In Jin Moon
July 30, 2010
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Manhattan Center. I'm delighted to be hosting the 16th Parents Day here at the beautiful Hammerstein Ballroom. I know that my parents and all my family join me in this celebration of a wonderful day.
When my father, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, first proclaimed the era of women in 1994 and inaugurated the Women's Federation for World Peace under the leadership of my mother, Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, it was the beginning of something wonderful time for us women in our movement. Ever since my father proclaimed the era of women, my mother has been tirelessly working to share the breaking news that True Parents are here, that we are God's eternal sons and daughters, and that our destiny is to become the kind of parents who can raise a beautiful family, the kind of a parents who can inspire a whole generation of young people to aspire to something more than just living a life of superficiality.
Under the leadership of Mrs. Hak Ja Han Moon, the project to make Parents Day a national holiday in the United States was initiated; with her and a number of great friends and colleagues, we were able to see this day inaugurated as a national holiday in the United States. Since then each year we've had wonderful opportunities to come together as a family to remind ourselves of the importance of what this day symbolizes for all of us.
I thank both my mother and my father, both of them together as True Parents, for symbolizing the beauty of family life and of a conjugal relationship. The beauty of a man truly loving and honoring the woman and the woman truly loving and honoring the man, as a couple, is something that did not exist in the history of religion.
As you know, Jesus Christ anointed my father in the lonely, cold hills of North Korea when my father was only 16 years of age. Jesus Christ asked this young boy to take up the mission of fulfilling Jesus' mission, which was to find that beautiful wife and build an ideal family. I strongly believe that had Jesus not gone the way of the cross but instead had the opportunity to find that wife through whom he could establish a True Parentship and start building the ideal family that our Heavenly Parent so desired, we would have seen the world in a very different light.
I believe very strongly that Jesus Christ would have done exactly what our True Parents have done and will continue to do in giving the gift of the Holy Blessing ceremony. I believe that had Jesus been given an opportunity to become our True Parent 2,000 years ago, he would have become famous for the very mass weddings that my father and mother are famous for. He would have encouraged the brothers and sisters of his time from different nations, different religious backgrounds, different cultural backgrounds, and different racial backgrounds to really love one another, to think of each other as belonging to one family, and to come together in the common denominator of our humanity as the sons and daughters of our Heavenly Parent.
What we see in the work of our True Parents right now is something that should have happened 2,000 years ago. But here we are, brothers and sisters. We have the opportunity of living in this historical time of the breaking news, when the messiah, the Lord of the Second Advent, together with his bride can stand in the position as the True Parents of humankind.
Think of all those difficult years when women were relegated to second-class citizenship, when women had no voice under the umbrella of religion, when women had no position because the Holy Spirit never had the chance to manifest in the form of a beautiful woman on earth. For me, the reason why the concept of True Parents is incredibly important is that for the first time women can stand as proud, eternal daughters of God. We don't have to be burdened by the human Fall. We don't have to be accused as temptresses any more. We can stand as the eternal, beautiful daughters that God so desired.
With our True Mother establishing the true position of perfected Eve, standing together with the perfected Adam as the True Parents of humankind, this breaking news is the greatest gift for all of us living at this time. Can you imagine, brothers and sisters, what we would do to just have a moment to experience what it would have been like to walk with Jesus, to talk with Jesus, to work side by side with Jesus Christ in his ministry?
We are the lucky ones, different from the millions who have come before us and the millions who will come after us. We are the lucky ones who have been given this gift, to graft onto the original olive branch and experience the opportunity of building this wonderful thing called an ideal family.
As a mother and as the senior pastor of Lovin' Life Ministries, I will be the first one to say that being parent is not a walk in the park. We have our moments of joy, our moments of laughter. But we also share moments of tears and moments of deep, deep suffering. The family that my father refers to as the textbook of love is a place where we have a chance to really rub up against our parents, to rub up against our spouses, to rub up against our siblings, to deepen our understanding of true love, genuine love, these eternal bonds of love that will stay with us here and in the world hereafter.
