Good morning, brothers and sisters. Welcome to Lovin’ Life Ministry. We’re delighted to have you here. Wasn’t the band incredible? And wasn’t Il Hwa Yokpore incredible? There’s a lot of woman power in the house, brothers and sisters. But we know that today is a very special Sunday because we are celebrating Father’s Day. Happy Father’s Day to all the men in the room.
Here at Lovin’ Life Ministry we have lots of exciting things going on all the time. This last weekend was no exception. On Friday we had an open mike night at headquarters at 43rd Street, where a whole group of young people got together. My husband said to me, “I never knew there was so much talent in one room.” He said the drummers were fantastic, the singers were fantastic. But more important than the talent that was congregating in the room was the spirit of truly sharing this precious time with one another and sharing in the joy that artistic expression can bring to one another. My husband had a wonderful time.
That’s one of the advantages of being married to Rev. In Jin Moon because while I have to attend to matters of faith and take care of a lot of things that concern headquarters or our congregation, my husband gets to go and attend open mike night with the young people. He had a fantastic time. Whenever he comes back from a meeting like that, his eyes are glowing, and he’s so excited. And even though he is well known in my family for not being able to even carry a note, he starts singing and humming. I say to myself, “I guess the spirit is really moving in my husband tonight.”
When I think about fathers, my thoughts always turn to my father, who is the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. He’s a very special person in my life. He’s a wonderful man and a very compelling man. He’s also a very funny man; he loves to crack jokes all the time. One of the things that I’ve noticed from a very young age is that he is really an absolute man in the sense that he’s a real human being. He can be sitting across a table, talking to Mikhail Gorbachev, or he can be sitting in the room talking to Margaret Thatcher or sitting next to a homeless person. The man, his integrity, and his character are always the same. He is absolute, no matter what the environment or where the situation takes him.
It’s so unusual for a man to be so real and so comfortable in his own skin. I remember one time he was meeting with a group of scientists, and one scientist got up and asked, “Reverend Moon, what’s your favorite color?” Then my father said, “I see no color. I see light.” But then the scientist pressed further and said, “Yes, but Reverend Moon, there are so many wonderful crayons in the crayon box to choose from. Which color would you choose?”
My father gave such an interesting answer—from a woman’s point of view one I thought was incredibly delicious. He said, “My favorite color is pink.” I kid you not! You could have heard a pin drop. And the scientist had to ask my father again, “Reverend Moon, what is your favorite color?” My father said so confidently and with so much pride, “My favorite color is pink.” Then the scientist pressed a little further and asked, “Why is your favorite color pink?” My father gave what I thought was an incredibly profound answer, one that I remember to this day. It is the reason why I love to buy my husband pink shirts, pink socks, pink underwear, and pink neckties. Anything in the men’s store that I can find in pink, you can be sure that my husband has in his closet.
The answer that my father gave is, “Pink is the color of love. It is like the color on the skin when a man first spots a beautiful woman and in her beauty is so overtaken by her light and who she is that he blushes when she gazes upon his face. It’s the color of first love.”
This is a beautiful, beautiful answer. I’ve thought about it from time to time. That is a true man, a man who can get up in front of a room full of scientists and declare to the whole room that his favorite color is pink because it is the color of true love. He is so real with himself and with all of us and so absolute in knowing who he is, especially in understanding that he is God’s son, that no matter where this man goes, he brings the gift of true love. He brings the gift of service, he brings the gift of excellence, and he shares with us the gift of his integrity and character.
One of the things I’ve noticed about my father was that he is forever unchanging and uncompromising. When he turned 16 and was praying on Easter Sunday morning, Jesus Christ came to him and said, “I need you to fulfill my mission.” Jesus told him the story of how he did not come to die but came to fulfill the true love of God, to inherit the true love of God, and become the true olive branch through which all humanity can engraft themselves and find true life, true love, and true lineage. Jesus Christ asked my father, “Please, fulfill my mission in perfecting yourself as an individual, and then find a perfect Eve, a perfect woman. Together please stand in the position as the True Parents of humankind, representing the feminine and the masculine qualities of our Heavenly Parent, God. Help everyone graft onto the true olive tree and bring this world into God’s family, one family under God.”
