Autobiography: As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen
Chapter 5: True Families Create True People
My Wife, Hak Ja Han Moon
The first time I saw my wife, she was a young girl of fourteen and had just graduated from elementary school. She was a quiet girl who never raised her voice and never sought to bring attention to herself. She always took the same route to and from the church. When she was first introduced to me, I was told she was the daughter of one of our church members, Mrs. Soon Ae Hong.
“What is your name?” I asked her.
“My name is Hak Ja Han,” she answered with a clear voice.
In that moment, before I knew what was happening, I said, “So Hak Ja Han has been born in Korea!” I said this three times in repetition, and then prayed, saying, “God! Thank you for sending to Korea such a wonderful woman as Hak Ja Han.”
I then looked at her, and said: “Hak Ja Han, I’m afraid you are going to have to do a lot of sacrificing.”
All of these words came out of my mouth spontaneously. Later, Mrs. Hong told me that she thought it strange that I would say the same thing three times after meeting her daughter for the first time. My wife has told me that she also remembers that first, short meeting. She told me she remembers everything that I said then as if I had delivered a sermon just for her, and she kept it in her heart. She said she felt like she had received an important revelation about her future that she could not forget.
Her mother was from a faithful Presbyterian family, so she was raised in a Christian home. Her hometown was Jungju, which is my hometown as well, but she had lived in Anju until coming to South Korea during the Korean War. When Mrs. Hong first began attending our church, she lived a very faithful life in Chuncheon and raised her daughter strictly. My wife attended a nursing school that was operated by the Catholic Church. I am told that the rules of this school were so strict that it was as if she were living in a convent. She had a gentle character, and during the time she was raised by her mother, she never went anywhere except to school and to our church.
I was forty at the time, and I sensed that the time had come for me to marry. All I needed to do was wait for God to tell me, “The time has come, so get married,” and I would do as I was told. Seung Do Ji, an elderly woman in our church, began an effort in October 1959 to prepare for my engagement, even though there was still no bride-to-be. Another church member who had been praying for seven years about a wife for me told me one day that she had had a dream in which she saw that Hak Ja Han was my wife.
Another church member, Mrs. Ji, told me about a strange dream she had. “What kind of dream is this?” she exclaimed. “I saw hundreds of cranes come flying. I tried to wave them away with my arms, but they kept coming and they finally covered you with their white feathers. Is this some kind of omen for the future?” The “Hak” in Hak Ja Han is the Chinese character for crane.
Then, Hak Ja Han had a dream in which I appeared and told her, “The day is near, so make preparations.” My wife later told me that in her dream she said to me in a humble tone, “I have been living until now in accordance with the will of God. In the future, as well, I will follow God’s will as His servant, no matter what that will may be.”
A few days after my bride-to-be had this dream, I asked Mrs. Hong to bring her daughter to me. This was our first meeting since I had been introduced to her at age fourteen. That day, I asked this young lady many questions. In every case, she responded with composure and spoke clearly. In this meeting, I asked my wife to draw a picture. Without hesitation, she picked up a pencil and started drawing on a sheet of paper. When she had finished and placed her picture before me, I was very impressed by what I saw. I then looked at her face, and her shy expression was very beautiful. Her heart was as wonderful as the picture she had drawn.
We were engaged on March 27, 1960, and had our marriage ceremony barely two weeks later, on April 11. I did not set a date at the time but when I called Miss Han several days later, I told her, “Tomorrow morning, we will have a marriage ceremony.” She responded simply, “Is that so?” and did not ask any questions or try to speak in opposition. She seemed incapable of opposition. That was how pure and gentle she was. Then as now, when it comes to the will of God, she has a strong determination.
I wore a samo-kwandae, the formal dress of court officials now commonly used in traditional wedding ceremonies, and she wore traditional Korean attire that included a jok-dori bridal tiara. My bride, who was seventeen and more than twenty years younger than I, looked confident and radiant with her tightly closed lips and pretty face.
During the ceremony, I told my bride that she was about to embark on a difficult course.
“I think you are already aware that marrying me will not be like any other marriage. We are becoming husband and wife to complete the mission given to us by God to become True Parents, and not to pursue the happiness of two individuals, as is the case with other people in this world. God wants to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on the earth through a true family. You and I will travel a difficult path to become True Parents who will open the gates to the Kingdom of Heaven for others. It is a path that no one else in history has traveled, so even I don’t know all that it will involve. During the next seven years, you will experience many things that will be difficult to endure. Don’t forget, even for a moment, that the life we live is different from others. Don’t do anything, no matter how trivial, without first discussing it with me, and obey everything I tell you.”
She responded, “My heart is already set. Please do not worry.”
I could see in her expression that she had made a strong determination. Her difficult challenges began the day after our marriage. The first difficulty she faced was that she could not see her mother. My wife, her mother, and her maternal grandmother were all only daughters. As a result, the relationship between mother and daughter was particularly strong. In order to take on her public mission and develop the proper focus, I asked her to live what amounted to an ascetic life for three years. That meant she could not see her mother or any of her relatives for three years. She lived in a room rented from a church member. She came to the church no more than once a day, usually in the evening. So as not to create disruption, she left through the back door. I was often involved in worship services or praying through the night and was rarely at home, but the separation was not for practical reasons. The separation was to establish a spiritual condition of unconditional devotion to her mission. As the outrageous rumors about me continued to circulate, this separation from her relatives and me made it even more difficult for my young wife to endure.
At the time of our marriage, the Unification Church already had been established in 120 communities around Korea. Even in our church, however, there were those who were critical of our marriage. Some envied her, some hated her, and many stories circulated.
As if that were not enough, she lived in someone else’s home. Older women of our church followed me everywhere I went. Eventually, my seemingly cold treatment of my wife brought an end to all the criticism and envy against her. In fact, people began to sympathize with her. For example, many members criticized me when I couldn’t go to see my wife even though she was suffering postpartum illness and was shivering in an unheated room after the birth of our first daughter. Some of them said, “How can he even call himself her husband?”
