Good morning everyone! Why are we meeting together at the very early hour of four in the morning? Before we leave each other, we need to bring our CARP Conference and Convention back to the root of who we are. All of the things we have experienced together in the last few days don't mean anything if we are not rooted in the will of God. Without that root, we cannot be the people who fulfil the work of God's providence.
Last year I went on a world tour to Korea, Japan, Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, Russia, Moldova, Hungary and Germany. There was one significant country missing, and that was the USA. Therefore let me remind you why the theme of that tour was Inheritance and Development. It was because there was a tension between the first and second generation. By second generation I mean all young people not just Blessed Children. The first generation thought they had their own path and the second generation felt they had a separate path. Each felt they could do without the other, and even discard the other.
Our movement has a long history of sacrifice. Our movement is built on the root of tears, blood and sacrifice. I started off my inaugural tour by asking if it was God's intention to have True Parents walk the course of the wilderness for 40 years, restoring all 6000 years of human history? That was not God's plan. He had already prepared a plan through worldwide Christianity. It had been prepared for 6,000 years. I explained about the Old Testament Age and the New Testament Age, and how that foundation was lost.
In 1945 history was undoubtedly at an inflection point. After the war, there was a feeling of the real possibility of global unity. The UN was founded, and America was the most powerful nation. Christianity was strong. At that time, True Parents should have stood on the national foundation of Korean Christianity and the International foundation of American Christianity. If that had happened, the Kingdom of Heaven could have been built in seven years, by 1952. However, a critical failure took place and the wilderness course began.
Now we have entered the settlement age, the time of settlement when once again we can lay the foundation to build God's substantial kingdom. Father has spent more than 50 years speaking about True Families. If you read the Hoon Dok Hwe books all the way from the early speeches in the 1950s up until just yesterday, you will see that Father is always talking about the same topics. He always talks about the relationships between men and women, relations in the family and with God. True Parents recognize that it is the relationships within the family that are the root of all other relations.
From the very beginning God lost the ideal of the true family. Even the original Divine Principle focused on just the reciprocal pair relations on the individual level, such as mind and body, myself and True Parents, myself and God. One consequence of that individual focus was that people could say that they had faith in True Parents but not in True Family. Now it is time to focus on the full four position foundation. It is through the family that the substantial lineage can be created, not just from the relationship with God between individual men and women, but the substantial relationship though a family. God needed to create a lineage on earth. That's why he created man and woman to grow to maturity and begin a family through marriage. Adam and Eve, standing on left and right, should pass the vertical tradition coming from God down to their children. Why is this so important? Because in the family you have true love, life and lineage.
After the fall, all of human history was a history to change blood lineage and ownership. Satan took away Eve who was to be through Adam the wife of God. She went away taking the seed of the enemy in her womb. How difficult would it be for God to see that child when he was born? Every time he saw that child he would be reminded of the blood lineage and life of his enemy. This was the analogy Father used. To restore this you have to build a substantial family. It is time now that the Cain type and Abel type children come together. When that relationship is correct it can unite all our family. We have to stand as one family before the world if we are to build Gods substantial kingdom.
Why is it then that until now we focused only on the individual? As I said, the Divine Principle speaks mostly on the individual level, because history until now was a history of salvation on the individual level. Man and woman fell on the individual level before they could stand as true men and women. That's why the question of mind/body unity has been the fundamental challenge of the spiritual life. Father asks all the time, and asked again yesterday, "Do you have real mind/body unity?"
Recently I was sitting in one of the classes at UTS on the topic of "Building True Family Values" We were talking about how one develops moral character. Today many psychologists and sociologists are following a model of moral reasoning being developed through stages. Kohlberg's theory of four moral stages is an example. This theory says in essence that there are different moral choices to be made at each level of growth, and that the moral paradigm used at each stage is different and therefore relative.
I challenged the professor that this theory implies that all morality is relative. There is no absolute right and wrong. "How is it then," I asked, "That the great figures of history faced moral dilemmas with absolute consistency?" They were absolutely clear about right and wrong and the way they should go. On the cross, Jesus was willing to accept the vertical path prescribed for him. He realized that it was a difficult course, but he was willing to accept it.
I mention this because the so-called moral authorities of today are not authorities at all. They are confused and their theories only reflect the mind/body disunity in themselves. Moral values do not lie in the nice rhetoric and explanations, the graphs and the rational process. They lie in the heart, based on experience. They affect us all wherever we come from, Asian, black or white. Regardless of all the cultural differences, there are universal moral standards that affect all of us.
