Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon
Declaring the Era of the Peace Kingdom
Address to the United States Congress
March 23, 2004
The United States Capitol
Washington, DC
Respected members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives,
religious leaders from around the world, distinguished guests,
I would like to express my sincere gratitude for your presence here this
evening in such a large number, in spite of your busy schedules.
Ladies and gentlemen,
The starting point to unravel the problems humanity faces today is the
certain knowledge of God, the Father of all creation and, on that foundation,
the building of true families that live in attendance to God. This calls
us to establish and attend God in our families, not as a concept but as
the substantial Parent of us all. To do this, we first must clarify the
relationship between God and humanity. God is the original entity of true
love, true life and true lineage, and He is the True Parent of all people.
If human beings had not fallen, we would have reached perfection in
God's true love as His true children and lived in attendance to Him as our
Parent. God's plan was for perfected human beings to bond as true husbands
and wives, bear and raise true children so that they would live in a Kingdom
of Heaven on Earth, and then live together eternally in the heavenly world
as families in the Kingdom of Heaven. Think about it for a moment. If your
father went to hell and only your mother went to Heaven, what kind of Heaven
would that be? If your parents were to go to hell and only you children went
to Heaven, how could that be called Heaven? The Kingdom of Heaven is where the
whole family lives together in an eternal peace kingdom. On earth as well, God
will reside where a whole family has established a kingdom of heaven. In such
a family, the world of God's original ideal, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth,
takes root. How, then, are we to bring about this family heaven on earth?
First, each member of the family needs to complete his or her individual
character. Each person has to shed the fallen nature that has passed from
the fall down through the generations, and achieve the perfection of his
or her character. In other words, each person must be victorious in the
struggle between mind and body. Then the world of harmony will bear fruit in
each individual's perfected character, a state of one heart, one mind and
one thought. Fallen nature, which causes jealousy, envy, greed, hatred and
all other evils, will never again take root in the person who has achieved
this state.
Shedding the fallen nature is not easy. The reality of fallen human
beings is that we vacillate even when trying to break habits formed over the
relatively short span of a few years or decades, like smoking or drinking
alcohol. We cannot expect, then, that it will be easy to cast off fallen
nature, which we inherit through lineages going back thousands, even tens
of thousands of years.
It is impossible by human effort alone. We need to stand on the foundation
of absolute faith, establish God as our vertical axis, and struggle our entire
life. Even then, it is a difficult fight. We cannot even think we will gain
victory unless we enter a state of absolute love for God, loving Him even
more than we love our own parents and children, and attending Him as our True
Parent. We cannot hope to win this fight without a foundation of absolute
obedience to God, following Him even at the cost of laying down our life.
Herein lies the reason that religions place fasting, sexual abstinence,
sacrifice and penance in the uppermost position. We must be born again, recast
as new persons in whom Heaven can reside and with whom the spirit world can
cooperate. We cannot betray an iota of shame even if our entire life and
being is exposed before all God's creation. Our character should be like a
"high noon settlement," on the straight vertical line of God's grace without
the slightest shadow, so that Satan will flee from our presence for eternity.
Second, individuals who achieve such completion of character come together
to form true families, and the members of these families work together
to establish what I call the "four great realms of heart." Such families
resemble, in form, an individual who has accomplished the complete oneness
of mind and body. I have said that the Kingdom of Heaven is a place we enter
family by family. Not every family, however, is qualified to enter Heaven
automatically. You need a foundation to be a true family and to complete
the four great realms of heart. A true family that can enter the Kingdom
of Heaven is composed of true individuals who have completed the four great
realms of heart in themselves and who are of a lineage centering on God.
What do I mean, then, by the "four great realms of heart"? I refer to
the perfection of the heart of parents, the heart between a husband and
wife, the heart of children, and the heart of siblings. This is found in a
true family bound by God's original true love, true life and true lineage
through a chaste three-generational lineage of grandparents, parents, and
(grand) children. Here, the love between parents and children establishes the
vertical relationship between upper and lower; the love between the husband and
wife establishes the horizontal relationship that brings left and right into
definitive oneness, and the love between siblings establishes the relationship
between front and back. In this way, God's ideal of creation is no longer
a mere concept or dream. It is perfected in reality through the completion
of the four great realms of heart centered on true lineages, family by family.
The realm of parental heart is acquired naturally as parents go through
the process of bearing children and then raising and educating them with
true love. In other words, it is the heart that enables the parents to own
true love with respect to the children. Without children, no one can own
love as a parent.
Next, the realm of conjugal heart is the love relationship that extends
true lineage. In this, husband and wife each are grateful for the other
having established them as an owner of love, and each learns true love through
giving and receiving with the other. They enjoy learning of true love when the
husband lives for the sake of his wife, even if it means sacrificing his own
life, and the wife attends her husband with the heart of attending God. The
perfection of the husband-wife relationship is possible only on this basis.
