Hak Ja Han
August 23, 1995
Hotel Lotte World, Seoul, Korea
Second International Convention of the Women’s Federation for World Peace
Photo date and location unknown
Honored guests, distinguished representatives and members of the Women’s Federation for World Peace, and women leaders from diverse fields:
I am confident that our long-cherished wish for world peace will be brought one step closer to realization by this conference today. I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for your tireless efforts, in every corner of the globe, in building a more peaceful society and world.
True world peace has never been accomplished on this earth, and yet this has been the one constant dream of all humanity throughout history. In order for this dream to be realized, a peaceful nation and society must be realized first. A peaceful nation and society can only grow out of the premise of a peaceful home. In this light, the peaceful and ideal home is the very starting point and the basic unit for the peaceful world.
The ideal home on a foundation of true love
What is the ideal home? As recorded in the book of Genesis, God’s plan for the human family was for Adam and Eve to become a good husband and a good wife, thereby becoming good parents, and creating an ideal home. God had planned that, on the foundation of the original ideal home, the descendants of Adam and Eve would continue to duplicate the tradition of their parents’ love, generation after generation.
According to the teachings of my husband, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, God is the origin of true love. The very act of creation was prompted by God’s original nature, stemming from true love. God’s true love needs an object partner to love and care for in a reciprocal relationship. God’s motive of creation was true love.
The creation, therefore, is God’s object partner of love in physical form. Among all of creation, however, man and woman are the closest object partners of God’s love. God is the True Parent of humanity, and all men and women were created as sons and daughters of God. God and humankind are True Parent and children.
As people grow, receiving their parents’ love, they experience the heart of children. And through the love between brothers and sisters, they experience the heart of brothers and sisters. When they mature as perfected true people with true character, through their married life, they experience conjugal love and the heart of husband and wife. When they give birth to children, through them they experience the parental heart. All creation wants love and needs love. And people are especially filled with happiness when they feel true love and live a life based on true love. When they give and receive love, they are vibrant with life. The perfume of life blossoms in genuine love.
Love is the fountain of an individual’s happiness, life and joy. This precious, genuine love is not obtainable through external knowledge or external conditions or techniques. True love can be felt only through experience and acquired through life.
Human beings were created to develop and embody God’s true love, step by step, during their growth period, through their life experiences. In other words, people perfect their character as they experiences, through this process of stages, the heart of a child, the heart of a brother or sister, the heart of a husband or wife and the heart of a parent. People’s character and happiness are determined by how rounded, how versatile and developed their love becomes as a result of experiencing these stages of life. To achieve the perfected ideal, their love must come to have the same qualities of maturity, unselfishness and total investment that characterize God’s own love.
Self-control and the unique responsibility in the love between a husband and wife
Within the four relationships of heart, vertical love, such as a parent’s love for children, does not diminish or change as it goes from one child to the next. That is why one parent can love many children. Because of this principle, one God can love all humanity as His children.
As God’s children, human beings, unlike the animals, were given total freedom to love between a husband and wife. A human being’s love is fundamentally different from that of an animal, which mates only to procreate. However, this freedom, if it involved no responsibility, could not be freedom in the truest sense. Love between a husband and wife requires responsibility. When a husband and wife are committed to sacred, everlasting love, and take responsibility for their relationship, there is peace at home. This home will be a nest of happiness. It is heavenly law that they have sons and daughters through this indivisible and faithful love between a husband and wife. Men and women originally were created by God to grow to become true individuals, then to become true husbands and wives through indivisible love with a spouse. By having children together, they would become true parents.
The Fall and the order of love
From the Bible we know that the ancestors of humankind did not have a marriage blessed by God, nor did they bear God’s loving sons and daughters. Adam and Eve committed sin against their original parent and were kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Outside the garden they had children that have multiplied through the generations. Because Adam and Eve became neither the true husband and wife nor the true parents that God desired, we as their descendants were not born in the lineage of true parents, as members of God’s true family. The reason people strive for everlasting, unchanging love between a husband and wife, yet can’t seem to achieve it, is because Adam and Eve’s original separation from God, the Fall, was caused by false love and adultery. The reason the original sin is inherited throughout the generations, and the reason we, in what the Bible calls “the last days,” are witnessing wide-scale immorality and family breakdown, is all due to this. What God dislikes the most is when a person goes against the law of love and becomes immoral. My question to you is: Who has a solution to such problems of youth, family breakdown and teenage pregnancy that are so prevalent in both East and West?
These phenomena are more fearful than starvation, war or any disease. Why is that? These problems are not just our problems today; they are the problems that will destroy humanity’s hope in our future generations. Today’s immorality has direct consequences for our descendants.
Teaching children ethics
The home provides elements that are necessary for a child’s internal development. The basic characteristics and attitude toward life are formed at home. Babies are born with a natural ability to receive love. Even after a few months, children can differentiate their mother’s loving embrace from another woman’s. They grow up naturally experiencing love from parents and from brothers and sisters. A person’s ethics and character are mostly formed through his or her experience of love and happiness, acquired in relationship with their family members. Parents’ life as seen by children, especially the parents’ love relationship, has a critical role in their child’s ethical development.