What are the fundamental and universal values that everyone shares? Take any man anywhere, he is always the son, husband, father, brother of someone. And any woman, be she a Miss America, a housewife, a professor from the Philippines, is the daughter, wife sister or mother of someone. Regardless of where we come from, we are the sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives and fathers and mothers of someone. These familial relationships are universal. However, there is a problem with these relationships in every culture today.
The gap between generations is a result of the conflict between people and their parents and grandparents, and the failure of that relationship. The struggles in society between men and women start in the family. The failure to create true brotherly relations in the family is expressed in war and struggle. The breakdown of the family is because of the failure of parents to love children.
Many people say, "Well, talking about ideal families is great, but what is the connection to building a world of peace." My reply is this. The family unit is the basic building block of any social order. If there are flaws in the basic building block, then the end product will be flawed. If you fix the flaw in the building blocks then the end product, will be OK. Somehow the DNA, the basic molecule was flawed and the result is totally the opposite of what God had intended. If we can recreate the original building block we can recreate God's ideal.
Everyone wants love, but there are so many different standards of love. We have to recognize that. We do not share the love between husband and wife with the children - that is incest. We do not share the horizontal love of bothers and sisters between parents and children, which is vertical.
There is a gap between the generations. The older generation says, "Young people today have no standards." Every generation has been the same since the beginning! Abba is 81 and his life represents many generations. Don't you think he feels that way about every generation? I am only 32, but I see today's kids and think, "What planet did they come from, they have no respect!" I would say that all of this is because of the ambiguity of the standard of love between generations.
Likewise, you could say that the confusion in sexual relationships comes from a loose and ambiguous understanding of what the relationship between husband and wife is, leading to things like homosexuality. Yesterday Father said that homosexuality was Satan's tool to destroy humanity. Why? You cannot create any vertical standard with homosexual relations, and there can be no procreation of the next generation. Therefore it means the end of that generation.
That kind of relationship is worse than even that of the animals. The basic theory of evolution speaks of the survival of the fittest and the strong urge for reproduction. That drive creates competitiveness among the males to pass on the genes. Even in the animal kingdom the relationship between male and female to pass on the lineage is very clear.
I see this myself when I go out hunting. All of my life I have loved nature, and my true church is God's creation. That's where I find peace, solace, and internal peace and purification, when I am thousands of miles away out in the boondocks. Right now, my playground is Alaska. If I had lived 2000 years ago I would have been a wilderness person who stayed away for 40 days. Who knows I might do that by taking 40 days away from CARP! What if I smelled and was dirty, or away so long my language skills deteriorated, would you still come to hear me speak? You are crazy people.
How about the relationship between brothers? When Father met all the great leaders in Washington DC last week and gave the speech there, he spoke of all conflict as being at root a brotherly struggle, an extension of the Cain and Abel struggle that started in the first family. The inability to love each of our brothers is the cause. Warfare represents the two camps, one representing God and the other Satan. Among these, it is those who attacked first who represent the evil ideas. That's why the struggle between nations can only be resolved by finding the true relationship between brothers and sisters, brothers and brothers. Where are we going to get that knowledge?
I have been studying at UTS and now I realize why I did not take theology in college! In the USA you don't have to decide a major until the 3rd year. When I was a college student, I asked Father what should I major in? He said History, Philosophy or Theology, and I chose History. Now at UTS I am taking courses in theology, including Christian theology. Now I see why it is so challenging for Christians to accept Father's message!
This is the time that religious people should be open minded, not dogmatic and not doctrinaire. Jesus was not a theologian, he was a man who wanted to build God's kingdom. Many of the troubles today come from the ideas of Christology about the role of the messiah and the person of Christ. If these are the conclusions and results, maybe we should ask different questions.
Today people are looking differently at the question of Christology. In New Testament studies we talk a lot about the search for the historical Jesus. Was he apocalyptic, or a sage or wisdom teacher? The apocalyptic view says that Jesus died on the cross as a condition for bodily resurrection. The wisdom view is that Jesus was a philosopher king, But does reason lead us to divinity? If you look at the Bible it is full of paradoxes and 'unreasonable' sayings. There is a component of faith and of heart that leads people to God's Ideal will beyond mere reason. This is the beginning of religious life, the relationship between man and his heavenly father.
