318. The Tradition of True Mother's Family and the Path of Women Leaders
Book 3: Cheon Il Guk and Our Mission
Part 2: True Parents, the Hope of God and Humankind
Chapters 4 & 5: The Tradition of True Mother's Family and the Path of Women Leaders + A Model of Absolute Faith
Chapter 4: The Tradition of True Mother's Family and the Path of Women Leaders
This speech was read by Mrs. Gil-ja Sa, representing Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, at the Second national assembly of the National Women's Federation, held on February 24, 1988, at the Cheongpa-dong Headquarters Church in Seoul.
Beloved Women's Federation leaders from throughout the nation, I am sure that you will accomplish many great, honorable achievements on the front line, moving us closer to certain victory in the providential, holy work to bring unity to North and South Korea, unifying our homeland.
Ladies! It is important how we lived in the past and how we are living according to the Will in the present, but we cannot help also thinking about how we can understand the future and leave behind outstanding results. The world is excited to have reached the eagerly anticipated year of 1988. We who have followed the Will have achieved the unification of the tribe, and now, going beyond the people we have our sights on the unification of the nation, of the world, and of heaven and earth.
For you who are part of the Unification movement, there is nothing that happens by chance. February 13, 1988 was a day for our movement to celebrate. Centered on God, four generations were established and centered on True Parents, three generations were established. Do you think it was a coincidence that we could experience such a day as a reality in our lifetimes? Burning tears of love flow out from deep in my heart, and a song of gratitude is exploding from the profound depths of my heart and wrapping around me.
Ladies! How did you feel? The 6,000 years of the sorrow-filled history of the providence of restoration; the 43 years of the thorny path of history that True Father could not talk about! How can they be expressed in words? If you call out, "Father,” loud wailing comes out ahead of the words.
Ladies! What I want to say here today is that for you who are in the Unification movement, nothing can happen by chance. That is to say, no one can deny that as the owners of the past and the owners of the present, we are the people who will become the owners of the future.
I know that you probably have many things that you wonder about in relation to me. I will resolve the things you are wondering about. When looking at the central figures of providential history, we can see the importance of their roles as well as their mothers' roles. Based on the roles of Abraham, Jacob, Moses and others and on the roles of their wives and mothers, a new historical beginning was achieved by each of them in their respective ages and prospered. However, internally, because of misery and suffering, a history of bitter sorrow has been the reality.
My birth and life up until this day were not by chance either. Moreover, I have come to think that the maternal lineage has more historical meaning than the paternal lineage. Father also knows that, before the liberation of Korea, the famous Christian pastor, Rev. Ho Bin Lee, received a revelation and matched and married my father and mother. The revelation said that the two of them should be blessed in marriage and that the baby who would be born to them would be the coming Lord.
Going back a little further, I can tell you about Grandmother Jo, my maternal grandmother. There is a story about a stone Maitreya Buddha statue that is connected to Grandmother Jo's family village in Jeongju County, North Pyeongan Province. True Father has said that during his childhood, he and his brothers touched that Maitreya Buddha and played there. This is a story of living history.
A nation remembers a filial son who lives for the sake of his parents and family; Similarly, Heaven considered one of Grandmother Jo's ancestors in the Jo clan to be highly precious. When the nation was going through difficulties, he invested all his wealth, and he saved the face of the nation by building a stone bridge. Heaven remembered his great offering, and it helped to prepare the lineage for me to be born through Grandmother Hong. You know well the kind of devoted life this grandmother lived. If we consider the generations up to when I was born, we were families with only one daughter for three generations. All the sacrifices in our family were made in order to meet the coming Lord.