Ever since that time, when my father responded yes, he has never wavered. Here he is at the ripe old age of 90, and he is still going strong. He is forever unchanging. Once this man commits, he commits for life. And once this man devotes his life to a cause, to bringing world peace, he will not stop until his last breath. This is the kind of man that my father is.
Here is a man who is unchanging, uncompromising, and unwavering, smack in the middle of our lives, where everything is changing and in flux. Many times our relationships are going through difficulties, so it’s incredibly wonderful to know that you have a secure man in the room who will always be unchanging, uncompromising, and unwavering. He becomes an anchor not just for my life but also in yours when you accept him as your father.
In this way my father has helped a lot of us overcome our individual difficulties. Whenever we’re going through difficult times, we think about our True Parents. But, more importantly, we think about our Heavenly Parent, who is God.
My father is a man who has been in and out of prison six times in his life. I read an interview that he gave a long time ago about his experiences in Hung Nam prison, which was the notorious concentration camp of North Korea. He was thrown into jail for speaking the word of God in a communist country, for wanting to teach the people, for gathering them in Bible study. Most recently he was thrown into prison in Danbury, Connecticut, and served over a year there. But probably the most difficult prison that my father had to survive was Hung Nam prison, where he was for over three years.
My father told the story about how there were so many people in Hung Nam and so much work to be done, moving 40 or 50-pound sacks of lime on their backs each and every day for a fertilizer factory. And depending on how many sacks they were able to move to a particular storage area, they would be allotted a certain amount of food and water. But there was very little. They got only one meal a day, and it would be a very salty soup. My father likes to call it water with a bit of salt. That was the soup. And a rice ball the size of a tennis ball. That was all they had to eat.
In a place like that, where you have very little but you are so tired and you’re always hoping that they would feed you more, my father said that the sense of hunger becomes so acute, the only thing that people think about is when they’re going to be fed. In Hung Nam, when the rice balls came around, human beings literally turned into a pack of wolves, diving upon the person bringing the rice balls, trying to take them from other people, literally clawing another person’s eyes. Or if a poor exhausted soul happened to fall down, choking on his rice ball because he ate it too quickly, then the other prisoners would scoop the remainder of that rice ball out of his mouth, as if this man were a limp carcass. This was the kind of environment that my father survived for over three years.
He explained how he survived. He said, “The only reason I survived is because I had an absolute faith in God, and because I was practicing putting my mind over my body, over the desires of the flesh for that rice ball.” My father trained his mind to think of that rice ball as a huge feast such as what you have at the beginning of the year or at a family celebration. He imagined that every grain of rice symbolized a fantastic dish. One grain of rice became hot and sour soup, stir-fried rice, orange beef, Buddha’s delight. This was how he ate and appreciated each grain of rice.
He said another way that he was able to constantly keep his spirit was, after receiving that rice ball in his hand, immediately cutting it in half and sharing the other half with other prisoners. He would eat only one half of the ration allotted a prisoner. But when he ate this half, he said to himself, “I’m eating more than that other person. I gave only a spoonful of my rice ball to him, but I get half a rice ball. I gave another person another spoonful, but I still have half. And I gave the sick man sitting over there against the wall another spoonful, but I have half a rice ball.”
He taught himself how to be grateful. He taught himself to take less, to give himself a little less, but to reward himself spiritually in exercising his creativity to say he’s enjoying an incredible feast.
As time wore on and the work got more and more difficult, my father would add that one tablespoon of rice that he used to give another person onto his own rice. Then that became a feast upon a feast. As the years wore on and he became weak and tired, he would take that other tablespoon of rice and eat it along with his half ration, and he would feel another reward, another blessing. In this way he was able to keep on going.