“You’re going too far, sir,” I was told. “If you married her, you should live with her. What are you doing, making it difficult for her even to see your face?”
The people who had been criticizing my wife one by one began to take her side instead.
In spite of her young age, it was necessary that my wife receive harsh training. During the time we lived together, her environment was relentless. She never had even a single free moment for herself. She constantly was on edge, as if she were walking on a thin layer of ice, wondering, “Will today be peaceful? Will tomorrow be peaceful?” Because she had to attain God’s standard of motherly love, I corrected her for even a single wrong word. Sometimes even her affection for me had to be curtailed for the sake of her eternal mission. It was all necessary for her to become True Mother, but I am sure it caused much grief in her heart.
I might say a word in passing and not think much of it. She, however, had to harmonize herself with my every word, so I am sure her suffering was great. It took us seven years to conform ourselves to each other. I relate these things because the most important thing in a marriage relationship is trust. It is what makes it possible for two people to become as one.
An Incomparable Inner Beauty
My wife and I made a promise to each other after we were married. We agreed that no matter how upset or angry one of us might become, we would not allow anyone to think, “It looks like Reverend and Mrs. Moon had a fight.” We agreed that no matter how many children we might have, we would not let them see any sign that we might have had a fight. Children are God. Children are God with very small hearts. So when a child says, “Mom!” and calls, you must always answer, “What is it?” with a smile.
After going through such a harsh course for seven years, my wife became a wonderful mother. All the gossip about her disappeared, and a peaceful happiness came to our family. My wife gave birth to fourteen children, and she has embraced each one with so much love. When she is away from home on our speaking tours and mission life, she sends letters and postcards to our children every day.
While it was difficult for her to raise fourteen children over the course of over forty years, she never complained. Several times I had to be overseas when my wife was about to give birth. She had to bear such times alone. There were days when I could not do anything for her. Once a member wrote me about her difficult financial situation. There was concern over whether she was getting sufficient nutrition. Even then, my wife never complained about her difficulty. Because I sleep only two or three hours a night, she has dutifully done the same throughout our life together. These sorts of matters pain me to this day.
My wife has such a tremendous heart of love and care that she even gave her wedding ring to someone in need. When she sees someone in need of clothes, she buys that person clothes. When she comes across someone hungry, she buys the person a meal. There have been many times when we have received presents from others that she would give away to someone else without even opening them. Once we were touring the Netherlands and had a chance to visit a factory that processed diamonds. Wanting to express my heart of regret toward my wife for all her sacrifices, I bought her a diamond ring. I didn’t have much money, so I couldn’t buy her a large one. I picked out one I liked and presented it to her. Later, she even gave away that ring. When I saw the ring wasn’t on her finger, I asked her, “Where did the ring go?”
She answered, “You know by now I can’t keep something like that when someone has a greater need.”
Once I saw her pulling out a large wrapping cloth, and she was working quietly to pack some clothes. “What are you going to do with those clothes?” I asked her.
“I have a use for them,” she said.
She filled several wrapping cloths with clothes without telling me what she planned to do with them. When she was finished, she told me she was getting ready to send the clothes to our missionaries working in foreign countries.
“This one’s for Mongolia, this one’s for Africa, and this one’s for Paraguay,” she said.
She had a slightly self-conscious smile that made her look so sweet when she told me. Still today, she takes it upon herself to look after our overseas missionaries.
My wife established the International Relief and Friendship Foundation in 1979. It has done service projects in numerous countries, such as Zaire, Senegal, and Ivory Coast. The foundation gives food to impoverished children, medicine to those who are sick, and clothing to those in need. In Korea, she created the Aewon charity organization in 1994. Its activities include managing a canteen serving free food to the poor and supporting low-wage earners, the handicapped, children taking care of families in place of parents, and others. It also provides aid to the North Korean people. My wife has also been active in women’s organizations for some time. The Women’s Federation for World Peace, which she established in 1992, has branches in some eighty countries and is in general consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations as a nongovernmental organization.
Throughout history, women have been persecuted, but I predict this will change. The coming world will be one of reconciliation and peace based on women’s maternal character, love, and sociability. The time is coming when the power of women will save the world.
Unfortunately today, many women’s organizations apparently believe that standing in opposition to men is the way to demonstrate the power of women. The result is an environment of competition and conflict. The women’s organizations my wife leads, on the other hand, seek to bring about peace on the principle that women should work together, take initiative, and empower one another across traditional lines of race, culture, and religion to create healthy families as the cornerstone of the culture of peace.
The organizations she works with do not call for a liberation of women from men and families. Instead, they call for women to develop and maintain families filled with love. My wife’s dream is to see all women raised as true daughters with filial hearts who can create peace at home, in our communities, in our nations, and in the world. The women’s movement being carried out by my wife serves the goal of true families, which are the root of peace in all areas of life.
During one of the most intense periods of my public work, our children had to live close to half the year without their parents. In our absence, they lived in our home, cared for by church members. Our home was always filled with church members. Every meal in our home had guests at the table, guests who always received priority over our children. Because of this environment, our children grew up with a sense of loneliness that is not experienced by children in other families. Even worse was the suffering they had to endure because of their father. Wherever they went, they were singled out as sons and daughters of “the cult leader Sun Myung Moon.” This suffering sent them through periods of wandering and rebellion, but they have always returned home. We were not able to support them properly as parents, but five have graduated from Harvard University. I could not be more grateful for their courageous accomplishments. Now they are old enough to help me in my work, but even to this day, I am the strict father. I still teach them to become people who do more than I do to serve Heaven and live for the sake of humanity.
My wife is a woman of incredible strength, but the death of our second son, Heung Jin, was difficult for her. It happened in December 1983. She was with me in Kwangju, Korea, participating in a Victory over Communism rally. We received an international phone call that Heung Jin had been in a traffic accident and had been transported to a hospital. We boarded a flight the next day and went directly to New York, but Heung Jin was lying unconscious on the hospital bed.
