Sun Myung Moon
August 20, 1985
God and Freedom Banquet
Omni Shoreham Hotel
Washington DC
At the pinnacle of their work in America, Father and Mother beam on the evening of the God and Freedom Banquet held in their honor in Washington DC on August 20, 1985
Honorable chairman and members of the God and Freedom Committee, distinguished clergy from all parts of the country, ladies and gentlemen:
I am truly grateful for and humbled by your welcoming me back from prison in such a deep way, representing all parts of the United States and so many denominations. I would also like to extend my sincere appreciation to those of you who have supported me during my court battles, in the filing of the amicus briefs to the Supreme Court, in the meetings and rallies for religious freedom, in prayer meetings, in the Common Suffering Fellowship, and in the CAUSA Ministerial Alliance. Also, I thank you for your prayers, and for the many letters I have received from you while I was at Danbury, which I will never forget.
I have suffered imprisonment six times in my lifetime. As in the past, this time in prison provided me a moving experience with God. I was not there because of my personal actions or mistakes, yet I did not brood with resentment or hatred for those who persecuted me, nor did I spend my time in prison pleading my innocence. Rather, I dedicated the time in prison to prayer and meditation, for understanding what America must do to fulfill God's will for the world.
The determination which underlies my whole ministry and life is to relieve the great and long suffering of God. Since the world is ignorant of God's heart of suffering, my work and the work of the Unification movement have long been misunderstood and persecuted. However, I understand the urgency of my mission before God, and despite the lack of understanding on the part of my family, not to mention the general public, Christian churches, nations, or even the whole world, this persecution has not really mattered very much to me. Throughout my life I have communicated deeply with God, and through numerous spiritual experiences I have come to know His heart and His love. I have always testified to this. To me God is not a vague God residing in the realm of imagination. God is alive, and I relate to Him directly in my heart. I experience Him in every cell of my body.
I know that I am addressing clergy who also have been participants in the fulfillment of God's will. Your welcoming me here today, as you and I know, is not a personal welcome for the individual, Rev. Moon, but is a testament to that will of God for which I have lived my life. To do the will of God is our common and utmost concern. Therefore, I would like to share with you some of my realizations about the will of God.
God's Purpose of Creation
Our living, personal God is eternal, absolute, and unchanging. Therefore, His will also is eternal, absolute, and unchanging. When God created human beings, He must have had a purpose and an ideal. God's purpose and ideal is a world united through true love, with God as the parent of all people. Under the true love of God, all people would be brothers and sisters living in one harmonious world family. God's ideal, then, is the creation of one world under God.
God, who is essence of love, created all creation for the purpose of love. An individual cannot love independently; it takes both a subject and an object to love. What God needs absolutely, therefore, is an object whom He can love. God created a universe motivated by love. Especially human beings, who are created in His own image, as we read in Genesis 1:27, are the visible and substantial objects of God's love.
To all mankind, God is the eternal, invisible, and internal parent and ancestor, and perfected Adam and Eve were to be the eternal, visible, and external parents and ancestors to all humankind.
The greatest, holiest love takes place when subject and object become one through giving and receiving love, eternally centered on God. In this true love, perfect unity comes about naturally, all life becomes interconnected, and the ideal of God is realized. God's original will was that His beloved children, Adam and Eve, would become the living visible reflection of their invisible creator, and thus would have eternal love, consummating the ideal of love and life.
The Foundation for Love
It is commonly thought that the creator and the created being can never be equal. If this is so, then the ideal of love is never possible with God. God's ideal of love was to let His children, Adam and Eve, be His visible, substantial objects and become one with Him. Indeed, as is stated in I Corinthians 3:16, God desires to dwell in man.
The ideal of love of the invisible God is realized when men and women (Adam and Eve) in essence become perfected. When a person, centering on God, attains complete unity between mind and body, then he or she attains maturity of character, and true objectivity to God. This means that he or she becomes an eternal object of God's love, God's ideal, and God's life.
