The agony of alienation
On February 1, 1993, Rev. Sun Myung Moon
spoke these words:
We refer to the God of sorrow, the God of pain. Why? Because, who is
Satan? Satan is the illegitimate husband, where God is the legitimate husband.
He is the love enemy. Think about if somebody stole your wife and is living
with her, yet you are in the position to love both of them. That’s
God’s position. We didn’t know, so we didn’t feel it. We
must understand.
Think carefully about the ramifications of this statement. God’s
position is that of a cuckolded husband, a married man with an unfaithful
wife. What is the nature of the conflict between God and Satan? It is the
timeless love triangle. Both loved the same woman. Who was that woman? It
was Eve. God wanted Adam to grow in heart and love to the point where Adam
would become God’s embodiment and representative in the physical
world, as God is an incorporeal being, a being without a body. Embodied and
incarnated in the man Adam, God wanted to love a woman, Eve, and give birth
to a lineage of sons and daughters like Himself. But instead of Eve loving
Adam and through him God, instead, she chose to love another, the archangel
Lucifer. The fruit that Eve ate with Lucifer was the forbidden fruit of
illicit love.
Why did this happen? This is not just a casual question. To understand
the answer to this question is to understand how evil came to be in this
human world. There are many among us whose spouses have done exactly this,
having been promised to one person for eternity, they went away with another
lover, male or female. Why would this happen? Why did it happen to Adam?
Was Adam a loving and attentive husband? Was he such a man as to sweep
his wife off her feet so that she was passionately in love with him? Or was
he so virtuous as to inspire her admiration and respect? If he had been, she
would not have chosen another lover, is that not true? The sad reality is that
Adam was an immature man, so his wife was vulnerable to another predatory male.
If you are a man and your wife has left you, you can choose to blame her
and be angry at her, but the undeniable reality is that if you had loved her
with a love that had exceeded her wildest dreams as a woman, it is unlikely
that she would have gone looking elsewhere. Likewise, if you are a woman
and your husband has left you, do you not have to admit that despite your
illusions to the contrary, your love was not ideal? It is a sad reality to
mourn over and repent for.
Now there may be many of you who think, “Well, I am still married,
my wife still lives with me, we have a good family.” But in your heart
of hearts, do you think your love is ideal? Do you think that if some other
person came along whose love far exceeded yours, that your spouse would not be
tempted to go off with that person? The reality is that many marriages would
be under great strain to withstand that kind of influence. Many marriages
are a quiet agony, for one or both of the partners. You married with great
hopes of true love, but then reality set in. You lived together, got to know
each other, saw each other’s quirks and foibles, their selfishness,
immaturity and even cruelty. You had the experience of sex, which may have
been wonderful, and may have been miserable. You had the responsibility
for a household, for making a living, for money, for a family, and extended
family relationships. You had to deal with the realities of daily life with
someone whom you are not sure you still love, and if you don’t feel
that way all of the time, maybe you feel that way some of the time. Maybe you
stayed together because of your faith, or because you liked the sex, or for
the sake of idealism, or for the sake of the children, or because you care
what others think, or because you made a promise to God and each other, or
because your conscience lets you do no other, but your love is barely alive.
You may not have admitted this to anyone, even yourself.
Be honest with yourself, this issue is too important. Do you complain
about your spouse? Does he or she have habits and ways of behaving that
really bother you? If someone came along who had none of those faults, and
was in every way better than your spouse, would you not be tempted to leave
your spouse and go be with them? That is the reality of the fallen world. We
live in a world where the ideal of love is very far away.
Now let’s go back to Adam. What did God expect of him? God wanted
Adam to love three people, on God’s behalf, to the point where they
would do absolutely anything for him, even be willing to die for him. Who
were those people? They were the three archangels in the Garden of Eden,
Gabriel, Lucifer and Michael.
What are spiritual children? They represent three lost archangels. Adam
and Eve fell because the three archangels did not stand in a realm of
supporting each other. This has to be indemnified. Thus three spiritual
children representing the three archangels have to become one and stand in a
position to offer their lives to Adam. You stand in the position of Adam and
Eve toward your spiritual children. You must make the realm of heart where
the three spiritual children who stand representing the three archangels do
not have any regret in offering their lives to their spiritual parent. Through
education, you must make that relationship.