If we follow the Word, we can become great ancestors
Grandmother Jo met True Father at the Chungpa-Dong Church in the late 1950s. She was elderly and because of a family situation, she went to the spirit world without being able to attend the 1960 Holy Wedding Ceremony. Grandmother Jo appeared to a Buddhist nun, named Yoon who said that Grandmother Jo was working anxiously to prepare for the True Parents to ascend to the throne. At that time many revelations came, but the Buddhist nun Ms. Yoon died without having been able to fulfill her five percent portion of responsibility. Grandmother Jo gave revelations again, through a Unificationist of Buddhist descent, and working through this person she was able to complete all the things she had wanted to prepare before this person died. Could we say these kinds of events happened by chance?
Now, the relationship between the spirit world and the physical world is closer because of the work of True Parents and Heung-jin, but at the beginning of 1960, it was difficult. Thinking this would be a good lesson and a guideline for us, I have told you these things. Someone who lives only for himself or who thinks only of the present will of course not endure in the past, the present or the future, and will not be able to establish a tradition.
Ladies, we are very happy people. You have to think, "How could I be born at this time, in this nation and at this moment to be able to breathe together with the True Parents? If I just follow the Word, the Will, and what has been shown, I too can become a great ancestor. I should not forget even in my dreams, and I should work at every moment to fulfill my responsibilities—the unification of Korea, North-South unification, the liberation of God, the liberation of the True Parents—I have to do all of them.”
Think proudly about being a woman whose light can shine on the path of history. I hope you will become proud daughters, proud mothers and proud wives.
Chapter 5: A Model of Absolute Faith
This speech was given a the 2002 World Culture and Sports Festival and General Assembly of the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace held on February 15, 2002, at the Hilton Hotel in Seoul.
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen! I am very pleased to welcome you to this opening ceremony for the 2002 World Cultural and Sports Festival.
A life with absolute values
I have witnessed many miraculous changes taking place in Korea throughout my life. I hope those who are visiting Korea for the first time will be able to experience Korean culture and see with your own eyes how the country has developed in leaps and bounds. We began the new millennium with the expectation that, if we utilized all our modern technology, we could surely bring about a world of peace and prosperity and end the violence and pain of the past. However, in reality, a series of events that occurred last year demonstrated otherwise. Even though we are enjoying incredible comforts and benefits from a remarkable material civilization, we are still unable to resolve the serious conflicts that persist due to moral confusion, as different cultures are based on different value systems.
Today's world is troubled by moral and ethical relativism. My husband, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, has dedicated his entire life to teaching the world about absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience to God, as well as absolute sexual morality based on the true love that all humanity and all of creation have hoped for. I believe many of you already know about Reverend Moon through the projects and activities he has been promoting throughout the world. However, today I would like to introduce another side of him that only I know. I have been married to him for 42 years, and I believe that only God knows my husband better than I do.
What do the absolute values that Reverend Moon teaches have to do with his life? I see him living for the sake of others from early morning until late at night every day, working to break down all barriers in every sphere of human activity, for the ultimate purpose of breaking down the barriers between God and human beings.
When I met my husband for the first time, the world was divided into two camps, with opposing military powers facing off along one national border. The Cold War between East and West had led to the tragedy of the Korean War and the division of Korea into North and South. In just a few years the war destroyed almost everything in this country.
My husband built his first church from discarded boxes and mud bricks. Even in that situation, he believed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that God would fulfill the promise of new hope He had bestowed upon this land. Reverend Moon never prayed to God to help him, even under the most difficult circumstances. For example, he evaded death several times while enduring severe torture in prisons under the rule of the North Korean communists. In addition, he endured imprisonment as a result of false accusations made against him by leaders of Christian denominations in South Korea.
Rather than defend himself, he would endure persecution in silence while consoling God, promising himself thousands of times that he would, without fail, achieve world peace, which is the Will of God. No matter what difficult circumstances he encountered—when he was on the verge of starvation, or when Christians and the media conspired with the government against him—his love for God and sympathy for humanity only increased. Like God's prophets throughout history, he did not submit in the face of opposition. Instead, he proclaimed the message of truth ever more intensely.