Our Heavenly Parent is allowing us to prepare for that moment when we ourselves become a couple and can look forward to the day when we can be holding these beautiful specimens of love in our arms. As someone who has five children of my own, I realize that I did not truly understand what true love is all about and how much God our Heavenly Parent loves all of us until that very moment when I held my eldest son in my arms. In a sense, the world vanished, and the only thing left was me and this child in an unbreakable bond that exists between a parent and a child: the very bond that we have with God, our eternal Heavenly Parent.
In that moment when the world disappeared and I gazed into those beautiful eyes of my eldest son, I realized for the first time: "So this is how much our God, our Heavenly Parent, loves us." This must have been the very feeling that he felt when he created Adam and Eve. And this must have been the kind of moment that he so enjoyed -- the kind of feelings of love and anticipation that come to mind when you look upon something so beautiful. These must have been the very feelings that God had when he gazed into each of our eyes.
At that moment I came to know for the first time in my life what an incredible blessing it is to become a parent. I realized that by becoming a parent I could finally begin to understand what God's love for us is all about. And just as God created each and every one of us as beautiful specimens of true love, God gave all of us a special destiny that we need to fulfill in our lifetime.
I believe that we men and women, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters alike, are divine beings with a purpose that needs to be played out in the course of our lives. Here in America, living in the great superpower of the world, we have so many things at our fingertips. We have the Internet. Wherever we go, we can stop by a McDonald's when we're hungry. We can play our favorite games in an arcade or walk across the street and watch the specific movie we want to see. Everything that we could possibly imagine and want is right here.
But if you look at human history, when God lost his children through the Fall, humanity became like orphans. We have become children without parents. As great as this country is, we struggle for our right to exercise religious freedom. We struggled and fought for our independence. We struggled and fought for our freedom, but that freedom must be exercised in living our lives as children of God and honoring our God. Just as we experience and enjoy the freedoms that are given to us, we must never forget where we come from and who we are. We must remember that the place we came from is the very place where we shall return.
We are born in God's love, and we make our way through our lives to find our way back home, when we finally return into his and her arms at the end of our lives. What we need to do as true parents ourselves, in building these ideal families, is to create a great example so that we can inspire a whole new generation of young people to aspire to be great, to aspire to be agents of change who can bring goodness, beauty, and love wherever they go.
For my family and I, our goal in life is to raise up a Generation of Peace. And when we think in our mind what that generation would look like, for us it's a generation of young people who understand first and foremost that God is our Heavenly Parent and, secondly, who understand that they are eternal sons and daughters of God, that they are divine beings with a divine purpose, and that they have a duty to live a purpose-driven life. These young people would understand the meaning of altruism, of living for the sake of others, that their lives are not really only about themselves but about how they can give to others, how they can love others, how they can empower others through their passions, through the things that they are very good at.
This Generation of Peace is the generation that understands the meaning of compassion, kindness, caring, and love, the very qualities that many times we don't see in our day-to-day activities at work or at school. We constantly see on the evening news the violence that exists in schools, between different religions, between different races. We need to bring compassion back into our lives.
This Generation of Peace will be a group of young people that symbolize excellence in their lives, not just external excellence but the internal excellence of love and faith that understands the need to honor the very place we come from and to honor the parents and people who have come before us.
Parents Day is a wonderful day for all parents to remember what we must do, namely, that our responsibility is to inspire such a generation of young people. But Parents Day is also a day when the young people can remind ourselves that we come from these great men and women before us; it is a day when we should honor them, when we should truly give them respect and share love between generations.
Brothers and sisters, I would like to thank all of you for spending the evening together with us. I would like to thank all the Ambassadors for Peace and others who have made this evening possible. I know that my parents, the Reverend Dr. and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon, wish you the greatest and happiest Parents Day. I hope that as we look forward to the great festivities that we will enjoy together with the Lovin' Life Band and ballroom dancing, we can really, truly celebrate this day and remember our greatest parent, who is our God up in heaven
God bless, and thank you very much.