Cham Bumo Gyeong: Episode 304

Cham Bumo Gyeong
Book 11: Ecumenical Initiatives
Chapter 1: Ecumenical and Interfaith Initiatives
Section 1: The Meaning and Purpose of Religion, Paragraph 08-17

8   If there is anything in the human world that goes beyond this physical world, connecting heaven and earth, it is religion. There are no human beliefs that are greater than religious beliefs. Religious beliefs make it possible for us to have a relationship with the invisible Creator. They enable us to say He is our Father and we are His sons and daughters. The starting-point of religion is that we exist in an inseparable parent-child relationship with God. This is the basis for our value as human beings.

It is also the reason a true religion does not remain merely on the national level as the faith of one people, but looks to the future of nations, the world and the cosmos. The Creator has been acting in order to become one with human beings and with the earth. The ideal of creation is the formation of a trinity comprised of God, humankind and the Earth.

Religion is the very means to restore this relationship with Him. That is why religions initially emphasized the master-servant relationship. Over time they established the correct order for relationships- what is in front and what follows behind, what comes first and what comes after. By doing so, they have clarified our relationship with heaven.

9   There is only one set of True Parents for eternity. Adam and Eve, our first ancestors, were not to remain as two individuals, but were to be a woman and a man joined as one. Those ancestors of humankind were to have become the True Parents, but due to the Fall, instead they became false parents. Unless the position of the absolute Parents is recovered, God's ideal of creation can never be realized. By this logic, a religion is not a true religion unless its teachings lead us to build true families, true ideal nations, and a true ideal world centering on God's beloved Bride and Bridegroom. As there had been no true parents, a true religion had to teach that we could not build true families until after True Parents had come.

The repair shop

The mission of religion is to recover fallen human beings as children of God and to recover the original world of God's creation. Fallen people became like broken machines. True Father therefore said that religion must fulfill the mission of a repair shop that rebuilds broken down human beings.

10   Religion teaches us to follow moral principles that are in alignment with the fundamental principle by which God created heaven and earth. Religion teaches that one being, God, made all things of heaven and earth, and that the one God has been steadily moving the providence toward realizing the world that fulfills His one purpose.

Accordingly, religion teaches that we too must move in that direction and holds that this requires us to renounce a life based on physical comfort. This is what both Buddhism and Christianity teach. The higher the level of a religion, the more strenuously it commands us to deny our bondage to the material world. The Bible teaches this.

We fallen human beings cannot become one with God just as we are. We first need to be completely liberated. We need to become new people, and this requires us to pursue the one purpose of God above all else. That is why we need religion.

We must not lead a religious life blindly. God always carries out His providence through a formula. Hence, we must understand His formula. The Unification Church is where people can learn this. This formula course is defined by the Principle of Restoration. The Unification Principle clearly teaches how providential history has unfolded from the past to the present. This is a most important aspect of the Unification Church teachings.

11   The role of religion is to re-create human beings. How does it do that? It guides us to resolve the seemingly endless conflict between mind and body and reach a state of peace where forevermore there is no struggle. Religion also guides us to become God's counterparts, who are qualified to represent the Sovereign of the cosmos. It teaches us how we can manifest the character of God in our relations with others, so that He will rejoice over us as people of eternal, unchanging value. Religion guides us to strive to fulfill this task not by our human efforts alone, but in cooperation with God.

12   God is the original Lord of human beings. He is the absolute Being in unity. Our original mind belongs to God, and therefore like a magnet we are naturally pulled toward God, who is our subject partner. This is why we human beings revere what is high and holy, and why we yearn for the absolute Being. Religion has taken responsibility in this arena. By the same token, the mission of religion is to keep the mind in the position of subject partner, and keep it stronger than the body so that it can completely subjugate the body.