Reverend Moon has set us an example of absolute faith in God. At the age of 16, he received a revelation from Heaven and came to understand that he had been chosen to fulfill the mission of leading humanity into a world of purity, freedom and happiness, the world that God has longed to see since the beginning. To fulfill his mission, my husband had to expand the scope of his life from the level of the individual to that of the family, tribe, people, nation and world on the foundation of absolute faith in accomplishing God's Will.
The path of sacrifice and absolute obedience
Ever since he received his calling from Heaven, Reverend Moon has taken a path of total sacrifice accompanied by indescribable suffering and pain. Most painful for him is that those he has endeavored to save have ridiculed and falsely accused him. Nevertheless, Reverend Moon has not once compromised or hesitated in the course of accomplishing the mission that Heaven bestowed on him. He has taught us the way of absolute faith in God by setting the example himself.
Most important of all, I believe my husband's teachings about absolute love are the most beautiful of all. Many religious leaders and scholars have dedicated themselves to building their religious denominations or spreading their doctrines. Some have worked on a bigger scale, through charity or humanitarian projects. Yet from the beginning, my husband was different. Even when the Unification movement was small and beset by financial difficulties, he always taught that we needed to devote more than two-thirds of our resources to the service of others before taking care of ourselves.
He has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to supporting interfaith work, seeking to bring all religions closer together, because he knows that this is God's desire. He has spent far more on interfaith efforts than he ever allowed the Unification movement to spend on itself. Students at the Unification Theological Seminary, which he founded in 1975, are required to spend far more time studying other religious traditions than their own and to engage in dialogue with scholars and clergy of other religious denominations.
When the United States government unjustly prosecuted him and was in the process of sending him to prison, my husband founded The Washington Times to help America put an end to the Cold War and fulfill its providential role for world peace. As you know, he financially supported many world media organizations and even now he is increasing their budgets rather than investing in the publications of the Unification movement.
I am certain that his way of living for the sake of others before looking after himself as well as his indomitable spirit come from God's unconditional love. I believe that this is the true meaning of love, which is the solution to breaking down the walls existing in today's world. Reverend Moon teaches us by setting the example himself. Absolute love between a husband and wife does not allow for infidelity or divorce. This kind of love is the only truly effective way to prevent sexually transmitted diseases that are so widespread in today's world.
There have been people who misunderstood his unwavering and sacrificial dedication to practicing and teaching his ideals through the way he lived his life. Sometimes, because of his absolute standard, he was falsely accused by people who were jealous of him or misunderstood him, or who would have rather taken an easier path. However, as time passed, more and more people came to understand that there is no negotiation or compromise in matters of right and wrong or good and evil, and that there is no yielding when it comes to devoting our lives and love to God.
A husband with love greater than any other
The time that he might have spent with me he almost always shared with others. We weren't even able to enjoy a honeymoon as most people do. Nevertheless, I can say honestly that I have received greater love from my husband than any wife has ever known. His love for our family and his devotion to education have yielded remarkable results. He has taught us to become as absolute in our dedication to God, and as universal in our love for humanity, as he has been in his daily life. Although we never took an ordinary family vacation, our 13 children and more than 20 grandchildren live with gratitude for God's grace and blessing.
When we moved to New York, we lived together with hundreds of Unification Church members. My husband was eager to learn how to use the riding lawnmower, and he would mow the lawn with the heart of wanting to present a beautiful lawn to God and to the people. He learned how to lay a carpet, and as he nailed it down, he poured that same heart into each nail. Our life has not been like the lives of others. I see the result of his lifelong sacrifice: the millions of families that have begun to follow this same tradition, and their children and grandchildren. I know that God is truly proud of His dedicated son, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
I cannot suppress my joy over this opportunity to introduce my husband to you this morning. I am happy to publicly express my overwhelming love and gratitude to him for the first time.
