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Building a World Imbued with Heart-Centered Culture

This is an excerpt from True Father’s speech at the Olympic Park Gymnastics Hall in Seoul, on May 1, 1994.

I stand at this podium with profound emotion. In 1954, with the late church president, Eu Hyo-Won, and several close disciples, on a tiny house in Bukhak-dong in Seoul we hung the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity sign. That official beginning seems like yesterday, yet forty years have already passed since that day.  

Reflecting on the forty years

The founding of our church was not done for the attainment of some personal goal of mine but solely to fulfill God’s will on earth. As I look back, I recall the tremendous persecution I encountered as I followed many different thorny paths. Not even my parents, my siblings nor my other relatives could understand. 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 that 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 in the future (after they die) others will honor. God is looking for saints that can save this evil world and that can transform it in this age into a world of goodness for which God is longing.

God is looking for saints that will plunge headlong into the sorrowful world of sin in order to wipe the slate clean of the world’s sinful history. He is looking for saints that 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 the world. Therefore, the path of these saints cannot be smooth; persecution and misunderstanding inevitably follow them.

I pledged to God that I would accomplish his will for him in 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 or under severe torture that took me to the verge of death.

Love motivated God

God’s will does not belong only to those that believe. God’s will governs all people and all of creation. It is not something vague. God’s will is to fulfill the purpose of the Creation, that is, the ideal that was in God’s heart from the beginning of time. All things of the universe and humankind were created according to the purpose of the 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. The only thing that even God cannot control as he wills is true love. One can find true love only through a mutual relationship with a partner. One cannot feel love by oneself.

This is why 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 created world, were made as the closest object partners for God’s true love. For this reason, God needs human beings to realize his purpose for true love. From this perspective, we can understand how precious is the value of human beings as the object partners of 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, having been created through such a principle, become absolutely obedient in true love’s presence. 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, parent–child, relationship. Adam and Eve, whom God created as his 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. By loving each other, they were to experience the heart of a husband or wife. Finally, after having children and loving them as true parents, they were to feel the heart of parents and experience the parental heart through which God had loved them as children. These different experiences of the heart, the heart of a child, the heart of a sibling, the heart of a spouse, and the heart of parents, we called the “four great realms of heart.”

The perfection of humankind requires a complete understanding of these four great realms of heart under God’s true love. 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, the origin and Lord of true love, is in the position of a father that 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.

Heart-centered culture

God wants a religion in a parental position to govern this age. God wants a religion whose followers live with parental hearts. I myself have been teaching true parent-ism, which means to educate each person to become a true parent that embodies this tradition. I guide people to first become true parents in the family and then to become true parents of their tribe by fulfilling their mission as tribal messiahs. We have to become a religion that embodies and practices the true parental heart in order to realize God’s will in a world of conflict, hatred and evil. Religions that despise other religions or denominations and have contempt for them are a hindrance to the accomplishment of world peace and of God’s providence.

A peaceful, harmonious world is destined to emerge. What, however, is the reality of the world around us? Even though we say that the cold war is over, many tensions and conflicts need to be resolved. Our task is to establish the age of the harmonious one-world family by fundamentally solving the conflicts between races and the struggles between religions. This task can be accomplished only with true parent-ism.

We who stand on the foundation of forty years of pioneering by the Unification Church and who have welcomed the True Parents and the Completed Testament Age, need to build a new world based on a true heart-centered culture. Each person becomes a substantiation of that ideal when he or she becomes one with God in a true parent–child relationship. That is what creates happiness in the harmony of love.

Throughout my life, my motivation has been purely to live for the sake of God’s will. God has watched over and guided me at all times, yet the difficulties and suffering he endures are thousands of times greater than my own. I offer all glory to God, for how could the achievements of the past forty years be only my own?

I am deeply grateful to the church members that have worked so hard and to the many who have lent their support. God’s will that I have begun to fulfill is actually his original will for all humankind. I therefore ask all of you to become my representatives and representatives of the True Parents. Please become the inheritors of God’s will and multiply the fruits of righteousness and goodness. Let us invest our efforts to realize quickly the original world, the true heart-centered culture that God yearns to see on earth.

Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to all honored guests from Korea and overseas for blessing us with your presence on this occasion. May your families and your work continue to be blessed by God’s presence.

This text, edited for inclusion in TPmagazine is from Pyeong Hwa Gyeong, Book 7, p. 1024.