A truck traveling over the speed limit as it came down a hill tried to brake and swerved into the opposite lane, where Heung Jin was driving. Two of his best friends were in the car with him at the time. Heung Jin cut the wheel to the right so the driver’s side took most of the impact from the truck. By doing so, he saved the lives of his two friends. I went to the place near our home where the accident had occurred, and the black tire marks veering off to the right were still visible.
Heung Jin finally went to the heavenly world in the early morning of January 2. He had turned seventeen just a month before. Words cannot describe my wife’s sorrow when she had to send a child she had raised with love to the heavenly world before her. She could not cry, however. In fact, it was important that she not shed any tears. We are people who know the world of the eternal spirit. A person’s spirit does not disappear like so much dust, just because the physical life is lost. The soul ascends to the world of spirit. As parents, the pain of knowing that we would never be able to see or touch our beloved child in this world was almost unbearable. My wife could not cry; she could only lovingly put her hands on the hearse that carried Heung Jin’s body.
Shortly before the accident, Heung Jin had been betrothed to Hoon Sook Pak, who was studying ballet. I had to speak to Hoon Sook about his departure from this world and what she wanted to do.
I told her I knew it wouldn’t be easy or fair to her parents if she chose to live alone. I told her it was best to forget the betrothal had ever happened.
Hoon Sook was adamant, however. “I am aware of the existence of the spirit world,” she said. “Please let me spend my life with Heung Jin.”
In the end, Hoon Sook became our daughter-in-law fifty days after Heung Jin’s departure. My wife and I will never forget the way she smiled brightly as she held a portrait photo of Heung Jin throughout the spiritual marriage ceremony.
It would seem that my wife would be devastated each time she faced such difficult situations, but she always remained unshaken. Even in the most difficult and unbearable circumstances, my wife never lost her serene smile. She always crossed over life’s most difficult peaks success fully. When church members ask my wife’s advice on raising their own children, she tells them: “Be patient and wait. The period when children wander is only temporary. No matter what they do, embrace them, love them, and wait for them. Children will always return to the love of their parents.”
I have never raised my voice toward my wife. This is not because of my character, but because my wife has never given me cause to do so. Throughout our life together, she has labored to care for me with complete, loving devotion. She is even the one to care for my hair. So this great saint of world affairs is also the best barber in the world. Now that I am old I make many new demands on her, and she always responds. If I ask her to cut my toenails, she will do it cheerfully. My toenails are mine, but I can’t see them very well. She sees them perfectly well, though. It’s a strange thing. The older I become, the more precious my wife is to me.
Promises That Must Never Be Broken
During our matching and marriage ceremonies, I ask the brides and grooms to make promises to each other that must never be broken. First, a husband and wife must always trust and love each other. Second, they must not cause any pain to the heart of their partner. Third, they must educate their children and grandchildren to maintain sexual purity. Fourth, all members of their family must help and encourage each other so that they become a true ideal family. Chastity before marriage and fidelity in marriage are of utmost importance. This is what I teach so people can live to their highest potential as human beings, creating and maintaining healthy families.
Marriage is more than a simple coming together of a man and woman. It is a precious ceremony of commitment to carry on God’s work of creation. Marriage is the path by which a man and woman become as one, create new life, and establish true love. Through marriage, a new future is created: Societies are formed; nations are built. God’s world of peace is realized with married families at the center. It is in the family that God’s Kingdom of Heaven is brought about.
So husbands and wives must be centers of peace. Not only must there be love between the husband and wife, but the couple must also be able to bring harmony to their extended families. It is not enough that the husband and wife live well together in love. All the relatives must love each other as well. I tell brides and grooms to have many children. To bear many children and raise them is God’s blessing. It is unthinkable that human beings apply their own standard of judgment and arbitrarily abort precious lives given to them by God. All life born into this world embodies God’s will. All life is noble and precious, so it must be cared for and protected.
Naturally, a married husband and wife must maintain mutual trust nd nurture their love. The promise I emphasize the most to people preparing to marry is “teach your children to maintain sexual purity.”
This is an obvious promise, but it has become difficult to keep in today’s society. The worse the world becomes, however, the more important it is to strictly keep the promise of sexual purity.
The perfection of human beings and peace in the world come about through the family. The purpose of religion is for everyone to become people of goodness who can then bring about an ideal world of peace. No matter how much politicians may put their heads together, they will not bring about peace. Formidable military power will not bring peace. The starting point for bringing about peace is the family.
When I first arrived in America in 1971, the wind of promiscuous free sex was blowing across the country, and the entire society was in the midst of confusion. Young people who had received wonderful educations were being destroyed one by one. Sexual immorality was so bad that it was becoming the norm. Sexually transmitted diseases were beginning to skyrocket.
The seriousness of the problem was compounded by politicians, academics, and clergy. They knew about this problem, but most of them ignored it. They tried to look away from the ugly reality because they themselves had not maintained sexual purity. People who are not sexually pure themselves cannot force their children to be so.
The degradation of sexual morality among adults destroys families and leads to the ruin of children. Immorality and licentiousness in the personal lives of adults ultimately destroy the lives of their children. The reason today’s society does not have a level of happiness to match its level of material affluence is that families are being destroyed. To save families, adults must first live proper lives. Then, it is possible to raise children in sexual purity.
The mother is the fortress that protects the family. No matter how much society may change, the family can stand as a healthy and peaceful family only if the mother has the heart to sacrifice and serve. It is in such a family that beautiful children can grow. In educating our children, what the children see and learn in the family is most important. A crab that walks sideways cannot tell its offspring to walk straight ahead. The parents must show a good example. True children come from true families. Truth is always very simple.