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming the founder of this World Culture and Sports Festival, a true son of God, a true husband, a true father and a true teacher, my husband, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
Part 2: True Parents, the Hope of God and Humankind
Chapters 4 & 5: The Tradition of True Mother's Family and the Path of Women Leaders + A Model of Absolute Faith
Chapter 4: The Tradition of True Mother's Family and the Path of Women Leaders
This speech was read by Mrs. Gil-ja Sa, representing Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, at the Second national assembly of the National Women's Federation, held on February 24, 1988, at the Cheongpa-dong Headquarters Church in Seoul.
Beloved Women's Federation leaders from throughout the nation, I am sure that you will accomplish many great, honorable achievements on the front line, moving us closer to certain victory in the providential, holy work to bring unity to North and South Korea, unifying our homeland.
Ladies! It is important how we lived in the past and how we are living according to the Will in the present, but we cannot help also thinking about how we can understand the future and leave behind outstanding results. The world is excited to have reached the eagerly anticipated year of 1988. We who have followed the Will have achieved the unification of the tribe, and now, going beyond the people we have our sights on the unification of the nation, of the world, and of heaven and earth.
For you who are part of the Unification movement, there is nothing that happens by chance. February 13, 1988 was a day for our movement to celebrate. Centered on God, four generations were established and centered on True Parents, three generations were established. Do you think it was a coincidence that we could experience such a day as a reality in our lifetimes? Burning tears of love flow out from deep in my heart, and a song of gratitude is exploding from the profound depths of my heart and wrapping around me.
Ladies! How did you feel? The 6,000 years of the sorrow-filled history of the providence of restoration; the 43 years of the thorny path of history that True Father could not talk about! How can they be expressed in words? If you call out, "Father,” loud wailing comes out ahead of the words.
Ladies! What I want to say here today is that for you who are in the Unification movement, nothing can happen by chance. That is to say, no one can deny that as the owners of the past and the owners of the present, we are the people who will become the owners of the future.
I know that you probably have many things that you wonder about in relation to me. I will resolve the things you are wondering about. When looking at the central figures of providential history, we can see the importance of their roles as well as their mothers' roles. Based on the roles of Abraham, Jacob, Moses and others and on the roles of their wives and mothers, a new historical beginning was achieved by each of them in their respective ages and prospered. However, internally, because of misery and suffering, a history of bitter sorrow has been the reality.
My birth and life up until this day were not by chance either. Moreover, I have come to think that the maternal lineage has more historical meaning than the paternal lineage. Father also knows that, before the liberation of Korea, the famous Christian pastor, Rev. Ho Bin Lee, received a revelation and matched and married my father and mother. The revelation said that the two of them should be blessed in marriage and that the baby who would be born to them would be the coming Lord.
Going back a little further, I can tell you about Grandmother Jo, my maternal grandmother. There is a story about a stone Maitreya Buddha statue that is connected to Grandmother Jo's family village in Jeongju County, North Pyeongan Province. True Father has said that during his childhood, he and his brothers touched that Maitreya Buddha and played there. This is a story of living history.
A nation remembers a filial son who lives for the sake of his parents and family; Similarly, Heaven considered one of Grandmother Jo's ancestors in the Jo clan to be highly precious. When the nation was going through difficulties, he invested all his wealth, and he saved the face of the nation by building a stone bridge. Heaven remembered his great offering, and it helped to prepare the lineage for me to be born through Grandmother Hong. You know well the kind of devoted life this grandmother lived. If we consider the generations up to when I was born, we were families with only one daughter for three generations. All the sacrifices in our family were made in order to meet the coming Lord.