When Adam and Eve attained this ideal as God's true, substantial children, they would naturally have propagated to create an ideal family, and eventually from that family they would have developed an ideal society, nation, and world. As a result of humankind's complete response to God's absolute love, all would have attained the highest joy in life, the ideal of happiness, and eventually the Kingdom of Heaven.
God created Adam and Eve on the earth so that heaven would be realized first on earth. After life on earth, the spirits of those who lived ideal lives on earth would go to heaven in the spiritual world, where they would live eternally.
All things are created in pairs, and are created for the sake of human beings. This enables all things to dwell in harmony under the principle of love. With God's love flowing through human beings, all the creation participates in realizing God's life and ideal.
While Adam and Eve were growing up, all things of creation were nothing other than a textbook of love for them, displaying an endless variety of love's manifestations. Adam and Eve, representing God's masculinity and femininity, were to gradually awaken to love through their life in God's textbook of love, which is nature. They were to become perfectly mature and realize the ideal of marriage.
Such was the ultimate purpose of God in creation. God's love was not only directed to the vertical relationship of love between Himself and human beings, but also, after the perfection of vertical love, to the horizontal relationship of love between Adam and Eve. God, who has existed as invisible subject ever since the beginning, was yearning for someone who would respond to His love, and was waiting to meet His perfected visible objects, man and woman. How stimulating, how fulfilling that love would have been! That moment was the very moment when God, the internal parent, was to have resided within Adam and Eve, the external parents, to be completely one with them. In that moment the ideal of love would have been accomplished. The invisible parent, God, would have resided in the visible parents, Adam and Eve, and would have become the eternal parent in the visible world. By this, Adam and Eve were to have become the True Parents, the true original ancestors of all humankind.
Violation of God's Ideal
So precious was this true love that to violate such love was the ultimate crime, a crime of universal magnitude. Immorality, the corruption of youth, the breakup of families, incest, homosexuality, and other unspeakable crimes are the world's reality today, over which God is agonizing. The ideal of creation is to achieve the perfect family, founded upon noble and eternal love, but how did today's tragic reality come about? As the last days draw near, the crime of the human fall is manifested clearly in society. We are reaping what has been sown.
I do not have time to discuss the details of the human fall, but I will say that I struggled for years to discover the truth of the fall, and I testify that its cause was immorality involving the first human family and an archangel.
In the Unification principle, Satan is not a conceptual being or a hypothetical entity. He is a real being, the very villain who destroyed the ideal of love and shifted the human lineage from God's dominion to his own dominion. Jesus himself said very clearly, in the eighth chapter of John, that the devil is the ancestor of humankind. The devil, Satan, is the very adulterer that ravaged the ideal of love which God meant to realize through Adam and Eve, the love which would have raised Adam and Eve to the position of God's own external self. This may be new to many of you, but this is the truth. It was discovered through hard-fought struggles I endured in the spiritual world, as I sought for the answers to the most fundamental problems of life. If you pray, seriously and deeply, you will find affirmation of these answers.
Then why has it taken so long for God to punish Satan for his crime? Satan stole the ideal of love from God, and possesses humankind as a false parent, through false love, usurping God's position. Therefore, God had to begin by reclaiming human beings from Satan's dominion by shifting their lineage.
The Potential for Rebirth Because of the fall, the relationship between God and man was severed, and the righteous relationship between people, through original give and take centered on true love, was also lost. Harmonious unity among people, based on true love, was destroyed, along with the joy of life, and individuals became enemies. The world became hell, full of distrust.
God's plan of creation was to create men and women as true olive trees and make the earth a plentiful garden. The fall brought instead the dominion of Satan over the human ancestral lineage, creating a wilderness of wild olive trees. God wants to cut the wild olive trees and engraft them to the true olive tree, which is Christ. But God cannot cut and engraft those wild olive trees, which are possessed by Satan, without some foundation being made. The very reason God established religion was to create His own garden, in which He could cut the wild olive trees and engraft them to the true olive tree. On the foundation of religion God will send the Messiah and graft humankind to Him through the Messiah, the true tree. This is the essence of the messianic ideal.