According to heavenly law, parents were meant to be true parents, as well as true teachers. The education that children need most is not the education of knowledge or techniques. The most important education for children is ethical and moral education. This education for life is essential and can be taught only by parents at home. Children learn, feel and resemble their parents’ most valuable examples of love and the basic order of life. Children need a model they can learn from and follow. Regardless of whether parents realize it or not, they are their children’s most important teachers. Children imitate and learn from their parents’ pattern. There is no teacher more important than parents who can show a child the correct direction in life.
As the fruit of love between two parents, children wish for their parents to be the most loving, ideal husband and wife. Children feel happiness from this loving relationship. For children, a divorce between their parents is a living nightmare and impossible to comprehend. This is because children also partake of the love between their parents. To the children, the love between their parents was the origin and root of their being. They cannot imagine the foundation of their existence being ripped apart. If the parent-child relationship is a naturally indivisible relationship, should not the husband-wife relationship, which was the root and motive of the parent-child relationship, also be naturally everlasting?
Immorality, sexual promiscuity and divorce are grave mistakes that violate heavenly law. These phenomena are the result of the Fall. Neither God nor an individual’s original mind desires them.
Children partake of their parents’ love
Woman leaders, how can we create order out of this chaotic world? Humanity has made tireless efforts to create a moral society, a society that would allow an individual to live in dignity as a man or woman, a society that would guarantee a bright future under the true value system. However, immorality is flooding our society with free sex and other decadent trends that go against heavenly law.
The AIDS epidemic is not simply a disease, it is a serious problem directly linked to humanity’s descendants and our survival as a species. These problems are not being fundamentally resolved at school by teachers, or by any government policy, or even by parents at home. Everything has been tried. The experiment is over. Humanity’s attempt at a cure is no longer the solution.
Even if one is not religious, the situation is so desperate that we must seek the solution from God in order to save the world and to save humanity. To accomplish this, God sends the Messiah. The Messiah comes as the True Parents, because the Messiah must cure the reality of this immoral society from what caused it go against God’s Will. Because the human ancestors, Adam and Eve, did not become true parents, the Messiah must come as the True Parents to take the place of Adam and Eve and become the origin of true love, true life and true lineage. The True Parents will educate humanity by being the example of true persons, the true husband and wife and the true parents who can make Satan surrender. Together, the True Parents must create the model of an ideal family and the world of peace and love on this earth. This is the essence of God’s dispensation of salvation.
God sent my husband, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, as the Messiah. His entire life is dedicated to fulfilling God’s Will, the ideal of creation. Due to the lack of understanding about his mission, however, he has been treated as a criminal worldwide without having committed any crime.
True Parents and the ideal family
Being close to him and seeing him every day, my heart aches to witness how difficult and unfair is the way of the saint. Even under all kinds of suffering and persecution, he never broke away from walking the path. At the same time, spiritually he has been in a bloody and furious battle with Satan. Satan is launching an all-out offensive on my husband in order to defend the sovereignty of false love he has held over humanity since the Fall. Both spiritually and physically my husband and I are carrying out our mission as the True Parents. Upon this victorious foundation Satan can no longer accuse us.
Dear woman leaders! The Second World Culture and Sports Festival is the culmination of all my husband’s activities. He has dedicated his life to realizing the united world of love. The Women’s Federation for World Peace, the Family Federation for World Peace, the Religious Federation for World Peace, the Federation for World Peace, the Youth Federation for World Peace, the Collegiate Federation for World Peace are all organizations to bring about the world of peace.
The conferences and events that are being held by these organizations, as well as by the International Cultural Foundation and the World Media Association, will awaken humanity’s original mind, lead history toward a good direction and bring hope for humankind’s future. In particular, the international marriage Blessing is an historic event. Who on earth can imitate this? Three hundred sixty thousand couples of different races and cultures from six continents and one hundred sixty countries will receive God’s Blessing and will embark on creating ideal families. The holy march is beginning, with the goal of creating the ideal families that will become the foundation of a peaceful world. This is a holy event, in which the leading players for the true love culture and true heart culture that God has been longing for are being born, the event where the good descendants are being promised.
The ideal family and the role of women
I have expounded since the founding of the Women’s Federation that God and history are asking us to live a life of love and service, and build world peace through realizing the ideal home. All the misuse of love and the fallen reality that has been controlling humanity must be boldly cleaned up. Immorality, hatred and all self-centered perversions must be eradicated. It is the proper role of women to demand an end to and put in order these wrongful practices.
The goal of the Women’s Federation for World Peace must not be for women to imitate men, trying to raise the position of women within the existing culture and social custom. By following the heavenly way, women can attend the True Parents and become leaders in creating the world of heart-centered culture. Please discard all the attributes of the Fall and establish the original culture, the peaceful culture of love and goodness that humanity has been longing for and seeking. Women now need to be engrafted into the True Parents and give birth to the worldwide true family of all races and cultures. In order to fulfill this, all women must emulate True Mother and become true mothers themselves. With the introduction of this new women’s age, all women need to become new pioneers, who guide with true love. At home, a woman has the responsibility to embrace her husband as a personification of true love and to nurture her children with the heart of a true parent.
Who will establish the home where God’s blessing of love dwells and where the original order of love is in place? This is the responsibility of women who are connected to the True Parents. We must be the vanguard for this movement. I would like to ask all of you to become leaders for the true liberation of women based on genuine love, and to establish a world of true peace. May God’s blessing be upon you and your family and upon your work!
Thank you very much.