If we follow the Word, we can become great ancestors
Grandmother Jo met True Father at the Chungpa-Dong Church in the late 1950s. She was elderly and because of a family situation, she went to the spirit world without being able to attend the 1960 Holy Wedding Ceremony. Grandmother Jo appeared to a Buddhist nun, named Yoon who said that Grandmother Jo was working anxiously to prepare for the True Parents to ascend to the throne. At that time many revelations came, but the Buddhist nun Ms. Yoon died without having been able to fulfill her five percent portion of responsibility. Grandmother Jo gave revelations again, through a Unificationist of Buddhist descent, and working through this person she was able to complete all the things she had wanted to prepare before this person died. Could we say these kinds of events happened by chance?
Now, the relationship between the spirit world and the physical world is closer because of the work of True Parents and Heung-jin, but at the beginning of 1960, it was difficult. Thinking this would be a good lesson and a guideline for us, I have told you these things. Someone who lives only for himself or who thinks only of the present will of course not endure in the past, the present or the future, and will not be able to establish a tradition.
Ladies, we are very happy people. You have to think, "How could I be born at this time, in this nation and at this moment to be able to breathe together with the True Parents? If I just follow the Word, the Will, and what has been shown, I too can become a great ancestor. I should not forget even in my dreams, and I should work at every moment to fulfill my responsibilities—the unification of Korea, North-South unification, the liberation of God, the liberation of the True Parents—I have to do all of them.”
Think proudly about being a woman whose light can shine on the path of history. I hope you will become proud daughters, proud mothers and proud wives.
Chapter 5: A Model of Absolute Faith
This speech was given a the 2002 World Culture and Sports Festival and General Assembly of the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace held on February 15, 2002, at the Hilton Hotel in Seoul.
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen! I am very pleased to welcome you to this opening ceremony for the 2002 World Cultural and Sports Festival.
A life with absolute values
I have witnessed many miraculous changes taking place in Korea throughout my life. I hope those who are visiting Korea for the first time will be able to experience Korean culture and see with your own eyes how the country has developed in leaps and bounds. We began the new millennium with the expectation that, if we utilized all our modern technology, we could surely bring about a world of peace and prosperity and end the violence and pain of the past. However, in reality, a series of events that occurred last year demonstrated otherwise. Even though we are enjoying incredible comforts and benefits from a remarkable material civilization, we are still unable to resolve the serious conflicts that persist due to moral confusion, as different cultures are based on different value systems.
Today's world is troubled by moral and ethical relativism. My husband, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, has dedicated his entire life to teaching the world about absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience to God, as well as absolute sexual morality based on the true love that all humanity and all of creation have hoped for. I believe many of you already know about Reverend Moon through the projects and activities he has been promoting throughout the world. However, today I would like to introduce another side of him that only I know. I have been married to him for 42 years, and I believe that only God knows my husband better than I do.
What do the absolute values that Reverend Moon teaches have to do with his life? I see him living for the sake of others from early morning until late at night every day, working to break down all barriers in every sphere of human activity, for the ultimate purpose of breaking down the barriers between God and human beings.
When I met my husband for the first time, the world was divided into two camps, with opposing military powers facing off along one national border. The Cold War between East and West had led to the tragedy of the Korean War and the division of Korea into North and South. In just a few years the war destroyed almost everything in this country.
My husband built his first church from discarded boxes and mud bricks. Even in that situation, he believed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that God would fulfill the promise of new hope He had bestowed upon this land. Reverend Moon never prayed to God to help him, even under the most difficult circumstances. For example, he evaded death several times while enduring severe torture in prisons under the rule of the North Korean communists. In addition, he endured imprisonment as a result of false accusations made against him by leaders of Christian denominations in South Korea.
Rather than defend himself, he would endure persecution in silence while consoling God, promising himself thousands of times that he would, without fail, achieve world peace, which is the Will of God. No matter what difficult circumstances he encountered—when he was on the verge of starvation, or when Christians and the media conspired with the government against him—his love for God and sympathy for humanity only increased. Like God's prophets throughout history, he did not submit in the face of opposition. Instead, he proclaimed the message of truth ever more intensely.