From this point of view alone can we correctly understand the biblical doctrine of rebirth. God pulls people away from the false dominion of Satan, giving them rebirth through a love which is much stronger than Satan's love. Since all people are born from parents and ancestors of false love, into a lineage of false love, all people must be born a second time, this time from parents and ancestors of true love, into a lineage of true love, becoming true children and people of God. The blood of Jesus and the Holy Communion both indicate the process of the shift of human beings from Satan's lineage to God's lineage.
All people must be born again. This is the destiny of all fallen human beings. No matter how difficult this may be, we must all tread this path. Salvation cannot be had but by rebirth, being grafted into God's lineage, out of the satanic lineage. Since we are born into Satan's lineage, the process of rebirth requires complete denial of the self, including willingness to deny one's possessions, one's own tradition or culture, even one's concepts about the world. What we already own in the satanic realm can never be recognized by God. We must renounce them to be born again. To engraft ourselves to the true tree, we must sever everything.
Jesus, who came as the true olive tree, is the True Parent himself. Since he came as the True Parent, to give us rebirth, he told us to sever all our old relationships and attachments before coming to God. In Matthew 10:36, Jesus warned that a person's enemies will be the members of his or her own family, and that a person must cut off one's own parents and family if they stand between that person and his or her relationship with Jesus. We can understand this in light of the fact that the family represents the false lineage
Our Response to God
My dear clergy, our task is to learn about God's will and to carry it out. We must become men and women who are bound in God's hands. We must become those who are willing to respond to the call of God. We must never ask God only for our individual salvation or personal heaven. Is it not our privilege as true Christians to respond to the call of the Messiah and to live and die for him and his cause?
Our religion, our denominations, must exist for the will of almighty God, not just for the propagation of narrow views. God cannot reside within narrow views. God is not a sectarian; God sees far beyond denominationalism. He is not confined within exclusivistic dogmas. He is, rather, a parent to us all, and His unbounding love distinguishes no race or color of skin. He does not recognize the walls of nationalism or cultural tradition. He is trying His very hardest today to embrace all of humanity.
My dear clergy, do you think it is mere chance that in America, the heaven of religious freedom, a nationwide movement for religious freedom flared up as a result of Rev. Moon's imprisonment? In truth, this is not an accident, but God's dispensation working behind the scenes. And would you consider it a coincidence that America, as a nation which carries the banner for the free world, and which has come to scoff at the real threat of communism, is now becoming aware of the seriousness of the present danger through the CAUSA Ministerial Alliance? CMA is a truly interdenominational movement, without walls, which has spread like wildfire across this nation. Can we call this a mere accident?
We Must Unite
America is a nation founded on the spirit and love of God. Especially after World War II, God raised up America as a leader of nations, for the salvation and freedom-loving unity of the world. Internally, He was preparing this nation for the second coming of the Messiah, and to be the country that cares for the world.
Unfortunately this country continues to ignore the monumental will of God. America is withdrawing more and more from its global responsibilities, preferring to enjoy false comfort as if this nation were a world unto itself. This attitude, of course, merely multiplies America's problems, both within and outside its borders. Serious racial problems, deterioration of social, ethical, and moral values, decline of religious life and Christian faith, and the rise of materialism and communism will not disappear just by ignoring them.
God called me to come to America because of these problems. Christianity must repent with great anguish, and must unite. We clergy must reexamine ourselves and also repent. We are reliving the time when Jesus came to earth and called the world to repentance. That call is being repeated now. We must fulfill the world mission which God has bestowed upon us. Without question, America must change. A new religious reformation must take place. Christianity must transcend denominationalism and ascend to a higher dimension. We must realize and consider seriously the mission of Christianity to lead a supradenominational, cultural revolution on a worldwide scale.
To commemorate this reunion tonight, we must determine to pursue the original path of Christianity. We must march forward on that way, that we might receive our coming Messiah, and help fulfill the will of God.
May God's abundant blessing be with you, with your families, and with all the churches of America.