At the Washington Prayer Luncheon, the president of the Billy Graham Association said that the thing that Billy Graham was most proud of in his life was not any aspect of his great worldwide ministry but his relationship with God. Many religious teachers said the same. Reason is not the way that leads us to God. It is time for us to rethink the theology and see Jesus from a different point of view.
This goes to the question of concept and experience. How does one learn, through experience or abstraction, or both? As humans we can abstract great concepts and principles out of thin air. We can use pure mathematics to learn about the relationship between stars in the universe that we cannot experience directly. However, all theories are just a theory until they are proved in the physical word.
When it comes to moral lessons and learning about God, it is experience and not abstraction that teaches us the real way. Experience is the source that leads us to true knowledge. Reason stands in the subordinate position. True love, true life and true lineage should not be an abstraction but a substantial reality that we experience on a daily basis. We manifest true love not by thinking about it, but by practicing it on a daily basis as a son, husband and father. This is how we get the substantial knowledge of True Love.
At various conferences, I have told many VIPS that the model of the family is the model for world peace. You will not find solutions that work from discussions about economics and politics. Those things change very quickly. However, the fundamental relations in the family will not change. The family is the place where the mature people emerge and leave a legacy behind.
If those people can create a relationship of True Love in the family it can be used elsewhere as a model. Through the family the individual can know the secrets of the man and woman relationship. If you are a man, you must understand the world of women not from a political perspective but through the eyes of love. If we really did that would we see all the conflicts we see today? No.
We can solve the problems that nations and cultures have against each other based on the model of true brotherly love learned in the family. This is knowledge that is more powerful and more useful than anything you might find in a book. In the family you learn to look at other people through the eyes of love. That is why it is the family that is the basic building block of human society and has the key to all the secrets, all the hopes that people have had since the beginning of history.
Let me ask our brother here a question. When you were a baby, did you know what the meaning of your life was? Did you even know if you are a boy or a girl? No, you only know what to put in your mouth! Today you are a gentleman, but everyone was a baby once, weren't they?
Later on you realized that there was an expectation of being a boy. You probably first realize you are a boy by looking at your sexual organ. Did you ever think, 'Why I am a boy? Why do I have something dangling here and the other half of the human race has nothing?' One day you realize that you are different and there must be some purpose.
The moment you realize that you are different, you realize there must be a meaning. You don't worry about big philosophical questions, but you do wonder about the meaning of the sexual organs, They are the means to create true love and lineage in the creation of ideal families. You are smart. You are the product of all the ideals and cultures that came before you, but also of barriers that they bring. Patriotism in one sense can mean ethnocentric in another. People who have a strong cultural heritage may love their culture and language but be unable to embrace other cultures and languages. If we shed all of that baggage, to look across the street, nation and world through the eyes of true love, all we should see is true love, life and lineage and no other distinctions.
I spoke the other day to the President of the Comoros. We will have a CARP chapter there soon. In the future we will have a CARP convention and symposium every year. Where will it be held? I want your feedback because it has to better, more effective. The guiding purpose is to make members effective in the field as leaders. A leader takes initiative, is responsible and accountable. A follower does none of these things. We want to give all of you the tools to become leaders. We have to create the curriculum to become leaders.
I want the things that are taught here at the CARP Conference to be applicable in the field. That is one of the key purposes of the Convention. The second part is that we can show to the world and to ourselves the international identity of CARP. It is a chance for all of us to see CARP Members from other nations and can practice the ideas of true love.
Is this an idea that is only attractive to Unificationists! No. We do not have a monopoly on the message of the family. But we have a message that anyone can use. I speak to many VIPS and I speak as frankly as I do to you. They realize that all the problems come from the breakdown of the family, and there is no true model. But we have it in our movement and we have it in practice. Amen or No men? Shall I teach you all now, or over many years? You say you want it all now but if you get too much your back may fold onto the floor!
If you remembered nothing else about this conference remember that the building of God's substantial kingdom comes from the building true families. We should see everything through the eyes of love. True Parents were able to overcome so much adversity. From the beginning Father was kicked out by the Christian community and was left with no foundations. Most men would have crumbled under that situation. Many people lose their faith in the time of death where it looks like that they are losing everything. But despite the misunderstanding, persecution and tribulation True Parents continued.
No parents would abandon their loving child, although sometimes it may seem that way to the child. Did you have such a situation within your life of faith? Father told me that in his life, every time God promised him a great blessing, God sent him to prison. Every time! That's how Father went to prison six times in his life, the first time when he was your age. As a human being, don't you have similar experiences? Be like Father and never quit. I once told Father after studying his life, "Every time you went to prison, our movement grew." This is parallel to how Christianity grew. Persecution was intense. Martyrs died to share their faith. That sacrifice came long before all of Christian theology.