He said that his eternal spirit, his absolute belief in God, his unchanging commitment and his loyalty to what he believed he was given this life for were the reason he survived. When he was released from Hung Nam prison because of the Allied forces and Gen. Douglas MacArthur, he gave the greatest thanks to Heavenly Father by truly honoring Him with his life.
He decided to come to this country and give his life for America. He brought all of us here together with him. I’ve seen my father over the last three decades go through a lot of difficult situations and deal with a lot of challenging issues that arise from leading a worldwide movement such as ours. But one thing I have always known is that my father is an incredibly grounded and solid man.
I still remember an instance when he was giving a speech, I believe in California, and there was a heckler in the audience. Because my father is a public man, whenever he gives a public speech there is usually a security person standing on the side of the stage and in the back. In this instance, the heckler starting verbally attacking my father, calling him a brainwasher. He rushed onto the stage, and we saw the security men rushing to grab him, tackling him. All the while my father was serene, still at the pulpit, very much himself, very real, very solid. He reminded me of an Indian chief who basically said to the white man, “No move.” There was nothing that could push my father around because he was so complete in knowing that he was God’s son, that he had every right to be there, and that he had every right to share our Heavenly Parent’s glory to the world.
That left a visual imprint for me as to how I need to live my life. Being a mother, raising five kids, dealing with all the things that go on in my house, I visualize this image of my no-move father, who has such conviction, dignity, and the pride that he is God’s son. When I visualize this, I realize that I am my father’s daughter, that I am God’s daughter.
I think if you were to take a moment and visualize this image of my father, you would come to realize that you are God’s son or God’s daughter and that you are an absolutely incredible human being. As a daughter, I marvel at this man who has been in and out of prison six times. In his recent autobiography, he describes himself as the fullest man, meaning he is so full. If you eat a big meal, you are the fullest person in the room, right? But what he means by this is he is the most full in the world in that he has been the most persecuted, the most misunderstood, and the most accused.
He said in his autobiography that they say in Asia that when you receive a pouch full of persecution and accusation, it should last you a lifetime, meaning that it takes a lifetime to digest so much accusation, misunderstanding, and persecution. But my father said, “I am so full of that misunderstanding and persecution, it would probably take one hundred lifetimes to digest all the persecution and accusation that I received over the years”.
When I read this, I asked myself, “What drives this incredible man to do what he does, when he is the fullest man in the world?” You know what it is? Jesus asked my father to fulfill his responsibility because Jesus was not able to finish it because he was crucified, and Heavenly Father is asking my father to substantiate one true family on earth. What my father is doing is what is inside his heart, going through his life of faith, going through these difficulties. He has come to realize this through many hours and years of prayer, getting callused elbows and knees. He realized that God is our parent; he is just like us in that he needs love. He wants love. He wants to experience happiness. But my father has come to realize that because of the human Fall, God lost his children and has become the God of suffering.
When my father first said this to us children, that our Heavenly Parent is a God of suffering, that profoundly moved me. I started to visualize God and asked myself, “If God could truly express what he was feeling through music, how would he express himself?” I thought, if God were a musician, he would play the blues. I very much saw God as somebody like Duke Ellington or like B. B. King, who takes an old, lean guitar, speaks to it, and plays it with all his soul, singing about how his heart is gone, how he’s suffering because he lost his children, “My child is gone.” This is what I heard in my mind, set to the beat of the blues. This is what God has been playing for the last 6,000 years because he lost his children to the Fall.
God, as a Heavenly Parent, is creating the world because he wants to realize true love, and he creates men and women, sons and daughters, because he wants to realize and actualize true love, wants to have an object through which he can experience the joys of fatherhood, the joys of motherhood. As great as God is, as omniscient and omnipotent as he might be, and as beautiful and as handsome as you might be, it doesn’t matter if you’re all alone in the world, sitting on a throne all by yourself, saying “I’m so powerful, I’m so all-knowing, am I not magnificent?” You can’t even ask a question without it coming back to you. “Yes, you are, Mommy; yes, you are, Daddy.”
