Mother of Peace: Episode 69
Mother of Peace: And God Shall Wipe Away All Tears from Their Eyes
A Memoir by Hak Ja Han Moon
Chapter 11: The Restoration Of Canaan In Heaven And On Earth, pg 335-341
The Summit concluded with the inauguration of the Latin America chapter of the International Summit Council for Peace. Universal Peace Federation International President Dr. Thomas Walsh introduced the purpose of the Council to serve as a forum in which heads of state and government, both current and former, can combine their unique expertise in addressing the most serious challenges to the realization of peace in our time. Four former presidents, their Excellencies Anthony Carmona of Trinidad and Tobago, Rosalía Arteaga of Ecuador, Jocelerme Privert of Haiti, and Jaime Paz Zamora of Bolivia, delivered speeches expressing their strong support. Former US Representative Dan Burton, co-chairman of the International Association of Parliamentarians for Peace (IAPP), officially proposed the initiative, and all current and former heads of state in attendance rose to affix their signatures.
After the conclusion of the Summit, its participants joined a crowd of 12,000 for the Family Peace Festival at the Gran Arena Del Cibao. The highlight of this beautiful event was the Blessing Ceremony of 6,000 couples. President Morales opened the ceremony, and my daughter and son-in-law, Moon Sun-jin and Park In-sup, officiated. The Dominican Republic Municipal Police co-sponsored this Family Peace Festival, and the families and friends of 4,000 city police and 600 national police came to uphold the ideal of “one family of humanity under our Heavenly Parent.” In-sup and Sun-jin awarded prizes to 10 representatives of those stalwart citizens.
The Rally of Hope in the Dominican Republic succeeded due to the devotion of leaders and members throughout Latin America who pressed forward in a difficult environment. They brought the flower of hope to blossom in Heavenly Latin America, and I am confident that this flower will multiply blessings long into the future.
The course toward a Heavenly Unified World
At this point I realize that even if the entire sky were paper and all the seas were ink, there would not be enough to record this tearful course. We all overcame physical limits and continued on, even if we felt we might collapse. It was a victorious course through which our hopes and desires were fulfilled. At long last, the era of the Heavenly Nation and Heavenly Continent has arrived in providential history.
Every nation and continent has its unique path of restoration. The first seven nations to complete their path did so during the seven-year course after True Father’s Holy Ascension in 2012. God re-created these seven nations as Heavenly Nations.
On the foundation of the substantial victory of seven Heavenly Nations and a Heavenly Continent, we have come to the historic day when, filled with determination, we can set out to reach the final objective of our journey, which is a Heavenly Unified World.
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The United States is a Christian nation on a spirit-led continent. Let me explain about its course toward becoming a Heavenly Nation. The paths of Christianity and the United States are entwined. The Roman Empire legalized Christianity in 313 CE. From the Italian peninsula, Christianity leaped across the European continent to the British Isles, where it grew strong. But over the next millennia, Britain lost the ability to practice Jesus’ teachings to “love your neighbor as yourself.” She placed the monarch as ruler of the church and created a state monopoly on religion. By the seventeenth century, Great Britain was gaining power, but it was suppressing many sincere followers of Jesus. God’s providence could no longer develop there, and it moved west with the Puritans who braved the treacherous ocean in search of religious freedom. The United States we see today was born of those sacrificial Christians.
My husband and I spent many decades in the United States. Because of its deep Christian roots and its people’s devout faith in God, it has providential importance to Heaven. Nonetheless we encountered many difficult and heartbreaking ordeals on our path there. As I already discussed, in July 1984, the US government sent Father Moon to prison. As was the case in both North Korea and South Korea decades before, this was a story of communists and unknowing Christians finding common purpose in opposing God’s work through True Parents. Fortunately, many fair-minded American Christians and political leaders, also from the left and right, spoke out against Father Moon’s imprisonment. Some ministers marched in protest and set up makeshift jail cells behind the White House. Thousands of Christian leaders attended the Common Suffering Fellowship, a week-long seminar on religious freedom in Washington, DC, and joined Minority Alliance International and the Coalition for Religious Freedom. People of virtue within the American government, media and clergy decried Father Moon’s imprisonment as a blatant assault on religious freedom. In 1987, these people coalesced through the American Constitutional Committee and its successor, the American Freedom Coalition.