The most difficult aspect of family life is raising children properly. We give birth to them in love and raise them in love, but they don’t necessarily grow up the way their parents desire. What’s worse, today’s materialistic civilization is destroying the innocent minds of young people. Young people who should be growing up to become responsible adults capable of extraordinary things are being lost to drugs. Drug-induced states make people lose touch with their own spirit. Young people who have lost their spirits eventually can only fall into crime and sexual immorality.
During adolescence, children think everything should be centered only on themselves, and so there is the tendency to rebel against things the parents may say. If the parent does not respond with understanding, there is the possibility that the child may go to self-centered extremes. On the other hand, a child in adolescence can be deeply moved by anything that seems to connect with his heart. Perhaps on an autumn day, the child will see a persimmon fall from a tree that has lost all its leaves. The child cannot explain it, but somehow it connects with his heart and he will smile and experience happiness. This is a sign that God’s original character is dwelling in his heart.
But if children are caught up in the emotions of love during adolescence, their perceptions can be clouded and their power of judgment diminished. When an adolescent boy and girl meet and start talking with each other, they can feel flushed and there may be a change in their heart rate. If their minds are not brought into harmony with God’s standard in that moment, they will surely be moved in the direction of self centeredness. They lose the means with which to control their bodies.
During adolescence, our cells open wide all the doors of love in both the physical body and the spirit. The desires of our mind and the desires of our body are meant to become one and function together. When we acquire the nose of love, we start to love smells that we used to hate. When we acquire the mouth of love, we start to love tastes that we used to hate. We want to listen all night to the stories of love. We want to keep touching the person we love. Adolescents start to think they can be happy simply by entering into a love relationship.
However, the doors of love are designed by God and are to open only when the time is right. Children must understand that they need to wait for the right time. Parents must teach these things to their adolescent children very carefully. Love is a process by which we grow to resemble God. Despite what the world may tell us, it is not something to be enjoyed anytime we please.
During adolescence, a child may want to try really hard to copy the activity in a thrilling movie. People ask, “What’s wrong with that?” It is wrong because irresponsible actions lead to destruction. When children mature and acquire wisdom and knowledge, they can control their social and environmental experiences and are truly free to do so, but not during adolescence.
Why do we say, “Do not give a knife to a child”? It is because the child would wave it around. The child might understand how to cut with a knife, but he cuts without control. The child might even cut his mother’s fingers. Because children do not yet fully understand consequences, we do not give them knives.
The combination of parents not teaching their children the value of purity and children rebelling against their parents leads to broken families. Because of this, societies are being broken. Because of this, nations are being destroyed. Because of this, humanity is being destroyed.
To Love Is to Give and Forget
The family is the only institution created by God. It is the school of love where people can learn how to love each other and live together in peace, and it is the training center where we practice how to build a palace of peace in the world. It is where we learn how to become a husband or wife who will live for the sake of our spouse and how to become a husband and wife who will travel on the eternal path of love. The family is the base camp for world peace, and it must be such that the children will say, “We have never seen our mother and father fight.”
We come up against all sorts of things in life. Even the most loving couple can have times when they may bicker with each other, become angry, and raise their voices. When the children come into the room, however, it all must stop immediately. No matter how angry a spouse may be, he must relate to his spouse in peace when the children are present. The children must grow up thinking their family is filled with joy and their parents always love each other.
Parents are like a second God to their children. If you ask your young children, “Whom do you like better—God or Mommy and Daddy?”—and they say they like their mom and dad better, then that means they also like God. The most precious education takes place in the family. You won’t find happiness and peace in some other place. The family is intended to be the Kingdom of Heaven. It would not matter if a person possesses incredible wealth and fame or even possesses the whole world. If all is not right with that person’s family, then he cannot be happy. The Kingdom of Heaven begins in the family. If a husband and wife are bound together in true love and they build an ideal family, this will connect directly with the world.
I saw something interesting when I was in Danbury prison. We were using a bulldozer to level a slope and make a tennis court. When it rained, we would wait for it to stop, and start up again when the sun came out. This process of starting and stopping went on for months. We had a stretch of rain for one period, and we couldn’t work for twenty consecutive days. When the rain cleared and we went out to start the work again, we found that some kind of waterfowl had created a nest where there were some water weeds. It was a place not more than a few meters from where the prisoners would walk for exercise.
At first, we didn’t even realize that the bird was there. Its camouflage was so perfect that the bird’s feathers could easily be mistaken for the water weeds. Once the bird laid its eggs, though, we could see there was a bird in among the grass. The bird was sitting on some eggs that looked like pieces of black gravel. Once the chicks hatched, the mother would go find some food, bring it back to the nest, and put it in the beaks of the chicks. When the mother was returning to the nest with food, however, she never flew directly to the nest. She would land a little distance from the nest and then walk the rest of the way. Each time, she approached the nest from a different direction. This was her wisdom to make it more difficult for others to find out the location of the nest where the chicks were.
The chicks ate the food their mother brought them and grew larger. Sometimes, when a prisoner would walk near the nest, the mother would fly out and chase him away with her sharp beak. She was afraid the prisoner might harm her chicks.
The waterbird understood the true love of parents. True love is willing to give up its own life, and there is no calculation there. The heart of the bird that was willing to sacrifice its life, if necessary, to protect its offspring was true love. Parents go the path of love, no matter how difficult it becomes. A parent is prepared, if needed, to bury his life for the sake of love, and this is true love.
The essence of love is to cast aside any thought of having others live for one’s self; it is to live for the sake of others and give for the whole. Love gives, but then forgets even the fact that it has given and continues to give without ceasing. This is a love that gives in joy. It is the heart that a mother feels when she takes her infant in her arms and lets it feed from her breast.
Parents will suffer for their children until it seems their bones are going to melt away, yet they never feel that the work is difficult. That is how much they love their children. True love begins with God and comes to us from God. So when the parents say to their married children, “When you like each other, it is because of the grace of your parents,” the children must be able to respond, “If you had not found such a spouse for me, I don’t know what I would have done.”