It doesn’t matter how beautiful or handsome you are. If you have nobody to share that beauty or handsomeness with, you can stand in front of a mirror for all of eternity but you will never feel love. You will never feel satisfied; you will never feel full.
When children become teens, they spend a great deal of time in front of a mirror. Sometimes I would be passing through my kids’ rooms and I would see my lovely daughter Arianna brushing her hair. Looking at her face, such a beautiful face, I would say to myself, “I have this beautiful daughter whom I adore. As a mother, what do I want for her? I don’t want her to be beautiful forever in front of a mirror, enjoying her beauty herself. I want her to share that beauty with an absolutely handsome, exciting man, so that she can experience how it feels to be loved, how it feels to be embraced, how it feels to be kissed, how it feels to be told, ‘I love you more than life itself.’ This is what I want for my child.”
That’s the heart of a parent. When each of you young ones become older and wiser and mature in love and you are ready for this wonderful thing called marriage, it means that you have prepared your life for that special day, for that special someone. This is when you can really practice and experience the life of true love that God wanted his first son and daughter, Adam and Eve, to experience so much.
Why is God broken-hearted? When God thought about his children, he wanted to give them the three blessings of being fruitful, multiplying, and having dominion over creation. These are kind of archaic words, but if you really think about it, what God wanted for Adam and Eve is no different from what we as parents today want for our sons and daughters. We want them to be fruitful—to perfect themselves individually, to become the perfect embodiment of this quality called true love so they can properly mature enough to be a fruit that’s ripe enough to be eaten.
The most damaging thing, the thing we want least for our children, is for them to be broken-hearted, to be broken people. There is nothing in the universe more powerful than love. Love has the power to create, but it also has the power to destroy. That’s why when God told Adam and Eve to be fruitful then multiply, and then have dominion, he was talking to his children about the process that a child, a son or daughter, would naturally go through in the stages of life.
Nowadays when we talk about teenagers, the notions of keeping pure, waiting, and abstinence are almost dirty words. But if you really think about it and if you really think about what your parents are asking you to do, it’s not a denial but simply preparation, waiting and growing yourself, finding out who you are before you take on the responsibility to love another human being. You’ve got to know who you are before you can extend yourself and love another person.
You see, this didn’t happen with Adam and Eve. They were supposed to grow up and be fruitful, work on themselves, work on putting their mind over their body, work on how to subjugate and overcome the desires of the flesh with the power of the spirit. They were meant to work on that on a daily basis, practice, and apply the principles of true love by sacrificing, by living for the sake of others, by learning how to understand the importance of delayed gratification. These are the things that God wanted Adam and Eve to do in their individual stage. The Heavenly Parent wanted Adam and Eve to be a perfect man and a perfect woman in becoming mature in love.
But we know that God gave Adam and Eve another commandment, “Eat of any fruit in the garden, but do not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” Many people have had theological debates about what the fruit actually was. Some people have understood it to be an apple. When I was a little girl I had a debate with my younger sister, trying to figure out what fruit Adam and Eve bit into. I was giving my reasons why it should be a peach, not an apple. My sister was saying no, it’s got to be a banana. We had this debate in front of my father and mother, and then my little brother chimed in and said, “No, it’s got to be a pineapple because a pineapple has all these cones and it really, really hurts. So that’s why God told Adam and Eve not to bite into a pineapple.”
We were all just elementary school age, trying to figure out what this fruit was. In the corner of the room my parents were watching with a bit of curiosity and smiling. My father said, “So you think it’s a pineapple, eh? And you think it’s a peach?” I gave my reasons why it would be a peach, which is so beautiful and even has protective fur around it. It almost looks like God is giving it extra special attention. An apple just has a skin, but a peach has fur.
My younger sister said, “But it’s got to be a banana because it comes in a pack. It doesn’t come alone; and it has all these pieces, representing the different days of the week.” The banana she had that day came from a bunch of seven bananas on a little vine. She said, “See, it’s like seven days of the week, so it’s providential. It’s got to be a banana.”