In the three years following Father Moon’s release from Danbury, we sponsored 7,000 members of the clergy to travel to Korea and Japan for the Advanced Interdenominational Conference for Clergy. Thousands of American pastors prayed at the Rock of Tears in Busan, just as Father Moon had prophesied would happen decades earlier. In 1996, we welcomed 5,000 members of the American Christian clergy to True Family Values seminars, and began the clergy Blessing movement. In November of 1997, ministers of all faiths prayed at the 40 Million Couple Blessing at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. On that foundation, in the year 2000, at the border between North and South Korea, we established the American Clergy Leadership Conference (ACLC). The next year, ACLC organized the 50-state “We Will Stand” speaking tour, in which my husband and I declared in church after church the truth of Jesus and True Parents. The ACLC was the driving force behind the Middle East Peace Initiative, which in 2003 buried the cross of resentment between Jew, Christian and Muslim and crowned Jesus as the true King in Jerusalem.
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On the foundation of these and more works over the following decade, at a major ACLC meeting in Las Vegas, 2015, I proclaimed for the first time, “I have come as the only begotten Daughter for God and humankind. Let’s realize God’s will together.” The ministers welcomed my words with cheers. “Why have we not known of this truth until now?” some of them said. “Why has this obvious fact never crossed our minds?” I challenged those thousand ministers: “The 21st century is the era of True Parents. Who are the chosen people of this age? The answer is, you! You are the chosen people centered on True Parents in the 21st century.”
Meeting this challenge, at New York’s Madison Square Garden in July 2017, at Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum in November 2018, and in Los Angeles and Las Vegas in April and June of 2019, the Family Federation and ACLC sponsored Blessing Ceremonies and Peace Starts with Me Rallies of Hope for the Advancement of a Heavenly Unified World. In Los Angeles, inspired by not just ACLC but by the youth of Los Angeles CARP, Bishop Noel Jones of the City of Refuge Church, a former mentor of US President Barack Obama, testified that I am the Mother of peace.
“Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon was specially sent to unite humankind,” he announced to an audience of 5,000, as he invited all couples to receive the marriage Blessing. At the end of the Rally, the City of Refuge Church raised our Family Federation’s flag.
Six months later, on October 31, 2019, in the Lotte Hotel in Seoul, Korea, some 700 clergy members, including 40 Americans and 400 Koreans, attended the inaugural ceremony of the Korean Clergy Leadership Conference (KCLC). Then, on December 28, 2019, at the culmination of my 40-day Cosmic Canaan Course for the Firm Establishment of Cheon Il Guk, clergy gathered from all over the world to establish the World Clergy Leadership Conference (WCLC). At the Prudential Center, Newark, New Jersey, amid a crowd of 25,000 at the Peace Starts with Me rally, 400 American ministers were joined by more than 600 Christian ministers from 70 countries, including 160 pastors from South Korea, and prominent members of the clergy from Japan, Latin America, Asia and Africa. From Europe came ministers from the World Council of Churches, the world’s largest council of Christians. In all, 1,000 Christian leaders united under the banner of a Heavenly Unified World centering on our Heavenly Parent.
I am deeply grateful to Heaven for the World Clergy Leadership Conference. Uniting Christianity was part of my resolution to bring True Father’s work to its ultimate conclusion, and this was an important milestone in that providence. At that Rally, Rev. Paula White, a spiritual advisor to US President Donald Trump, spoke on the direction the United States should take for the sake of our Heavenly Parent. Six Christian clergy, representing the regions of the world, then spoke. Among them were Archbishop George Augustus Stallings, representing America, KCLC co-chair Rev. Kim Soo-man, representing South Korea, and Prophet Samuel Radebe, representing Africa.
FFWPU, USA