are not dressed in formal attire. You must go to the banquet house in formal attire. Can a groomsman go to a wedding in work clothes? Think about it. You have to dress appropriately for the occasion in order to go there and be welcomed into that environment. Otherwise you will be thrown out. People will say to you, "Get lost, blockhead!"
There was once a rich man in Mokpo who was said to be so rich that he owned all the land in the northern part of the city. Then, my friend married this man's only daughter and became his son-in-law. Since this was during the Japanese occupation, almost no one could afford the expense of a modern Western-style wedding with tuxedos and gowns and such. Usually, a groom would just wear his civil defense uniform and stick a single flower into his lapel.
However, because this man was rich and had all his rich friends coming, he decided to have a modernstyle wedding. I was asked to be one of four groomsmen. When the bride's family prepared the outfits for the groomsmen, they decided to make all of them match the height of the groom. The groom was about the same height as I was, but he was not nearly as heavy. So when I put on the white shirt they had bought for me and buttoned it up, you could see my belly button. Wearing this tight shirt, I had to maintain a posture that put a lot of pressure on my spine. After a couple hours of this, I started to get muscle cramps. What was I supposed to do? Could I cry out in a loud voice? I remember going over to a wall and bending over like this to massage the cramped muscles.
Dressed like this, I had to stand in front of this huge crowd of thousands of people, including everyone who was anybody in South Jeolla Province. I would much rather have found a rat hole somewhere that I could crawl into. It was all I could do to stay there in my place and endure.
Being unable to fit into a particular environment is oppressive.
I know the spirit world well. I know all the saints and all the founders of religions who are in any way significant. They do not want to yield to you, but you must not be shut out from that group.