The family is a bundle of love. When we go to the Kingdom of Heaven and unpack that bundle, a wonderful father and mother will jump out. Beautiful children will jump out. A benevolent grandfather and grandmother will jump out. This is the bundle of love. The family is the space in which God’s ideal is realized and the place where we can see the completion of God’s work. God’s will is to bring about a world in which love is made real, and the family is the place where God’s love overflows.
We only need to hear the word family for us to begin smiling. This is because the family is overflowing with true love that truly lives for the sake of all members. True love gives love, then forgets even the fact that it gave, and then gives again. The love that has parents living for their children and grandparents for the grandchildren is true love. The love that lets a person give up his or her life for the country is true love.
The Peaceful Family Is the Building Block of Heaven
Many Western people live truly lonely lives. Their children leave home once they turn eighteen, and the parents may only get to see their faces at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Many children never visit their parents to just find out how they are doing. Once people marry, they live with their spouse, independent from their family, until their parents become so old they can no longer take care of themselves. At that point, they move into a nursing home. So it is understandable that some Westerners envy the culture of the East. Many elderly people in the West think, “In the East, the grandparents live in the family as the senior members of the family, and it is really wonderful. The children respect their old parents. This is how people are supposed to live. What good is it to be lying in a nursing home, not able to see my children, not even knowing what day it is, just staying alive?”
Unfortunately, though, the Eastern family structure is also gradually deteriorating. We too are abandoning traditions that have been handed down to us for thousands of years. We have thrown away our traditional clothing, our food, and our family structure. The number of senior citizens living alone in Korea is on the rise. Each time I see stories in the news of senior citizens alone, it makes me sad. The family is where generations live together. If family members are scattered and the parents are left alone, then that is no longer a family. The extended family system is a beautiful Korean tradition.
I recommend that three generations live together as one family. I do so, not simply because it is a way of maintaining our country’s tradition. When a husband and wife have a child, they pass on all they can to that child. There is a limit, however, to how much the parents can pass on. The parents represent the present and the children the future. The grandparents represent the past. So it is only when the grandparents, parents, and children live together that the children can inherit all the fortune of the past and present. To love and respect your grandfather is to inherit the history of the past and to learn from the world of the past. The children learn precious wisdom from their parents on how to live in the present, while the parents prepare for the future by loving their children.
The grandfather is in a position to represent God. No matter how intelligent a young man may be, he cannot know all the secrets of this big world. Young people cannot know all the different secrets of life that come to us as we grow older. This is the reason the grandfather represents the history of the family. The grandfather is a precious teacher who passes on to the grandchildren all the wisdom he has acquired through the experiences he has accumulated during the course of his life.
The world’s oldest grandfather is God. So a life of receiving the grand father’s love and of living for the sake of the grandfather is a life of coming to understand God’s love and of living for His sake. We need to maintain such a tradition in order to open the secret storehouse of God’s Kingdom and receive His treasure of love. Any country that ignores its old people abandons its national character and ignores its roots.
When autumn comes, the chestnut tree gradually loses its moisture, and its leaves begin to fall. The outer shell of the chestnut falls off, and even the inner shell that surrounds the actual nut dries up. This is the cycle of life. Human beings are the same way. We are born as infants, grow up on the love of our parents, meet a wonderful partner, and get married. All this occurs in the chain of life made up of love. In the end, we become like chestnuts becoming dry in the autumn. Old people are not a separate category of people. We all become old. We must not treat old people disrespectfully, no matter how senile they may become.
There is a saying, “Anything can be accomplished when there is harmony in the home.” When there is peace in the family, everything goes well. The peaceful family is the building block of the Kingdom of Heaven. The family operates on the power of love. If we love the universe as we love our families, then there is nothing to stop us from going anywhere we want. God exists in the center of love, as the Parent of the entire universe. That is why the love in the family needs to link directly to God. When the family is completed in love, the universe will be completed.
Ten Years of Tears Melt a Father-in-Law’s Heart
Not long ago the Korean media carried a story about a Japanese woman living in Milyang, Korea, who received an award for her filial service to her family. The article said that the woman had come to Korea as the wife of a Korean man who had met her through an introduction by a certain religious group and married her despite opposition from his family. The Japanese wife had cared for her Korean mother-in-law, who had difficulty moving around, and her aged father-in-law with great devotion. The people in the community then recommended her to be recognized for her filial actions, the article said.
The mother-in-law was paralyzed from the waist down and classified by the Korean public health authorities as being in the second highest level of physical handicap. From the first day of her marriage, the daughter-in-law carried her mother-in-law on her back to different hospitals so she could be treated. Because she spent so much time devoting herself to her parents-in-law, she rarely had time to visit her own family in Japan. When she heard that she was going to be awarded for her actions, she protested, saying she was merely doing what was right.
This Japanese daughter-in-law in the news is Kazuko Yashima. She came to Korea through the international and intercultural marriages of our church. These are marriages where men and women are matched across religious, national, or racial differences. There are many young men in Korea’s rural areas who cannot find brides. The brides who come to Korea in these international and intercultural marriages do so unconditionally.
They care for their aged parents-in-law, inspire their husbands to have strength and hope, and bear and raise children. They go to live in the rural communities that Koreans have left behind because it is so difficult to live there. What a wonderful and precious thing they are doing. This program has been going on for more than thirty years.
Thousands of women from other countries have settled in Korea through such international and intercultural marriages. In rural Korean communities where the young people have left for the cities and the sound of a baby’s cry has not been heard for a long time, the old people are overjoyed to see the birth of babies to these couples, and they treat the babies as if they were their own grandchildren. In one elementary school in Choong-cheong Province, more than half the eighty students are children of the international and intercultural marriages arranged by our church. The school’s principal has said the school will have to close if its student body declines any further, and so he prays daily that our church members will not move away from the community. In Korea today, some twenty thousand children of international and intercultural marriages are enrolled in elementary schools around the country.
