Hak Ja Han
August 21, 2013
Delivered by Kwon Jin Moon
Opening plenary session of the International Leadership Conference
7.15 HC the Sheraton Walker Hill Hotel, Seoul
The conference for societal leaders from various nations focused on True Father's life and teachings and coincided with the first anniversary of True Father's ascension.
Excellencies, Religious Leaders, Woman Leaders, Ambassadors for Peace, Distinguished Delegates from throughout the World, Ladies and Gentlemen: Thank you for participating in this very important Inter- national Leadership Conference. As you know, a year ago, my beloved husband of fifty-two years, Dr. Sun Myung Moon, ascended to the spiritual world. At this time, we gather in honor of the first anniversary of his passing away to pay tribute to his life, his teachings and his legacy.
Although my husband, True Father, has passed away to the heavenly realm, not a day goes by when I do not feel his warm presence and his guidance. I feel as if the fifty-two years we spent together are being extended, day by day, even though he now dwells in the heavenly realm, and I am here on earth.
Of course, I cannot deny that the passing of my dear husband has brought me moments of great sadness. So many times, I have wished we could walk together hand in hand, or sit together for a meal. Most of all, I often wish I could listen to him speaking God's word to our children and to the worldwide members of our movement.
The moments of sadness are intense, but they pass quickly. For I understand what he taught me all throughout our life together: Life on earth is temporary. This physical world is a place and a time for us to prepare for our eternal lives. Each of us will ascend one day to the world of the spirit. Every moment is so precious and so infinitely significant.
ILC Luminaries: Lan Young Moon; Yeon Ah Choi nim; Hwa Yun nim (Kwon Jin nim's wife)
He lived his life that way, twenty-four hours a day, from his earliest days. He seldom slept. He always lived every moment of every day with such an intense awareness of not only human suffering but of God's suffering, our Heavenly Parent's own suffering course, which came about due to the Fall and the sad history of human selfishness and conflict that has continued until today.
Each person he met, no matter the time or place, stimulated him to give everything he had to bring that person closer to God, our Heavenly Parent. When my husband passed away last year, I hesitated as to whether I could carry on his legacy in leading this worldwide movement. Could I stand in his shoes? Anytime such a thought visited me, however, it would quickly vanish as I felt my husband's presence and his encouragement, as if he were saying:
I spent fifty-two years with you. You were not only my beloved wife, given to me by God for the sake of his providence, but my most faithful and closest disciple. My words are your words. My accomplishments are your deeds.
I tested you and others tested you constantly, and you always endured and emerged faithful, obedient and victorious. I am with you now, just as much as before. And you are always with me. Let us simply continue our work as the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind.
As I look at our world, I, too, can feel the pain that God must feel as he witnesses the degradation and sinfulness of human beings. God, our Heavenly Parent, created the world with a clear ideal in mind. At the very center of this ideal was the parent -- child relationship, rooted in filial piety. If we consider the biblical story of the Fall, we can understand that the root cause of the Fall was Adam and Eve's failure to be a devoted son and daughter exhibiting obedience, faith and love in the presence of their heavenly Parent, God. Their faithlessness undermined God's ideal of true love in the first marriage and the first family. This reality affected their own relationship to their children, giving rise to the long-standing historical pattern of Cain -- Abel division that has plagued humanity to the present time. As you recall, the first murder occurred within the first family, as the older brother, Cain, killed the younger brother, Abel, who was on God's side.
Interfaith prayer participants, Kaminaga Yoshihiko (Shinto); Sheikh Abubakar Bakayoko (Islam) and Dr. Sreerupa Mitra Chaudhury (Hinduism)
For this reason, my husband consistently taught of the absolute centrality of filial piety in our life of faith. Only in this way can we reverse the effects of the Fall. This is why my husband and I performed the holy wedding ceremonies, known as Blessing Ceremonies, all over the world. The blessing upholds the original ideal of true love, centered on filial piety, absolute sexual purity and fidelity.