Blessing and Ideal Family, by Reverend Sun
Myung Moon, Chapter Five, Part 3
So, practically speaking, what does this mean in my life? It means that
I need to love three people to the point where they come to be completely
devoted to me, to the point where they would willingly lay down their lives
for me if the need arose. Before I can love anyone to that degree, I have
to experience that love from someone else. I have to receive and experience
God’s love through someone who takes the role in my life of a parent,
mentor, intimate friend, coach, confidant, confessor. In fact, the more such
people I have in my life, the better. Did Adam have such a person? He had
God. Did Jesus have such a person? No. Sadly, he had a very difficult life,
which made it hard for him to experience the love he needed to give. The
relationship with a mentor helps us to develop our vertical relationship with
God. It is much more difficult to experience that love from the invisible
God than from a visible person in your life. That is why the first person
to attain this standard has the most difficult experience to attain it. He is then able
to pass on that love to others, so that they can experience that love much
more easily than he could.
Based on that experience, I need to love three people as God does to
the point where they would be willing to lay down their lives for me, with
no regrets. They will not do that for me unless I have first done that for
them. These two processes can be happening at the same time. I can be guided
by my Abel while being Abel to someone else in the position of Cain. It is a
hierarchy of love mentoring, with God and True Parents as the root. It is a
tree of love and a tree of life. It does not necessarily mean that I have to
go out on the street and find strangers to believe my theology. What it means
is that three people in my life have to come to love me like that because I
loved them that much first. If I cannot evoke that kind of love and loyalty
from my friends, how can I expect it from my spouse or my children? It is
not a test that I have to pass in order to get married. It is simply that
if I do not love to that level, then I am really not qualified to make a
successful marriage, and I am on the path to failure and heartbreak.
Did Jesus accomplish that standard? No, in fact he did not. When the
going got tough, in his hour of need, his three closest disciples, Peter,
James and John, would not stay awake with Jesus to pray with him in the
Garden of Gethsemane, and then another disciple, Judas, betrayed Jesus to
the authorities and he was killed. Subsequently, his disciples ran away,
only to regroup after his death. What it means is that Jesus was not able
to love his disciples to the point where they were willing to die in his
place, or to defend him at all costs. Their love was weak. Both Jesus and
Adam were unable to fulfill that standard of loving three people to the
point where they would lay down their lives for their friend.
The unfulfilled standard of God’s ideal involves loving three
other people to the point where they are willing to lay down their lives for
you. It is a very difficult standard. When you see it in that light, you can
see that Adam was unable to receive that kind of love and loyalty from the
three archangels, because he had not been able to give it. Then one of the
archangels, Lucifer, seduced his wife Eve who became alienated from Adam,
and from God. Though Eve did come back to Adam, her heart was still with
Lucifer, the illegitimate husband, and she had inherited Lucifer’s
nature through their sexual relationship. When Eve had children with Adam,
they did not inherit the nature of God, their legitimate husband and father,
but the nature of the archangel Lucifer, the illegitimate husband and
father. This means that Adam’s lineage came to be owned by Lucifer,
rather than God. As a result, we were all born with Satan’s nature
rather than God’s nature.
Can Adam blame his wife, or blame her lover? No, he has to take the full
burden of responsibility upon himself and acknowledge that his own love was
insufficient. Adam had the role to become the absolute subject of love,
not Eve, and not the archangel. God’s position then became one in
which He had to love His adulterous wife, and the man she was living with,
such sickening heartache, and to harbor no bitterness towards them, but to
love the enemy of love with the love He had expected to give His own wife and
children, His own flesh and blood. In fact, since Lucifer’s accusation
to God was always that God did not love Lucifer as much as He loved Adam,
God has been in the position of having to love His enemy and the children
of His enemy more than His own children, in order that Satan cannot accuse
God. We who follow the path of restoration need to love our enemy, and our
enemy’s family, even more than our own children, or else the condition
for Satan to stop accusing us cannot be made.
The whole history of God and man is God’s effort to raise up just
one man who could love like that, and then to multiply that love through
a woman, and through his lineage. God sends the Messiah as the one who is
intimately and bitterly familiar with God’s suffering, through his own
experiences in life, and through his experiences with God, and then is able
to stand as a subject of love to melt away the bitterness of human beings who
have never known true love. When we meet that kind of love, we can surrender
all lesser loves. That is why Jesus said that those who love father or mother
or husband or wife more than they love him are not worthy of him.