Every year around the anniversary of Korea’s independence from Japan, television news programs carry stories about some very special Japanese who stand before the camera and apologize for the actions of their country in Korea during the period of occupation. They them selves did not commit those crimes, but they apologize for the actions of their ancestors. Most of these people are members of our church who have torn down the walls separating nations by means of international and intercultural marriages. Because of their actions, the walls in the hearts of Koreans who think of the Japanese as our enemies are increasingly crumbling.
In 1988, a young and well-educated man who had joined our church wanted to get married and sought to be matched. He was matched with a Japanese woman. The father of this young man reacted very negatively to the match.
“Of all the women in the world, you have to marry a Japanese?” he said.
During the Japanese occupation, his father had been one of the Koreans conscripted into forced labor and taken to a coal mine in Iwate Prefecture in northwestern Japan. He risked his life to escape the mine and walked for well over a month to Shimonoseki, where he was able to board a ship back to Korea. He harbored a tremendous hatred for Japan. On hearing the news of his son’s match to a Japanese woman, he threatened to disown him.
“You betray the family,” he said. “I will have your name taken out of the family register. No woman from that enemy country will ever set foot in this house, so take her and go away. She is not right for you, so I don’t care whether you go or whether you die.”
The father was adamant. The young man, however, went ahead and did what he felt was right. He married the Japanese woman and took his bride to his hometown in Nagan, Korea. The father would not even open the front gate for them. Sometime later, he reluctantly accepted their marriage, but his persecution of his daughter-in-law continued. Every time she seemed to have difficulty with something, he would say, “That’s nothing, compared with what your people did to me. You should have expected this much when you decided to marry into our family.”
Every time the relatives would gather for a major holiday, the father in-law would have her sit near him, and he would tell her all the things that were done to him in the Iwate coal mine. Each time, the daughter in-law would respond by saying, “Father, I apologize to you on behalf of Japan. I am sorry.” She would shed tears and ask for his forgiveness. For as long as he would vent his anger at her, she would listen to him tell the same stories over and over until he was finished, and she would continue to apologize.
This went on for about ten years, and then it stopped. Relatives noticed that his cold attitude toward the daughter-in-law had become much warmer and that he even seemed to like her. So they asked him, “Why are you behaving so kindly toward your daughter-in-law. She’s a Japanese woman. Don’t you hate her?”
“I don’t hate her anymore,” he said. “All the hatred that had accumulated in my heart has gone away.
“I never hated her,” he added. “I was just venting on her all the hatred that was in me for having been conscripted to work in the mine. Because of her, the hatred has all disappeared. From now, I’m going to be kind to her, because she’s my daughter-in-law.”
The daughter-in-law paid for the sins of the Japanese. This is an example of the path of redemption that will lead humankind into a world of peace.
The True Meaning of Marriage
International and intercultural marriages are the quickest way to bring about an ideal world of peace. Things that would take seemingly forever can be accomplished like miracles through these types of marriages in just two or three generations. People should marry across national and cultural boundaries with people from countries they consider to be their enemies so that the world of peace can come that much more quickly. A person may hate people from a certain country or culture and think he never wants to set eyes on them. But if someone from that country becomes his spouse, then the person is halfway to becoming a person of the new country. All the hatred melts away. If this is repeated for two or three generations, the roots of hatred can be eliminated.
White and black people will marry each other; Japanese will marry Koreans and people from Africa. Many millions are entering into such international and intercultural marriages. A completely new lineage is being created as a result. A new kind of human being that transcends white, black, and yellow is being born. I am not just referring to marriages across international boundaries. The same is true for marrying people from other religions or denominations. In fact, marriages between people of different religions are even more difficult than international marriages. Even if two religious groups have been fighting each other for centuries, it is possible to bring harmony between them by having their followers marry each other. In such a marriage, one spouse will not close himself off from the other just because she was raised in a different tradition.
It is most important to teach young people about the sanctity and value of marriage. Korea today has one of the lowest birthrates in the world. Not to have children is dangerous. There is no future for a country that has no descendants. I teach young people that they should remain sexually pure during their youth, receive the marriage Blessing, and then have at least three children. Children are blessings given to us by God. When we bear children and raise them, we are raising citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven. That is why it is a great sin to live immorally and to abort babies conceived in this lifestyle.
We marry not for ourselves but for the sake of our partners. When looking for a spouse, it is wrong to look only for a beautiful person or for a person living well. Human beings must live for the sake of each other. We should apply this principle to marriage, too. No matter how uneducated or homely your prospective spouse may be, you should marry with a heart that you will love him or her even more than if the spouse were educated and beautiful. God’s love is the most precious of all blessings. In marriage, we receive that blessing of love and put it into practice in our own lives. We must understand this precious meaning of marriage, conduct our lives in marriage in the context of true love, and bring about true families.
World peace is not such a huge undertaking. It takes peaceful families to create peaceful societies and eliminate conflict among countries. This will lead to world peace. This shows the importance of families that are intact and the immense responsibility such families must bear. The thinking that says “It’s enough that I live well and that my family lives well” is completely alien to me.
Marriage is not something that involves just the bride and groom. Marriage creates a relationship between two families, and it brings reconciliation between clans and countries. Each accepts the other’s different culture and overcomes the resentment and hatred built up through history. When a Korean and Japanese marry, it contributes to reconciliation between the two countries; when a white person and a black person marry, it contributes to reconciliation between the two races. The children of such marriages represent harmony because they inherit the lineage of two races. They represent a new beginning for humanity that transcends the races. When this continues for a few generations, division and hostility among nations, races, and religions will disappear, and humankind will become one family living in a world of peace.
In recent years, more and more Koreans are marrying foreigners, and we see more families with people from different nationalities and religions. Koreans have even coined a phrase for it that means multicultural families. It is not easy for a man and woman who have been raised in different cultures to create a family and live with love for each other. Particularly in Korea, which tradition ally has had a homogeneous culture, the partners in such marriages need to make extra effort to understand and care for each other. The reason our members who enter into international and intercultural marriages succeed is because they live together centering on God.