The moment a bride and groom share love on their wedding night with God's
blessing, they inherit the palace of true love, the palace of true life,
and the palace of true lineage. The wife, through her husband, receives
God's ideal son, who is also Heaven's older brother, Heaven's husband,
and Heaven's parent. The husband stands in the corresponding position in
receiving his wife. When the realm of conjugal heart is perfected, the
relationship between the husband and wife also becomes absolute, unique,
unchanging and eternal, because God is absolute, unique, unchanging and
eternal. So the term "divorce" cannot even exist. Theirs will be a life of
happiness, filled only with the blossoms of mutual respect and love.
Next, how can we describe the heart of children, and how is it obtained? The
parents are the center, in God's position in the family, and it is impossible
for a child to be born without parents. For these reasons, the relationship
between parent and child is established not by human morality but by a heavenly
morality. Thus the parent-child relationship is a vertical relationship,
not horizontal. It is not a relationship of destiny, which means that human
effort can change it, but it is a relationship of absolute and eternal fate.
Children experience and learn the heart of true love as they attend
their parents in daily life, placing their parents in a position higher
than themselves. Through a natural process, they come to understand that
the love, life and lineage that they inherit from their parents originate in
God. Children who watch and learn from their parents in this way will grow
up to become husbands and wives who have no fallen nature, and ultimately
they will obtain the position of true parents themselves. The spherical
motion of the family unit that continually repeats the three-generational
pattern in this way is the basic model for building the Kingdom of Heaven.
Lastly, the realm of the heart of siblings arises through brothers and
sisters who live as a family in attendance to the same true parents. I
said earlier that the heart between brothers and sisters establishes the
relationship between front and back. True parents are a husband and wife
living in truth, and children who attend such parents will naturally learn
the discipline of heavenly morality and ethics among siblings.
It will be a beautiful sight, where a younger brother attends and reveres
his older brother as he would his father, and the older brother looks after
his younger brother with a loving heart. The older brother represents "front"
and the younger brother represents "back." The older brother represents the
father, while the younger brother represents the mother. The perfection of
the realm of heart between siblings is the foundation for all people to live
for the sake of others through love and service.
Respected guests, as the number of "true peace family kingdoms" perfecting
the four great realms of heart increases, "true peace tribe kingdoms,"
"true peace nation kingdoms," and ultimately the "true peace world kingdom"
will appear. In this way this will become the original world of God's ideal,
the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, the eternal Kingdom of Peace on Earth. I am
declaring this here today. Humanity has lived without the certain knowledge
that establishing true families is the most serious, foundational commandment
of Heaven.
A new era has arrived today. The number of people around the world who have
received my teaching and are standing resolutely for the sake of building
the Kingdom of Peace is growing by leaps and bounds. Heaven and earth are
shaking with the cries of bright young people who are determined to build
true families even if they must offer their lives in order to protect their
purity. Already, we find hundreds of millions of blessed families around the
world. These families are shoring up a world in which ethics and morality
are rapidly deteriorating.
That is not all. The spirit world is one step ahead of us in breaking
open the age of the peace kingdom. Starting with the five great saints, more
than 120 billion blessed families are working day and night to cooperate
with us on earth and prepare for the day that is to come. According to
the Principle of Creation, God's ideal world should be completed first on
earth. Although people today are descendants of the fall, God's unending love
and the spirit world's cooperation now allow us to understand the nature
of the heavenly kingdom. Please recognize that it is time to accomplish a
true love revolution of overwhelming proportions, taking as our example the
miraculous accomplishments of the spirit world.
The time has come for you as well to open your hearts and receive the
secrets that Heaven is disclosing in this age through me. In one sense, I
am a human being living with a physical body like each of you. But in the
context of Heaven's providence, I am God's ambassador, sent to earth with
His full authority. I am sent to accomplish His command to save the world's
six billion people, restoring them to Heaven with the original goodness in
which they were created.
The five great saints and many other leaders in the spirit world, including
even Communist leaders such as Marx and Lenin, who committed all manner of
barbarity and murders on earth, and dictators such as Hitler and Stalin,
have found strength in my teachings, mended their ways and been reborn as
new persons. Emperors, kings and presidents who enjoyed opulence and power on
earth, and even journalists who had worldwide fame, have now placed themselves
at the forefront of the column of the true love revolution. Together they
have sent to earth a resolution expressing their determination in the light
of my teaching of the true family ideal. They have declared to all Heaven
and Earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity's Savior,
Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent. This resolution has been announced
on every corner of the globe.
Respected guests, it is now only a matter of time. Look at the world. Do you
see anything that gives you real hope for the future? Sooner or later, we have
to give what we have to our descendants and leave this world. What gift could
be more precious than that of completing the family ideal in your family, so
as to guarantee eternal peace and happiness for your children? Surely no one
who has such an opportunity should hesitate to take up the task of building
the peace kingdom on earth, for which God has waited thousands of years.
I have reached the advanced age of eighty-five, by the Korean way of
counting. But I will continue to work harder than anyone else until the
day the Earth overflows with God's true families, guns in the Middle East
fall silent and give way to fireworks of peace and joy, and shouts of mansei
[eternal victory] celebrating the unification of my homeland Korea echo across
the Pacific to be heard in America. I hope that you leaders representing
the world's six billion people in this ceremony will join hands with me. I
call you to take the lead in building what is God's original ideal and the
desire of all humanity, the peace kingdom on the Earth.
Thank you.
|