It is an amazing truth that when we love the one who is the most difficult
to love, for whatever reason, then we gain an internal victory which
has external results. When I can love and embrace and treat graciously,
the person who caused my heart so much pain, then I am doing something
Satan cannot do, and that person then has great difficulty in harboring
resentment towards me. It is the path to healing and reconciliation. It is
truly a miracle. Getting to that point is another story. I have to find a
motivation to love that transcends all the reasons I have to hold bitterness,
all the reasons I feel justified in holding on to my bad feeling towards that
person. I do whatever I have to do to gain the resolve to love, to make the
decision to love, and when I do it, I change, and they change too.
God created us in order to experience love in all its fullness, but
He feels inexpressible agony because we are alienated from Him, and He is
unable to reach us due to our evil selfish nature, and due to our lack of
anything in common with Him. When people have a lot in common, they respond
to each other like soul mates, like long lost friends, like an explosive
chemical reaction. Why do I not relate to God like that? It is because
we do not have much in common. Whether I like it or not, I have to admit
that if I do not relate to God like that, it is because I am more like
Satan than I am like God. What is Satan like? He is cruel, self-centered,
focuses on himself and what is his above all else, guards his possessions
for his own use and does not share them with others, he is full of hatred,
bitterness, blame and anger. Satan delights in the suffering of others,
and is jealous of anything they have that is good or better than what he
has. God is altogether other-centered, gaining joy from the joy of others,
and in the joy of loving others, even loving those who hate and despise Him.
God is generous and loving to a fault, to the point where others perceive
it as foolishness and weakness.
So what is the path to restore ourselves to be God’s children? The
first step is to find someone who is closer to God than I am, in the position
of Abel, and allow them to love me in the position of Cain, and in obedience
and trust, allow them to guide me to make a relationship with God. We call
this the foundation of faith. Not
only does it involve faith in God, but faith in a person. Everyone except
the central person in God’s providence has someone else who is closer
to God than they are. I have to allow that person to represent God to me,
as I am unable to come to God directly. I am able to restore my lifeline
to God through Abel, who is connected to the Messiah, who is connected to
God. Then when I take on the responsibility to love three people in the
position of three archangels or three Cains, then I am able to fulfill the
foundation of substance.
The process of learning to love those three people so much that they meet
God through me is a transformative process. For someone to meet God through me
requires me to represent God to them, to love them as God loves them, and to
take responsibility for their eternal life. When I can love them to the degree
necessary for them to experience God through me, God will come to me more and
more, until my nature resembles God’s nature more than Satan’s
nature, and finally, all remnants of Satanic nature fade away. This is what
the Divine Principle calls the condition to remove the fallen nature.
As the person in Abel’s position loves the person in Cain’s
position, both are changed by the experience. It is a true love experience.
When I can successfully pass through these two stages, then I am able to
stand beyond the realm of the fall, and the Messiah is able to give me the
blessing of marriage and together as a couple, we are able to pass through
the third stage, the completion stage, and fulfill the ideal of love. At
this point, I have not fulfilled this standard, but coming to understand
the practical implications of it has me much more motivated to follow this
restoration course, rather than to complain about why my life did not turn
out the way I wanted and expected. If I have not fulfilled the ideal of love,
then I cannot justifiably complain about my spouse for not having done so,
or that my children do not want to listen to me or obey me. When I gain that
qualification, they will naturally follow me. They are not the problem, I am.
When I can win the hearts of three people, I can love anyone, and I can
teach them to do the same. In this way, my realm of love grows and grows. It
grows vertically from the servant of servant position through servant,
adopted son, step son, true son, father, mother and God. It also grows
horizontally from the individual to the family, clan, tribe, nation, world,
cosmos, and God. Today, Unificationists celebrate Pal Jong Shik,
which True Father declared on August 31, 1989. It represents Father having
accomplished the restoration of all eight vertical and eight horizontal stages
of restoration. Within a few months of that declaration, the Berlin Wall came
down, True Father went to Moscow and met President Mikhail Gorbachev who ended
communist rule in the then Soviet Union, and communism as we knew it ended.
This is the way God will save the world. He sent one Messiah, who models
all aspects of love in the family and teaches us how to love as God loves,
and helps us to become like him. He also leaves a lineage of people who
inherit his nature. They are a permanent presence in the world, and through
the Messiah and his family, the world can learn to love as God does and can
transform this world of hell into the kingdom of heaven. The world dominated
by Satan with its fallen relationships, alienation, misery, and loneliness,
can be transformed through the passionately active love of God being manifested
in the world through you and me, and all the disciples of the Messiah.
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