Reverend Moon has set us an example of absolute faith in God. At the age of 16, he received a revelation from Heaven and came to understand that he had been chosen to fulfill the mission of leading humanity into a world of purity, freedom and happiness, the world that God has longed to see since the beginning. To fulfill his mission, my husband had to expand the scope of his life from the level of the individual to that of the family, tribe, people, nation and world on the foundation of absolute faith in accomplishing God's Will.
The path of sacrifice and absolute obedience
Ever since he received his calling from Heaven, Reverend Moon has taken a path of total sacrifice accompanied by indescribable suffering and pain. Most painful for him is that those he has endeavored to save have ridiculed and falsely accused him. Nevertheless, Reverend Moon has not once compromised or hesitated in the course of accomplishing the mission that Heaven bestowed on him. He has taught us the way of absolute faith in God by setting the example himself.
Most important of all, I believe my husband's teachings about absolute love are the most beautiful of all. Many religious leaders and scholars have dedicated themselves to building their religious denominations or spreading their doctrines. Some have worked on a bigger scale, through charity or humanitarian projects. Yet from the beginning, my husband was different. Even when the Unification movement was small and beset by financial difficulties, he always taught that we needed to devote more than two-thirds of our resources to the service of others before taking care of ourselves.
He has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to supporting interfaith work, seeking to bring all religions closer together, because he knows that this is God's desire. He has spent far more on interfaith efforts than he ever allowed the Unification movement to spend on itself. Students at the Unification Theological Seminary, which he founded in 1975, are required to spend far more time studying other religious traditions than their own and to engage in dialogue with scholars and clergy of other religious denominations.
When the United States government unjustly prosecuted him and was in the process of sending him to prison, my husband founded The Washington Times to help America put an end to the Cold War and fulfill its providential role for world peace. As you know, he financially supported many world media organizations and even now he is increasing their budgets rather than investing in the publications of the Unification movement.
I am certain that his way of living for the sake of others before looking after himself as well as his indomitable spirit come from God's unconditional love. I believe that this is the true meaning of love, which is the solution to breaking down the walls existing in today's world. Reverend Moon teaches us by setting the example himself. Absolute love between a husband and wife does not allow for infidelity or divorce. This kind of love is the only truly effective way to prevent sexually transmitted diseases that are so widespread in today's world.
There have been people who misunderstood his unwavering and sacrificial dedication to practicing and teaching his ideals through the way he lived his life. Sometimes, because of his absolute standard, he was falsely accused by people who were jealous of him or misunderstood him, or who would have rather taken an easier path. However, as time passed, more and more people came to understand that there is no negotiation or compromise in matters of right and wrong or good and evil, and that there is no yielding when it comes to devoting our lives and love to God.
A husband with love greater than any other
The time that he might have spent with me he almost always shared with others. We weren't even able to enjoy a honeymoon as most people do. Nevertheless, I can say honestly that I have received greater love from my husband than any wife has ever known. His love for our family and his devotion to education have yielded remarkable results. He has taught us to become as absolute in our dedication to God, and as universal in our love for humanity, as he has been in his daily life. Although we never took an ordinary family vacation, our 13 children and more than 20 grandchildren live with gratitude for God's grace and blessing.
When we moved to New York, we lived together with hundreds of Unification Church members. My husband was eager to learn how to use the riding lawnmower, and he would mow the lawn with the heart of wanting to present a beautiful lawn to God and to the people. He learned how to lay a carpet, and as he nailed it down, he poured that same heart into each nail. Our life has not been like the lives of others. I see the result of his lifelong sacrifice: the millions of families that have begun to follow this same tradition, and their children and grandchildren. I know that God is truly proud of His dedicated son, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
I cannot suppress my joy over this opportunity to introduce my husband to you this morning. I am happy to publicly express my overwhelming love and gratitude to him for the first time.
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming the founder of this World Culture and Sports Festival, a true son of God, a true husband, a true father and a true teacher, my husband, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
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