At Danbury the whole religious community came forward and told the government, "You are wrong." The ministers who came yesterday to welcome Father came first from the Danbury time. The campaign manger for George Bush who organized the conference was also there. Also the ministers who led George Bush to be a believer were there. Another man was there who will soon get a cabinet level position. All the different denominations and religions were there.
Let me tell you a story about that meeting in Washington. After giving his speech, the ambush media came to Robert Schuler, the famous TV evangelist, and asked 'Do you know this event is sponsored by Rev. Moon?' He said 'Yes, and moreover it is time we rethink our position on Sun Myung Moon.' This came from the mouth of the most prominent religious leader in the USA.
After that, Father was in his room reading Hoon Dok Hwe when many VIPS came up to greet him. There were no chairs and so they sat on the floor. When God looks at us, does he recognize positions like president or vice-president? God does not see all that. He sees all humanity as his children and he sees through the eyes of love, not through external means. Look at each other and see how different we all are from each other.
Some people say that to be united we should all be the same, same hair, same skin colour, but the beauty comes because we are true people. We are different. Some of us want to move mountains, and others just to still the soul. Through True Love you can see true greatness. God does not value things like power, money and knowledge. God needs families under his domain, true families. At the end of the Hoon Dok Hwe, a successful presidential campaign manager came up to Father and said, 'I read Inquisition and I want to apologize to you on behalf of my nation for the way you were mistreated in my country' At Danbury, people started to realize the value of Father's words.
If Father had reacted or argued with God he might not have gone through all the difficulties he has until now. Yet he persevered in obedience to God. The leaders have to know this. This is the settlement age, the 7th millennium from the Biblical view, the 21st Century. It is not every day that history reaches such a critical point. This is a period to rectify all that went wrong in the beginning. The solution is the creation of ideal families. We came so early in the morning because we want to align ourselves with this message to position ourselves to be able to build a new world order, a revolution of heart. If that is the spirit you take, nothing can stop it!
Think of the dream we have for liberating God, humanity and True Parents. If we are to bring people under the dominion of God, True Parents life and lineage is fundamental. This is our mission, Amen. We will not go quietly into the night. We will rant and rave and shake the world until it recognizes that we have come at a time in history where we will build the kingdom. We will take this message to every campus and every street corner. Do you have that dream? If you do, there is nothing you cannot accomplish. Remember Father. You have been promised blessing, but there will be times that you do not see that. There will be difficulties instead. If we remember Father's course, we will overcome those difficulties and build that ideal world.
This year, I am going to be doing another world tour. Don't think that CARP is for young people who are isolated from the rest of society. I know people were dying to get out of CARP, thinking 'I'll do my 2 or 3 years, and then get out' Is that what you think? Is that your view? To serve your time and get out? Now there is a change, miraculously people want to stay. CARP members of the past who are 40 or 50 want to come back but there is not enough room!
The power and commitment is here in CARP. If the vision and ideals are in CARP, do we just exist for ourselves, or do we want to go out and share our blessing with the world? Invest, forget, invest and forget is the message! Let's rock the nations, rock their world! Amen? I want you not to see CARP just as it is today but to see the potential for greatness. Do I look like a person who settles for mediocrity? What is the motto for World CARP? There is no such thing as number two, only number one! Why? Because God deserves Number One! Why? Because True Parents deserve number one!
CARP is an organization that strives for excellence. We will liberate God and True Parents. This convention is not an event in isolation. I have been kicking the butts of these ajoshi, getting them to understand the vision I have for CARP. You cannot carry the baggage of old CARP into new CARP! CARP is going to revive the world! We will take that spirit around the world, spreading faster than a contagious disease. Old members have a lot of children and worry about their families, as well as many other things.
Young people have the capacity and freedom to focus and to propel God's work forward at light speed. The world of progress is not going to be made by political and religious leaders, but on the grass roots level in every town and city. This will be grassroots-based, rising from the energies and activities of young people. I want you to understand your role in this most historic hour. Take this message forward, take your conviction forward and change the face of history. Amen! Amen!
Great! I finished in an hour and a half what I thought would take two hours. You can take the content of this message and debate with any theologian, and you can meet any politician or social worker and speak with confidence. You will have knowledge and truth that is more than that of a whole lifetime. You have been given a tool today. Go out and use it!