The main theme of this conference is related to building a nation of peace. This is a very important concept. The one, unifying purpose and goal of our worldwide movement is to establish a nation of peace. We call this nation Cheon II Guk. That Korean term can be translated as a nation where "two become one." In other words, a nation where divisions of every kind are healed and overcome, resulting in harmony, cooperation and peace.
Earlier this year, we celebrated Foundation Day, as the founding day of Cheon II Guk, a unified nation that is fully aligned with our Heavenly Parent's and True Parents' will. Following Foundation Day, I developed the 2020 Vision for expanding the realm of Cheon Il Guk. Special envoys and national leaders have been assigned to forty-three nations. In each of these nations, our representatives will strive to serve the citizens by expounding True Parents' vision and message for the sake of establishing a God-centered, prosperous and peaceful nation.
Ladies and gentlemen, over the next few days, please invest yourselves in studying and learning about the life, teachings and the legacy of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Although he was badly misunderstood and even vilified throughout much of his life, that era has ended. Increasingly, the world is becoming aware that True Father's life and teachings provide a road map to peace, leading the world toward becoming one family under God.
The sponsoring organizations for this International Leadership Conference are the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, the Universal Peace Federation, and the Women's Federation for World Peace. Each of these organizations has played (and will continue to play) a critical and significant role in God's providence. FFWPU, inheriting the foundation of the Unification Church, serves as the internal center and spiritual core of our life of faith. Centering on True Parents, FFWPU preserves the sacred value of our Heavenly Parent's true love, life and lineage, rooted in the blessing, and lifts up and honors God's truth, guiding us to a life of faithful service in front of heaven, always living for the sake of others. UPF and WFWP are external extensions of FFWPU's vision. These two providential NGOs are grounded in True Parents' vision and affirm the spiritual truths that Father Moon taught. They expand and reach out to the wider world of other religions, nations and societies, to women the world over, and to all fields of human endeavor, including the media, academia, business, culture and civil society.
We often refer to UPF as the seed of an "Abel UN" and WFWP as the seed of an "Abel Women's UN." An Abel UN or an Abel Women's UN means there should be a global, God-centered movement that is dedicated to peace and human development.
As many of you know, Abel is a biblical figure, the younger son of Adam and Eve, who was killed by his older brother, Cain. Abel was a person who had the proper heart of piety toward God, and he made his life an offering centered on God's will. Thus, my husband always honored and uplifted Abel as the example of a true devoted son.
Even though Cain may have had more strength or cleverness, he lacked the heart of a devoted son. Based on external power alone, and selfishness, Cain could not establish a family, tribe or nation of peace. Only someone with the same heart as Abel can (with God's blessing) achieve this goal.
Whenever my husband spoke about the Abel UN, he revealed an inspiring vision of the human family rising together in love and overcoming the barriers of nationality, race and religion. He saw a vision of a God-centered United Nations. Not a United Nations based on national self-interests, but a United Nations concerned about God's interests and the interests of all people as God's sons and daughters. This would be none other than a global Cheon II Guk, guided by the principle of living for the sake of others.
True Father Moon always understood peace as a profoundly spiritual concept. FFWPU, UPF and WFWP all have the word peace, Pyeonghwa, in their name and basic mission. The word peace describes a state of spiritual and physical harmony that characterizes the individual, the family, the society, the nation and the world. My husband did not make a distinction between the meaning of peace and the concept of God's original ideal or what sometimes is called the kingdom of God. Thus, whenever he used "peace," he always thought primarily of God's heart and God's providence.
I encourage you to study my husband's teachings, the Divine Principle. If you study carefully, you will come to understand the way in which God worked in human history. At the same time, you will be in a position where you can directly work to build the ideal world that has been the hope of all the ages, a unified world of peace.