My father let this conversation continue and did not tell us for a long time exactly what the fruit was. But when we learn the Divine Principle and realize that the greatest power in the universe is love, which God wanted to actualize through the form of a man and a woman, Adam and Eve, we can begin to understand why the fruit must symbolize sexual love. The sexual love that’s not misused, that’s properly prepared, that’s properly eaten, and that’s properly enjoyed gives the greatest satisfaction and a feeling of fulfillment to a man and a woman as a couple as they start their family life.
When God was asking Adam and Eve to wait a while, what God was saying was, “Eve, look, you’re developing into a beautiful woman. You’re no longer a child. You’re developing breasts, you’re developing hips, you’re developing a gleam in your eye. Your eyelashes are becoming longer to attract that special someone every time you blink.” God was saying, “Look, Adam, how incredible you are.” Maybe Adam was working out with a five-pound rock in the garden. You never know. I know that my boys and a lot others out there spend an inordinate amount of time with barbells. Maybe our first ancestor didn’t have a barbell, but I’m sure he had a rock. Maybe God saw with great delight Adam working on his biceps, working on his legs, working on his abs. Maybe he was doing abdominal crunches.
God was basically saying, “Look, just as much as you work on your biceps, and just as much as Eve, you are preparing physically to give birth as a mother, you need to understand that the most important thing that you can do as a man and a woman is to come together as husband and wife, and to take part in a creative expression of love that can result in a beautiful family.” That’s what God wanted for Adam and Eve.
God asked them to please not eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil because God wanted them to wait for the proper time when they could fully experience the glory of being one with God, of being one with each other.
We know that this did not happen, and we know that there was a misuse of love. Adam and Eve bit into the apple, they “ate” sexual love before God said that they were ready to be husband and wife. That is the reason why the heavenly lineage that our Heavenly Parent wanted to pass down through Adam and Eve was lost forever. That’s why God has been a suffering God, playing the blues for 6,000 years, because he lost his children to the satanic realm. He’s been waiting all this time. He’s raised up great champions along the way—Abraham, Noah, Isaac, and especially Jesus Christ.
God waited 2,000 years for his son, Jesus. But God did not have the pleasure of seeing that son build an ideal family of his own. So God had to wait another 2,000 years for this opportunity that we have now, when we have our True Parents here, the first man and first woman who have restored providential history and can absolutely stand in the position as the first True Parents. That’s why our True Parents are so important; they represent the true lineage through which we ourselves can have and share in the true lineage of God and thereby literally become one family under God.
When your parents are asking you to wait a little, to please work on yourself, they’re not taking anything away from you by saying, “Please don’t have a boyfriend. Please don’t have a broken heart. Please don’t be a broken person.” Nothing destroys a person like the wounds of love that happen when you are broken in love, when you date one man and another, when you have casual relationships.
Men start looking at women as a composite of body parts. When you start serial dating, you’re not treating each and every girl you meet as the daughter of God, as a daughter who has absolute divinity in her and will become a wonderful wife and wonderful mother some day. You’re not looking at that woman as a specimen of true love that comes from God, our Heavenly Parent. You’re looking at her in terms of her body parts. You’re looking at those gorgeous eyes, at the breasts, or, as my sisters call them, the kajungas. You’re looking at the kajungas and not realizing that this is a daughter of God. Or you’re looking at the bun-buns and not realizing that she is a daughter of God.
The reason why my father and your parents are asking you to wait is because we don’t want you to be just another object that a person uses and throws out. This is because you are an incredible person. You are an incredible daughter. You are an incredible specimen of a human being that deserves to be honored, loved, and appreciated as God’s daughter, not somebody who is to be used for immediate gratification and then tossed aside like garbage. This is what our Heavenly Parent doesn’t want
The Heavenly Parent, your parents, or my father and mother are asking the gentlemen in the audience to wait. The problem is, if you don’t wait and start dating and go through women like a Rolodex file, then you don’t realize that you’re denying yourself the pleasure of having a truly transcendent experience. No matter how great sex might be for young people, it’s just mechanical if you don’t have love. Then we are no different from animals. If you don’t have love, you cannot feel this incredible power that comes from knowing that you’re loving somebody who is going to be there, committed to you for eternity, whether you’re having a bad hair day or a good one, whether you’re sick or whether you’re happy because this person made a commitment to God. And he made a commitment to live his life to honor and appreciate you as the true daughter that you really are.
