When you are asked what is the most valuable thing in
the world, you will name your life. Your life is the greatest and most important
thing to you. However, if you think again, isn't there something greater than
life itself'? Your answer would be love; it could be nothing else. No knowledge,
no authority, no power - nothing is more desirable than love.
We want to live eternally - nothing less than that. But if you were asked
what you would want to live with through that eternity, your answer could only
be love. Life is in your possession already. If you live on through eternity,
then you will have already attained your purpose or desire. But you need
something else. You don't want to live without love.
There must be something corresponding in God, because He is the Creator of
life. Can God enjoy His life without love? No. However omniscient or omnipotent
He may be, by Himself alone He cannot enjoy happiness. He cannot be happy, He
cannot have an ideal or feel joy.
Suppose you see a man dancing around and shouting out for joy. He is all by
himself. There is no one else he is talking to or who is responding to him. He
has no object with him. We would call this man crazy. You say you are happy
because you have your parents, your husband or wife, your sweetheart. You say to
someone, "I am happy because I have you with me." Any ideal, joy, happiness or
anything of virtue cannot be achieved without having an object. Strictly
speaking, you are not happy because a flower exists, but because you see the
flower. The flower means something to you. You are not happy because there is
music, but you are happy because you hear the sounds. You are not happy because
smells exist, but because you can smell fragrances. You are not happy just
because there is someone else beside you, but because you can see him, touch
him, talk to him. You can finally say that in the world where you do not have an
object to respond to you, there is no joy, no ideal , no happiness. If that is
true with human beings, then the same applies to God.
God became grieved due to the human fall. What element in Him could allow
that? What could respond to the fall? If you don't have a person united with
you, you have nothing to lose. Without ever having met that person you cannot
even say you are sad. It's only after you have lost your object where he had
been before that you feel unhappiness and sadness.
Then in what position were human beings originally in relation to God that He
was made so sad at the loss of them due to the fall? We can imagine that human
beings were in the responsive position of object to God as the Subject. When we
look through all the creation, we can find nothing greater than man; we are the
masterpiece of God's creation. Looking into ourselves, we find that our bodies
are full of mysteries. Even the appearance of the human being has something
great and mysterious about it. God being the Lord and Absolute One, He would
have chosen the one of greatest capacity in His creation to be one with Him.
That must be man. If God exists, the Subject of life, then the object of His
life must be man. Since God is eternal, He would not want man to be an ephemeral
being. The eternal God must have wanted man to be eternal also.
We say that God created man as His object of life. But man was more than that
to God - not just an object to look at, to walk with. We were created to be
objects of His love. Nothing less, nothing more, nothing other than love.
After creation, God must have looked around at everything, and He saw that
all the creatures were beautiful and good. When he saw the beautiful flowers
blooming in the field, it must have brought joy to Him; chirping birds, flying
butterflies - all these made Him happy. He could say that He was happy, all was
good. It was because He loved those things. Anything you look at - the flowers
or anything else - when you say, "It's cute," "It's lovely " - then you are
loving that thing already. You have pet animals and love them. In America I have
often witnessed people walking with pet animals and even kissing them. If you
can love flowers, birds and animals, how much more should you love human beings!
If you smile at the puppy, can it smile back at you? If you talk to a bird and
tell him to sing with you, would he do that, could he understand you? However
beautiful the flowers may be, if you want them to dance with you, would they do
that? But with another person, if you want him to do something with you, he can
respond to you. If you say, "Let's dance, let's sing," that person will begin to
dance and sing with you.
We can see that man is the being of greatest virtue and value to God. God
cannot but love man. You can be so confident as to say that without yourself God
cannot be happy.
Man in the beginning had such a relationship with God. What made God sad?
What took man away from the bosom of God? If there had been ,any enemy to God,
he would have wanted to take away God's most valuable possession. Satan set his
eye on what God treasured the most. He wanted to take away God's object to be
his own. God has life and love itself within Him. Life is also within you; Satan
could not take it away. But love is something unfixed or mutable, and that could
be taken away. Life could not be taken from you because you are life itself, and
you would fight against the loss of life. He could only take away something in
the object position to you. Love is the thing of greatest value that had the
possibility of being stolen away.
Suppose you are a husband; there is the possibility of your wife being taken
away by someone else. There are two ways that she could be taken from you -
either by force or with more love than you can give her. The fall of man
therefore could have only come about centered on love. According to Genesis, Eve
was tempted or taken away by Satan. That could have happened either by force or
by more love than her spouse would have been able to give her. At that time,
then, Adam and Eve must not yet have been in perfect love with each other. If
that had been true, then nothing could have taken Eve away from him. First love
is the strongest. Until your death you will never forget your first love. Their
first love being the strongest one, nothing could have separated Adam and Eve if
that love had reached maturity. In other words, then, life was present in its
perfected form in the creation, but love had not yet reached its maturity.