True peace begins with an attitude and practice of filial piety in front of God and True Parents. This basic virtue must then be combined with sexual purity before marriage and absolute fidelity in marriage. Men and women are intended to live as equal and eternal love partners. The family was created by God as the school of love and peace. The holy marriage blessings that my husband and I offered to Heaven over the past fifty-three years, involving many millions of couples all over the world, began as a humble path in a dense forest, but this pathway has grown to become an international highway to world peace.
Lasting peace requires harmony and cooperation among religions. Believers of all faith traditions should work together in love and respect, for the sake of fulfilling our Heavenly Parent's will. As we stand in front of God, we are not evaluated by our title or the name of our religion but by the quality of our hearts and by the quality of our efforts to serve God's providence.
I know that each of you has great responsibilities and great influence in your countries. I hope that you will take seriously what I have said today and what you will learn over the course of the next three days and that you will take this message back to your countries.
Our worldwide movement, centering on FFWPU, UPF and WFWP, stands ready to support and work with you in whatever way we can to advance the ideals of peace, human security and human development in your nations. Let us work together to build ideal families and nations, and let us come together as people, as nations, as religions, and as families to create Cheon Il Guk, one family under God. Thank you and God bless you, your families and your nations.
Kwon Jin nim's comments:
Before I go, please be seated. If you do not mind, I would like to share a few words with you myself. Don't worry; I know we are overdue for a break. I need to go to the bathroom as much as each of you.
[Laughter] I just wanted to share a moment of your time now that I have all of you here.
I want to reflect upon how precious and how rare this occasion is. To have a collection of distinguished and honored world leaders and religious leaders together in the same room on the day of observing our father's passing, I am truly humbled by all of your presence. But I would like to reflect not only on the past, but as great leaders, I would like to reflect upon the future. I truly believe, and every one of my family members believes, that along with the work of our beloved mother, this is the beginning of a new era, that the torch has been passed to a new generation, and that all of us here present together hold the key to that life of peace that we all so deserve. I would like to acknowledge that in my mother's speech she talked about the importance of family.
As a young boy, I was so blessed to have a wonderful older brother. His widow is with us today, Mrs. Yeon-ah Moon. He is now in the spirit world, working with our beloved True Father.
But he said something very interesting to me when I was a child. He asked me, "Are you inspired by your father's path?" And I said, "But yes, of course!" And he said, "I'm not." Only a true son could say that. That was a profound message for me that a wonderful older-brother figure was able to impress upon me, because only a true son of a father, a devoted son, understands the burden of leadership, the road of sacrifice and the heart of leading a people. That impressed upon me a very important distinction. We all work very hard to become leaders of our respective territories and our respective areas, whether it be in academics or in government. But my brother gave me a distinction about the path of our father, the path for peace, that is: Now that we are all in these positions, what can we do to surrender the title and not be just a believer, but change our mind-set from a believer to a true son or a true daughter? Because only a true on or a true daughter of our Lord would look at the world and shed a tear for every living soul in the world. It was said in the Sermon of the Mount, "Blessed are those who are filled with grace, for they shall have the world for their possession." It is wonderful that we are all here together, because we are now the people who can do that.
I would like to remind you of the words of the great William Shakespeare. In a time of war and of turmoil, Shakespeare reminded us through the St. Crispin's Day Speech' that a great king and a great people can only be one when he surrenders his titles and he uplifts his people not as believers, not as followers, not as employees, not as politicians... Only when he uplifts them to a higher level -- that of a true son or a true daughter. In that speech, Shakespeare gave us the words that uplifted his people not only to be victorious but to bring about an era of peace. He said:
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
and gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
hat fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
I believe, distinguished guests, that if we go back and uplift the people that we look after and we become the good shepherd that our Father always wanted us to be, only then can we stand hand in hand as true sons and true daughters, as true brothers and sisters, on the threshold of leadership and say together, "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Aju and Amen. God bless you, God bless all of your people and God bless all of your families.