Various social welfare groups in Korea try to encourage the success of multicultural families by offering programs that teach Korean language and culture. Such efforts will be useless, however, unless our concept of marriage changes. Whoever thinks, “Why did I marry this man? If I hadn’t married this man, I would have had a better life,” is setting the tone for a marriage that will be hell. Coming to a correct understanding of marriage is more important than learning Korean language and culture.
Marriage is not a simple matter of a man and woman of marriageable age coming together and combining their two lives. Marriage is some thing built on the basis of sacrifice. The man must live for the sake of the woman, and the woman for the sake of the man. As you continue to live for the sake of your spouse, your selfish mind disappears completely. The heart that seeks to sacrifice this way is the heart of love. Love is not a man and woman meeting each other and having a good time. Love is offering up your life. If you marry, you must do so on the basis of your determination that your life is for your spouse.
True Love Is Found in True Families
No matter how much a man and woman may love each other, a complete and happy family must have parents who act as a protective shield around the home, and there must be least one child for the parents to love. When a family is protected, it becomes a nesting place for happiness. Even a person with great success in society will have an unhappy family if this protection collapses.
The basis of love is the heart that sacrifices everything for the sake of the other. The reason parental love is true love is that parents are willing to give everything to their children, and when they have given every thing, they want to give even more. Parents who love their children do not even remember what they have given. No parent would keep track of all the shoes and clothes he bought for his child and say, “This is how much I spent on you.” Instead, a parent gives everything he has and says, “I wish I could do more for you than I have, and I’m sorry that I cannot.”
As a child, I would follow my father around as he tended to his bee colonies, and I saw how the bees behaved. When a bee flying around a flower garden caught the fragrance of a flower, it would place its legs firmly on the flower. It would then stick its nose deep into the flower, so that its rear end was pointing upward while it sucked up the nectar. If you grabbed the bee on its rear end, it would not let go of the flower. It risks its life to keep its hold on the flower.
The love of parents cultivating a family is like the honeybee attached to the flower. Even if a parent should lose his own life, he will never let go of the bond of love that ties him to his child. Parents will lay down their lives for the sake of the child and then later forget that they had done so. This is the true love of parents. No matter how far or dangerous the path may be, the parent will gladly travel it. Parental love is the greatest love in the world.
A person can live in a wonderful house and eat exotic foods from the mountains and the oceans, but if he has no parents, there will be a large void in his heart. A person who has grown up without receiving parental love has a loneliness and emptiness in his heart that cannot be filled with anything else. The family is the place where we receive true love and learn true love. Children who do not receive true love when they are young live their entire lives hungering for love and suffer emotional pain. Not only that, they don’t have the opportunity to learn the lofty moral duties that they must fulfill for the family and society. True love is a value that cannot be learned any place other than in the family.
A true family is a place where a husband and wife each love the other and live for the sake of the other, as if the spouse were his or her mother, father, or sibling. It is a place where the husband loves his wife as he loves God, and the wife respects her husband as she respects God. We cannot forsake our siblings, no matter the difficulties we my face. Neither can we forsake our mothers. So the term divorce cannot even exist. The husband is in the place of the father and older brother to the wife. Just as a wife could never forsake her father or older brother, she can never forsake her husband. In the same way, a husband could never forsake his wife. A true family is a place where each spouse lives with the acknowledgment of the absolute value of the partner. It doesn’t matter if a husband and wife come from different races or cultures. If they have formed a family after having received God’s love, then there can be no conflicts of culture among the children born into this family. These children will love and value the culture and tradition of their mother’s country and father’s country with the same love they have for each parent. Resolving conflicts in multicultural families is not a matter of providing them with particular knowledge. Instead, it is a matter of the parents of these families raising their children in true love. The parents’ love soaks its way into the flesh and bone of the children and becomes the fertilizer that enables the children to accept their mother’s country and father’s country as one and become wonderful citizens of the world.
The family is the school where love for humanity is taught and learned. When children who are raised in the warm love of their parents go out into the world, they will care for people in difficulty in the manner they learned in their home. People raised in loving relationships with their own brothers and sisters will go into society and share their caring hearts with their neighbors. People raised in love will look upon each person they meet in the world as a member of their own family. The starting point toward a true family is the heart of love that treats strangers as family and shares with them.
Another reason the family is important is that it expands to become the world. A true family is the basis for forming a true society, true nation, and true world. It is the starting point toward a world of peace that is God’s Kingdom. Parents will work for their children until their bones melt way. They are not working just to feed their own children, however. A person whose heart overflows with love is capable of working for the sake of others and God.
The family is where we receive so much love that it overflows from our hearts. The family protects its members in its embrace, but its function is not to prevent love from getting out. In fact, the love in the family should overflow into the surrounding community. No matter how much love may overflow, the love in the family will never go dry. This is because it is received from God. The love we receive from God is such that we can continue to dig it out but never see the bottom. In fact, the more we dig, the more love wells up like pure spring water. Anyone who has been raised in this love can lead a true life.
Leaving Behind a Legacy of Love
A true life is a life in which we abandon our private desires and live for the public good. This is a truth taught by all major religious leaders past and present, East and West, whether it be Jesus, Buddha, or the Prophet Mohammed. It is a truth that is so widely known that, sadly, it seems to have been devalued. The passage of time or changes in the world cannot diminish the value of this truth. This is because the essence of human life never changes, even in the midst of rapid change all around the world.
The teacher with whom we have the closest relationship is our heart. Our heart is more precious to us than our closest friends and even more precious than our parents. So, as we live our lives, we need periodically to ask our hearts, “Am I living a good life now?” Anyone can hear his heart speaking to him. If he comes to the realization that his heart is his master, he “polishes” his heart and maintains a close relationship with his heart throughout his life. If a person hears the sound of his heart tearfully sobbing, then he needs to stop immediately whatever he is doing. Anything that makes the heart suffer will ruin him. Anything that makes the heart sad will eventually make the person fall into sadness.