When we are striving to come closer to God, we have to go through three
points of love. There are three kinds of love: the love of parents, the love of
husband and wife, and the love of children. Out of the three, what kind of love
would come first? Love of parents would come before the other two. Then we can
as well say that love started from parental love. We know that all love
originated in God. Love began in God as the Parents, who created man out of that
love. After creation man and woman would come together in the position of
parents to their children. Thus there would come about parental love, marital
love, and children's love in human families. Love begins from God, and then with
man and woman put together, resembling God, they experience love in their
marriage. Toward their children they feel parental love, while the children feel
children's love toward their parents, who return their love to God.
However, due to the fall of man, love began separated from God, in an evil
world dominated by Satan. And the love we enjoy has the quality of not being
centered on God's love. In order to restore these loves and return to God's
heart, we must experience them in reverse order. First we must bring children's
love under God's dominion, then love in marriage, and finally the love of
parents, When children of God marry with God's blessing, in their unity, loving
God as the Subject to them, then they can restore all three loves at once.
Because of the fall we lost three loves - parental love, marital love, and
children's love. In bringing them to be centered on God, we must raise all our
love to a higher dimension than what we have known on earth up to now. We can
raise love above the level of Satan's dominion and back to the original standard
and value of love, to the standard that matches God's love. We will find the
standard of love in man as the children of God in the perfect love of God, as
the married couple in the perfect love of God, and as the parents in the perfect
love of God. Out of the world of Satan's control, God must find at least one
such person as His child and raise him through these positions, finally bringing
him to the standard of parental love. That person can be the core of God's love.
The first man who wins this course of love can be called the Messiah. In him you
will find the true qualities of love as the Son of God, as true husband, and as
True Parent. (Isaiah 9:6).
All of these three loves must be revealed in one person because all were lost
at once through Adam's fall. God is to restore these three types of love in the
man He has found as His son. By having this person restore all three human
loves, God can begin to restore all other people of the world as His children.
People are alienated from the love of God, but if and when they have a deep
desire to love God or to be loved by Him, God's love has magnetic power. That
person will inevitably be drawn to God and join the mainstream of the flow of
His love. Love is the only element that can draw us to God, and the path of love
alone can lead us to reach God.
Your parents, your spouse and yourself, with your children, make three levels
in one family. God is the origin, you and your spouse represent the present
world, and your children represent the future. So you must be able to become one
at least with your own parents and children. Only love can unite those three
generations of people. Only when you can enjoy those three levels of love can
you say you are really happy. There will never be unhappy people in that kind of
family. If you and your husband or wife are one like this centered on God's
love, you can never be separated from each other. There will be no divorce
there, and no quarreling.
You are in a position to inherit the tradition formed by your parents. Anyone
who mistreats his parents or the older generation, will suffer. You must love
children as God would love them. In the home, the young couple must love their
parents and exemplify this to their children. If you fail to educate your
children properly, your home will be broken.
Our heart of love, centered on God's love, must be enlarged and elaborated to
reach out to the whole world. That is our way of advancement and how we are
walking our road of faith. You as the central figure must love your spouse as
God would have you do - as God would love him or her; and in loving your
parents, you must be loving them as God would love them; and in loving your
children, you must be loving them as God would love them. If you do that, your
children will do the same toward you and their grandparents, and the parents
will love you and your grandchildren in the same way. That is the measure of
love, that is the true tradition of love.
By loving each other alone, a couple are not entitled to enter the kingdom of
God. When they love their parents as dearly as they would love God, then they
are entitled to the kingdom. And when the couple raise their children, they must
not think that the children belong to them alone, but that they are God's
children. The parents are responsible to raise them and educate them as God's
children. If you love your children in that way your whole family may enter
God's kingdom.
If there is any family receiving God's love perfectly, with God's love
abiding in the family, that family can be the core of the whole world. In the
Providence of God, not Noah alone, but Noah's entire family would count. God was
interested in Abraham's family, Moses' family, Jesus' family - not just
individuals alone.
Up to the present time, people have been inclined to think religious life
belonged to some airy plane far above human life, and imagined that God would
just sweep them away to heaven with His power. But the way to heaven is to
broaden the scope of our love by loving the people in our homes, by loving our
neighbors, by loving our friends, relatives, clans, nations, and the whole
population of the world. God would take delight in living in the home where that
kind of love is lived. But He would want to expand that home to ever-broader
levels until the whole of mankind could become one huge family under God as our
Parent. Wherever you see men of your own age, you must be thinking of them as
your brothers. When you meet women older than you, you must think that they are
your aunts or your mother. And toward elderly women, you should feel as though
they were your grandmothers. The outgrowth of that kind of heart will be one
family over all the world.
