Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: Episode 280
Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: A Selection of True Parents’ Speeches
Book 7: The World of the Culture of Heart
Speech 4: Building a World of Heart-Centered Culture, pg 1024-1028
Building a World of Heart-Centered Culture
May 1, 1994
Olympic Park Gymnastics Hall, Seoul, Korea
Address at the Fortieth Anniversary of the Founding of the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity
On this day, the fortieth anniversary of the founding of our church, I stand at this podium with profound emotion. In 1954, with former President Hyo-Won Eu and several close disciples, we hung the name board of the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity on a tiny house in Pukhak-Dong in Seoul. That official beginning seems like yesterday, yet forty years have already passed.
Reflecting on the forty years since the founding of the Association
The founding of our church was not for the attainment of some personal goal of mine. It was done solely to fulfill God’s Will on earth. As I look back, I recall the tremendous persecution I encountered as I walked many different thorny paths. Not even my parents, my brothers and sisters, or my relatives could understand them. I have vivid memories of false accusations from various groups and nations. The most painful aspect was the opposition from members of the established churches whom God had prepared. Even today some of them raise totally unfounded criticisms. Truly I have surmounted many hurdles. During all these difficulties I am so grateful for God’s protection and guidance, out of His deep love.
What is the duty of saints who are responsible for God’s providence of salvation? What is God’s purpose in raising saints? The saints for whom God is searching are not those who will be honored in history after they die. God is looking for saints who can save this evil world, and who can, in this age, transform it into the world of goodness for which God is longing. God is looking for saints who will plunge headlong into the sorrowful world of sin in order to wipe clean the slate of the world’s sinful history. He is looking for saints who take it upon themselves to solve the problems God is most concerned about, saints who will fulfill the providential Will by firmly standing up against the evils of this world. Therefore, the path of such saints cannot be smooth, and it is inevitable that persecution and misunderstanding follow them.
I pledged to God that I would accomplish His Will for Him during my lifetime, and whether awake or asleep I focused on that thought alone. I renewed this pledge countless times, and continually disciplined myself to keep going, even while in the bowels of prison and under severe torture that put me on the verge of death.
God’s motive for creating humankind was true love
God’s Will does not belong only to those who believe. The Will of God governs all people and all of creation. It is not something vague. The Will of God is the purpose of creation, that is, the ideal of creation that was in God’s heart from the beginning of time. All things of the universe and humankind were created according to that purpose of creation.
Why would the eternal absolute God need to create? What does God absolutely need? Would it be material things, knowledge or power? If God wanted any of those things He could create them at any time. God can conduct Himself freely. However, the only thing that even God cannot control according to His Will is true love. True love can be found only through a mutual relationship with a partner. One cannot feel love by oneself.
This is the reason God needed the material world as a counterpart. God created the world for the ideal of true love. We can look at the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom or the animal kingdom, although they are at different levels, and see that they were all created in pairs of subject and object partners in order to be able to engage in give-and-take action, harmonize and complement each other.
Furthermore, human beings, as representatives of and the center of the world of creation, were created as the closest object partners for God’s true love. For this reason, God needs human beings to realize His purpose of true love. From this perspective, we can understand how precious is the value of human beings as the object partners for God’s true love.
God established true love as His ideal of creation, the highest and most absolute value. Even the absolute God desires to submit absolutely in front of true love. Likewise Humankind and the rest of creation, which were created through such a principle, become absolutely obedient before true love. All of life’s energies are interconnected and directed toward the higher level of true love. The order of the universe and the value of each created being are decided based on this principle.
The relationship between God, who has a heart of true love, and humankind is a vertical relationship of parent and child. Adam and Eve, who were created as God’s son and daughter, were the first to receive God’s parental love and experience the heart of children as they grew up. During their growth, they could also feel the heart of brother and sister for each other. Next, after being blessed in marriage by God, they were to become a couple, and by loving each other they were to experience the heart of a husband and wife. Finally, after having children and loving them as true parents, they were to feel the heart of parents and also experience the parental heart through which God loved them as children. These different experiences of the heart: the heart of children, the heart of brother and sister, the heart of husband and wife, and the heart of parents, are called the “four great realms of heart.”
The perfection of humankind requires a complete understanding of these four great realms of heart under the true love of God. The foundation for this is the ideal family. A family that embodies the four great realms of heart is the smallest unit of humankind that fulfills God’s ideal of creation.
God, who is the origin and Lord of true love, is in the position of a father who intends to bequeath unchanging true love to all people as His children. Through true love, complete harmony and unity can be achieved. Furthermore, for those who receive this true love, the right to live together and the right to act together naturally ensue. Therefore, as God’s children, we can all move and work together with God. People who are intoxicated by God’s true love would have joy and the ideal, and they would naturally give true love to those around them and to their descendants. That would have been the fulfillment of the original ideal of the creation.
True love takes the shortest and most direct route
Unfortunately, the first human ancestors fell because of the false love of an archangel. Consequently, they could not become a couple of true love. They had children without God’s Blessing and became false parents and false ancestors. As a result, our ancestors could not be born from true ancestors or true parents; they were born of a lineage God did not want.
When we look at the natural world, even though all things are at lower levels, they are all in harmony in the order of love. Only in the world of fallen people is this order not maintained. The result has been evil, conflict and suffering. However, God cannot abandon this world even though it is the opposite of His Will. So He has been working to restore this evil, fallen world to the ideal world of creation. That is the providence of salvation.
The providence of salvation is the providence to restore the purpose of creation. It is the providence of re-creation. Following the Will of Heaven, religions have played the major role in the providence of restoration. Religions were established for the purpose of restoring the original ideal family and the ideal world, based on God’s true love and the ideology we call “True Parentism.”
The Messiah is the one who comes as the True Parent, with the crucial responsibility to get rid of everything that sprouted from the false root originating from the false parents, and to restore the original ideal world of creation. To restore this world through true love and true family, someone first needs to establish the internal position of True Parents. God called me for the sake of accomplishing this mission. Because of the Fall, the original ideal was not realized. To accomplish the providence of recovering what was lost, God established religions and then sent the Messiah.
God’s unchanging purpose is to realize the ideal world of true love. The purpose of religion is fulfilled with the appearance of true love and the ideal family. Conversely, if a religion exists for a different purpose, or only for itself, then although that religion may talk about God, it does not have anything to do with Him. God and the world do not exist for the sake of religions. Religions were established for the sake of accomplishing God’s Will to restore true love and the world of true families. My forty years of efforts in developing interfaith, academic, educational, ideological, cultural, artistic, media-related, scientific, technological, and business projects worldwide have all been directed toward this purpose.
I have devoted and invested my life to accomplish all this. I have lived with the heart of the Heavenly Parent and loved the different peoples of the world more than my siblings and more than my parents who gave birth to me. I surmounted imprisonment and miserable persecution, and transcended the fear of death. The way of true love is the shortest way. In the realization of true love, there can be no conditions or excuses, and nothing can stand in its way.
The only direct way is to sacrifice oneself and give to others. I am grateful to the many people who are showing their appreciation for my worldwide achievements. However, more important than the external results are the motives and processes by which they are achieved.
None of this work has been accomplished under pleasant conditions or in a favorable environment. All these achievements were built on the foundation stones that I laid with the single-minded conviction to accomplish the Will of God on earth, for which I mobilized all my enthusiasm and sincerity, and invested everything. Throughout my struggles, I continuously invested for the growth and protection of this righteous work by standing firm against all the winds of evil.
FFWPU, USA