For a person to polish his heart to the point that it becomes as clear as crystal, he absolutely must spend time in direct conversation with his heart in an environment where he is away from the world and alone with his heart. It will be a time of intense loneliness, but the moment that we become close to our hearts is the time of prayer and meditation. It is a time when we can take ownership over our hearts. When we isolate ourselves from the noise around us and allow our thoughts to settle, we can see into the deepest parts of our hearts. It will take a lot of time and effort to go all the way down to where the heart has settled. It will not happen in a day.
Just as love is not for our own sake, so happiness and peace are not for ourselves. Just as love can never exist without a partner, happiness and peace cannot exist without a partner. All these can exist only in the context of a relationship with a partner. Nothing can be accomplished if we love alone. We cannot be happy alone or speak of peace alone. Since a partner is what enables us to have happiness and peace, the partner is more important than we are.
Think about a mother carrying a baby on her back, sitting at an entrance to the subway, selling homemade snacks to the people passing by. To be at that spot in time for the morning rush hour, she will have spent the whole night preparing the snacks and put her fussing child on her back to come to the station. People passing by might say, “Oh, you could get along well if only you didn’t have that child to care for,” but it is for the sake of the child that the mother lives her life. The child on her back is the mother’s lifeline.
Today people can expect to live about eighty years. Eighty years of joy, anger, sorrow, happiness, and all the other emotions mixed together may seem like a long time. But if we take away the private time that a person spends sleeping, working, and eating, and then the time we spend talking, laughing, and having fun with family members and friends, attending weddings and funerals, and time spent lying sick in bed, only about seven years will remain. A person may live eighty years but only spend about seven years living for the public good.
Life is like a rubber band. The same seven years, given to two different people, can either be spent as seven years or as seventy. Time, by itself, is empty. We need to put things in it. The same is true about a person’s life. Everyone wants to live his life with a comfortable place to sleep and good things to eat. Eating and sleeping, however, are simply ways of letting time slip by. In the moment that a person has lived out his life and his body is laid to rest in the ground, all wealth and glory become nothing more than a bubble and disappear at once. Only the seven years that he lived for the public good will remain and be remembered by posterity. Those seven years are the trace that is left in the world of a life that lasted eighty years.
We do not come into this world, or depart from it, of our own accord. We have no ability to make choices with regard to our fate. We are born, though we did not choose to be born. We live, though we did not choose to live. We die, though we do not choose to die. We have no authority over these aspects of our lives, so how can we boast that we are somehow better than others? We cannot be born by our own wish, possess things that will forever be our own, or avoid death. So any boasting on our part would only be pathetic.
Even if we rise to a position higher than others, the honor is only temporary. Even if we gather more possessions than others, we must leave them all behind at the gates of death. Money, honor, and knowledge all flow away from us in time, and all disappear with the passing years. No matter how noble and great a person might be, his is nothing more than a pitiable life that will end the moment he loses hold of his lifeline.
Human beings have always struggled to understand who we are and why we must live. We must realize that, just as we were not born of our own accord, so also we are not meant to live our lives for our own sakes.
So the answer to the question of how we should live our lives is simple. We were born of love, so we must live by traveling the path of love. Our lives were created by receiving the boundless love of our parents, so we must live our entire lives repaying that love. In the course of our lives, this is the only value we can choose on our own. The success or failure of our lives depends on how much love we are able to pack into those eighty years that are given to us.
At some point, everyone will shed his physical body like old clothing and die. In Korean, “to return” is a common expression for dying. To return means to go back to where we came from, that is, to go back to our fundamental roots. Everything in the universe moves in cycles. The white snow that collects on the mountains will melt and flow down the slopes, first forming streams and then a river, and eventually go into the ocean. The water that flows into the ocean will absorb the heat of the sun’s rays, become water vapor, go back up into the sky, and prepare to become either snowflakes or drops of rain. To return to our original place in this way is what we call death. Then, where do we human beings return to when we die? Body and heart come together to bring about human life, and death is the act of shedding the body. So we go to the place from which the heart came.
We cannot talk about life without also talking about death. We must accurately understand what death is, even if we do so only to under stand the purpose of life. The type of life that has true value can be understood only by the person who finds himself in a difficult situation when death appears imminent and he cries out to Heaven in desperation, pleading to be allowed to live even just one more day. If our days are as precious as this, how should we live them? What are the things we must accomplish before we cross over the boundary line of death?
The most important is not to commit sin and live a life that is without shadows. There is much religious and philosophical debate over what constitutes sin, but what is clear is that we should not engage in acts that give pause to our conscience. When we do things that give us a guilty conscience, it always leaves a shadow in our heart.
The next most important thing is to resolve to do significantly more work than others have done. All of our lives are limited, whether that limit is sixty years, seventy years, or some other time period. Depend ing on how we use that time, we can live a life that is two or three times more abundant than others. If you cut your time into segments and then live each segment in a meaningful way, your life will be truly precious. Live your life with an attitude of devotion and diligence, telling yourself, for example, that you will plant two or three trees in the time it takes others to plant one. Do not live for yourself. You must live not for yourself but for others; not for your family but for your neighbors; not for your own country but for the world. All sin in the world comes about when the individual is put first. Individual desires and ambitions harm a person’s neighbors and ruin the society at large.
Everything in the world will eventually pass. The parents we love, the husband or wife we love, and the children we love will all pass away. All that remains with us at the end of our lives is death. When a person dies, only his legacy remains. Please consider for a moment what you can do to show that you lived a life of value. The possessions and social position you have accumulated during your life will pass away from you. Once you cross the river of death, such things will have no meaning. Because we were born in love and lived our lives in love, love is also the only thing that remains with us when we are in our graves. We receive our lives in love, live by sharing love, and return into the midst of love. It is important that we live our lives in a way that we can leave a legacy of love behind us.