We have been talking about how to restore big things - the family, nation,
and world - but the core of everything is to restore yourself into God's full
love. You must establish and build the three levels of love in yourself by
deeply living your life. Unless you give birth to your own children, you don't
realize fully the love of God in you. Anything in the world can be understood
only by our own experience of it. In restoring yourself, you can realize the
true love of God in yourself. Then through love in your marriage love is
broadened or elevated to the next level. When you are a parent to your children,
your love is still more elevated, and reaches a greater dimension.
You must be very eager to find those experiences and restore them in
yourself. You must be able to really feel God as your loving Parent, abiding in
you, illuminating you. To feel that, your mind and your body must be united into
harmonious oneness. Only then can you be loved by God. If you are experiencing
God's love to that degree, you will be full of gratitude and feel even
intoxicated in God's love. Even Adam and Eve did not experience such love; if
they had they could never have fallen away from God.
As individuals, our desire is first to experience God's love personally. Any
man who becomes fully one with God in love would think, "I am the happiest man
in the world. I am loved by God in the true sense." Any woman receiving that
fullness of love would feel she is the happiest woman in the world. When that
man and woman reached maturity, God would be happy to bless them in marriage,
and there they could experience the love of God on a higher level. By their
being put together, they would feel the whole world is united into one around
them. With the whole creation around them, protecting them and giving them joy,
they would feel love surrounding them love coming from God above them, and love
coming from their children below them.
In the Western world, people often marry without their parents' consent. But
that is not according to God's standard. More than anything else, you must think
that marriage is for your descendants. Think back. You are born out of the
lineage of your forefathers. You don't belong to yourself. You were not
initiated by you. Love itself is the source of lineage. Love being more than
your life, your lineage must be, more to you than your life. You will love your
family more than your own life. Matrimony passes on the tradition of your love
to your descendants. When you leave the earth, your children and grandchildren
and all of their children will be left behind you, seen by other people, even
though your love is not visible. Love cannot be seen; it dwells invisibly within
you and works through you. But when you find a husband or wife with God's love,
together with that person you can create children, making your love concrete in
them.
In loving your spouse, you are transcendent of your two lineages. When you
love your husband or wife, remember that that person is the fruit of past
generations and the starting point of future generations. You must put such vast
value in your husband or wife.
Love is something you inherit from your forefathers. In the West, you are
blessed in marriage by a minister or sometimes by a person of high rank, such as
a judge. But ideally your parents bless you in marriage, just as God would have
blessed His children, Adam and Eve, when they reached maturity. In that case,
the parents would bless their children, saying, "You are my life, you are my
love, you are my everything. I am so happy that you have reached maturity. I am
now blessing you to be man and wife. I want you to love each other as we, your
parents, have done. Become one with each other, resembling us, and give birth to
wholesome children, multiplying your future generations forever." In that
situation you would long to be like your father and long to be like your mother
and long to have the love that they had. Such an event can only be imagined in a
world centered on God's love.
As children to your parents, you would never want to see your parents
separated. You would want to have harmony in the family. Would you like to fight
your parents? Never! Then, where does the harmonious tradition begin? From your
parents, from your grandparents, their parents, and their parents. And they
inherited that tradition from God ultimately. Children's love, marital love, and
parents' love must be put together in one in you. You must always have three
levels of love in yourself.
Of the three kinds of love, which one is central? Which is closer to God?
Parental love. If you have your grandparents, you must really be able to love
those elderly people as you would God. Age-wise, you must unite the three loves
within your own heart - love for the old, love for the middle-aged, and love for
the young. You must be able to experience those three types of love. If your
grandparents are dying, both your parents and yourself must be in the same
degree of grief and sadness. If your parents were to pass away first, both your
grandparents and yourself must feel the same grief about that. In a situation
where there is joy, too, if one of the three has joy, the other two will be
equally joyful. In your family, all will be one in heart.
Where does God's grief begin? In the path of true love, on the way of heart,
either happiness or grief will be found. Everything starts from love. When love
is created, there is happiness. But when the loving heart is lost or wounded,
there is grief. The loss of love made God grieve; nothing else could have made
Him sad. He did not want wealth, position, knowledge, or any such thing. He
wanted love, and He wanted also to exercise love. If God can find love in you,
find in you His love, God will be happy. But if He cannot find the love of God
in you, He will be saddened. He will be saddened if He cannot find His love in
couples and if He cannot find the love of God in parents. How much do you want
to have God's love? You must be a dynamic, responsive object to Him, so that His
love may explode within you.
Have you ever experienced such love? Have you ever been so happy in the love
of God that you had almost to weep from that love? But that's not enough; you
must experience that degree of love in all three kinds of love. The love of God
must be so powerful as to connect God, mankind and creation and bring them into
absolute harmony and oneness. Love must flow from one to the other.