13   If only we had God's true love dwelling in us, our mind and body would naturally be in total oneness. God established religions to save human beings based on this principle. The religious world is like a repair shop for mending human beings who are out of order. Religion produces new parts and fixes what is broken. Religious teachings pursue the goal of mind-body unity. No matter how serious we are about religion, studying its teachings and practicing self-discipline, are all vain efforts unless we bring our mind and body into oneness. Unless we achieve mind-body unity, ten years of study and practice, even 1,000 years of study and practice, will be in vain. How can we unite our mind and body? None of the great religious founders could fully teach this. I say it is God's true love that enables us to attain mind-body unity. Therefore, the primary issue is understanding why we have been unable to fully abide in the true love of God.

14   Human beings did not fulfill God's ideal of creation. While on the way to realizing the ideal world, they fell and became broken beings. Human beings ever since have spent their lives wandering in confusion, not knowing where to go, whom to follow, or what kind of world they should strive to attain. This condition describes present-day human society. Human beings have fallen to a position where their value is lower than that of God's servants and lower than the things of creation. We cannot recover our rightful position by acting randomly or blindly. We need to repair fallen history through the principle of re-creation. Religion was established as the repair shop to rebuild broken human beings. It is to restore us fallen human beings to our original condition. We need to go to the repair shop and be created anew.

15   The fact is you are all broken people. When a radio is broken, you get static or no sound at all. Likewise, when a person is broken, he or she cannot go where his or her heart wants to go. If God exists, He will have the know-how to fix broken people. If He does not have such a plan, He may as well not exist. However, questions arise: Why did God end up having to establish a repair shop to fix broken people? Why must God send technicians, and are they able to make these repairs? The repair shop is religion. Immediately after the Fall, religions began to develop, beginning with shamanistic faiths. Starting from those small repair shops, the higher religions emerged and were established as world-level repair centers.

16   The world's cultural spheres are realms that were established by religious thought and developed first as religious cultural spheres. Religion is the fountainhead of all civilizations. Civilizations emerge on the foundation of religion. That is why the cultural spheres of the four major world religions cover the entire world.

Religions have taken the role and responsibility of repair shops. However, no existing religion can repair the whole person. It is as if the repair shop of one religion only manufactures legs, another only manufactures arms, another necks and another heads, yet they still remain to be assembled.

Therefore, we need a factory that can assemble all these parts and make people whole. That factory is the Unification Church. Given the current circumstances, it is remarkable that we have emerged and put up a sign stating that we will unite all religions. This is why people who used to believe in Buddhism, Christianity and Confucianism, as well as non-believers, are joining the Unification Church. It is because the Unification Church is a religion of synthesis. It performs a comprehensive assembly of the whole person. It is a comprehensive repair center in name and in reality.

Dominion over oneself

True Parents teach that the conflicts and disputes among human beings arise from the struggle between their mind and body, which became divided due to the Human Fall. Thus, True Father lived by the personal motto, "Before you seek to have dominion over the universe, you must first gain dominion over yourself' The body, which seeks its own comfort and pleasure, must be subordinate to the mind, which is connected to God and His ideal. Accordingly, religion teaches that mind-body unity, where the focus of the mind is the higher purpose, is the necessary foundation for a life of true love, which comes through service to others and self-sacrifice. The body's unity with the mind is the necessary first step on the path to actualizing the final goal of one world under God.

17   "You must achieve mind-body unity." People have shouted this throughout history, regarding it as the gospel of gospels. If you cannot reach this state, even your love will be in vain. Without it, you have no basis to say anything about what it means to be a human being. Whatever your line of argument, if it is not based on that fundamental foundation within yourself, it has nothing to do with reality. For this reason, you have to be able to state that you have attained complete mind-body unity. But can any of you say that with confidence?

God teaches us that the way to bring our mind and body into unity is through true love. God abides in total oneness of mind and body because, abiding in love, His mind and body live for the sake of each other. God exists perpetually because His mind and body invest in something beyond themselves—the body for the sake of the mind, and the mind for the sake of the body. This is the logical basis of eternal life. It originates in the reality of beings investing in one another and then investing more.