When a man waits, then he learns to value a woman as something other than the body parts. The man learns that just as he loves his sister, he sees a woman as someone who might be a sister of someone else. Or she could be a mother of a child or the wife of a future husband. When you start seeing human beings in the proper roles that they are meant to play, then they’re no longer objects. They become the incredibly gifted, talented, and awesome human beings that we all are. That’s the gift that our parents and your parents want for you.
It took a tremendous amount of work just to get to where we are. Your parents sacrificed so much to give you this opportunity to graft onto the true olive branch and to be a part of this worldwide community. This precious time is not going to come again. This is a great opportunity for us to share with the world that we are not meant to waste our lives in casual relationships, in relationships where we use and abuse each other. The meaning and the mission of our lives is to perfect ourselves individually, to be fruitful, and to multiply, finding that special someone who has the same commitment as you do to God, our Heavenly Parent. This means that the qualities of God, such as being absolute, unchanging, and eternal, are the very qualities that you will have in your marriage. And this will give you security so that you will have the strength and the anchor with which you can go through life as a proud son or daughter of God.
Brothers and sisters, when I speak to my children, I say to them, “You need to work on yourself. That’s going to take a little time. Then you’ll meet this really awesome person who’s going to honor, love, and cherish you for the rest of your life. And you know what? It’s not going to be easy, but if you work on yourself, then you will know how difficult it is to become a perfect embodiment of true love. So when you meet another person, you will see it as an opportunity to grow as a couple, an opportunity to grow as a family, and not just something that you receive.”
I always tell my children, “We want to have a marriage that lasts forever, but in order to have a marriage that lasts forever, you’ve got to practice the meaning of absolute, unchanging, and eternal. Do you want just fast food and not the gorgeous restaurant with candlelight, violins serenading in the background, a delectable six-course full meal?” This is the difference that God is asking you to look at. Do you want sex, do you want the mechanics? Or do you want love? Do you want to experience true love and create something wonderful like these munchkins that I call my kids, who are absolutely the joy of my life? They are so delicious; it’s like biting into a peach, a banana, a grapefruit, and a pineapple all in one.
This is what our Heavenly Parent wants. And those children become great people, great in their chosen area, for instance a swimmer like Michael Phelps, who won all those gold medals. Not only will they bring pride and honor to their families but to the community, and not just to the community but to the world. And in this natural way of growth and prosperity, they will come to own their own world and not be controlling people but take ownership of their lives, communities, country, and the world by truly taking care of it, nurturing it, and serving it.
If everybody does this, brothers and sisters, the world peace that we’re waiting for will be just around the bend. It is truly within our hands.
When we gaze into the beautiful eyes of our children, we’re always teaching them, “Look, you guys are awesome kids. You are so talented—reach for the moon and beyond.” But those of you sitting in the audience have already touched the moon. Have you not met Reverend Moon? Are you not in the room with another Reverend Moon? You’ve not only reached the moon, you’ve touched the moon, and you’ve harvested on the moon.
So think about what you can do in your life. The sky’s the limit. The kind of people that your children can be, the sky’s the limit. Here we are in the middle of New York City. The Italians have it right. They have a beautiful song that is sung everywhere. When I go to the Italian section of New York, I always hear someone singing it somewhere. The words go something like this: “When the moon hits your eye, like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.” It’s true love time.
When the moon hits your eye like the big pizza pie, what my father is throwing at you is saying, it’s amore. It’s love, and it’s true love, which is the most important thing. It is something worth waiting for.
So young people in the audience, reach for the moon, go beyond, and become the great sons and daughters that you are and that you were meant to be. Have a blessed Sunday. God bless.