God is grieved over the fact that man lost His love. In order to reach you,
God has gone through the whole course of the history of restoration, struggling
through the long years to regain true love. So from your part, you must not stay
idle. You must work for the sake of God and the world, rushing to meet Him from
your side. If you fight against Satan and win over his power spiritually and
physically, you will stand in the position where no evil power can ever invade
you. You will become perfectly one with God. There you will meet Him, and you
will find that He has been at that point all along, waiting for you and looking
for you.
Where is the point where you can meet God - in your room, or on the
front-line of the world? On the front-line. Then are you going to enter the
struggles of the world reluctantly and tearfully, or willingly? Our desire is
the unity of our minds with God, our bodies with our minds, and our whole being
with other people. Only by achieving that unity can we restore ourselves on the
individual, family, national and worldwide levels. We must come to the position
where we long for God very, very much. When we miss any other individual, any
family, any nation, or the whole ideal world, very much then to that extent and
to that degree God will be there waiting for us. And we will meet Him when we
have found those things we are longing for. Then will you not go that way?
More than anything else, God has been sad because there has been no one who
knew His heart in this way. There has been no one who knew the world that God
wanted to restore and who was willing to fight and endure all trials and
difficulties in order to meet Him in that world. Since you know these things,
you have the responsibility to win the whole world and bring all things back to
God's bosom. Only in that way can we realize His long cherished hope of unity
among God, man, and every true element.
God sets His hope in us, and we also have our own hopes, flickering like
fires within us. But we have to multiply that fire and multiply our love to
destroy the whole world of evil. We may now have only a flickering candlelight,
but we want to shed light into the whole world. The light will be multiplied,
and the whole world will be illuminated by it in God's love. We are the soldiers
for that cause, and we are eager to liberate God from His grief.
We must not ask God to help us, but we must be willing to relieve God's
agony. As Christians, we can restore God's heart through our prayer. He is
praying for us. He is praying for sons and daughters to end His suffering and
the suffering of the world. Can you ever pray to such a God to give you a
blessing, to help you? Since we have begun from so far away from God, we can
relieve God's heart little by little, as we walk the course of restoration step
by step. When we walk through difficult ways, we must always pray to God, "As I
taste this difficulty, I know this much more of your heart. As I go through all
these things, I understand the more what you have experienced." In that way you
can always have the courage and zeal to continue.
Since you know all these things, you must be doing everything for the sake of
God. When you read, feel that you are reading to dissolve God's sorrow. When you
sing, when you recite poetry, when you write literature, when you do anything,
you must realize that you are doing that in order to make God happy. We must be
different from Adam and Eve; we must be different from all people of the past.
We must become such people that God can say to us, "Because of you I am so
relieved. Because of you I have found again my joy, my smile, my son, my
everything." If you are such a person to God, He will want to talk with you, to
confide things to you. And God would want to bestow everything He has on you.
If you can relieve God's agony, if you can make God happy at last, then there
is no more that can be expected of you. You can enjoy everything of virtue. Then
you will have restored yourself, your family, your nation, and the whole world
back to God. By doing this, we can liberate God from His grief. You can do this
yourself.
Have you ever attempted to take on a task that would lighten God's load, even
a little? Would you struggle to do it, even if it meant that each of your limbs
might be torn from your body? You haven't. On the other hand, God ever draws
near to comfort us in our difficulties. Through the long ages, He has sought out
the children who betrayed Him with an unchanging parental heart.
God, our Parent, remains in the realm of lamentation until every last human
being has been freed from lamentation. Because He is in this position, we must
comfort God and bring Him true liberation.
How are we to liberate God? God lost His beloved children. God is confined in
a place where He cannot love humanity with the original love that parents give
their children. Therefore, our task is to establish a realm of true liberation
for God where He can freely give love to all humankind. God's confinement was
brought about by the human fall, so human beings must become victorious sons and
daughters who transcend the limits of the fall. This is what will bring God true
liberation.
Human beings have lived ignorant of the tremendous pain in God's heart.
Longing for those who betrayed Him, those who were embraced in the bosom of the
enemy, God has been calling out, "My son! My daughter!" But have you even once
cried out, "My Father!" so loudly that it made you hoarse? Have you ever
passionately called for your Father until it made your tongue dry and you began
to choke?
As fallen people, what do we have that would enable us to relate with God?
Our emotions and the perceptions of our five senses are entirely profane.
Nothing in us is acceptable. Under the laws of justice, we have nothing that
will let us relate to God, but under the law of love there is a way.
If you should shed tears, sweat and blood for the sake of the whole world,
you will find God has been shedding tears, sweat and blood for you.
