Convention to Proclaim the Word that Firmly
Establishes the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind
July 8th 2010
Respected leaders from around
the world, distinguished guests from home and abroad, ladies and
gentlemen:
Representing True Parents’ True Family, the
Republic of Korea, and blessed members worldwide, I would like to
welcome and express our deep appreciation to our many esteemed
guests. You have come, despite your busy schedules, to participate in
this providential Convention to Proclaim the Word that Firmly
Establishes the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind. In this
year alone, thousands of representatives and top leaders from 120
nations of the world honored us with their presence at our Golden
Anniversary, Coronation, and the Memorial Festival held at the new UN
building—making it a wonderful occasion. Once again I would
like to express my appreciation on behalf of all the people of the
Republic of Korea and all of humankind.
Ladies and gentlemen,
a few months ago I celebrated my ninetieth birthday and took my first
steps toward the hundredth year of my life. This is a very eventful
time in God’s providence. I have been blessed with a long life,
beyond the average human lifespan. On the occasion of our fiftieth
wedding anniversary, we are holding this occasion with people from
all over the world. From a providential point of view, this year is
not simply the year of our Golden Anniversary; it is a jubilee year.
We have fourteen children; five have graduated from Harvard
University. Among our forty plus grandchildren, several of them are
already studying there. Moreover, a great number of good men and
women from 194 nations have come to recognize and follow us as the
king of kings and the True Parents.
Throughout our lives, we
have established many international organizations and institutions to
promote world peace. We have invested unreservedly in many fields
including interreligious cooperation, projects to benefit society,
intercultural activities, sports, education and the media, and we
have successfully led these initiatives with the aim of promoting
peace and bringing salvation to humanity.
After working to
succeed in all these things, people would probably commend us, saying
that we deserve to look back at our lives and pleasantly celebrate
our birthdays with the good wishes of all people. They would probably
encourage me to forget about everything and sit back and enjoy the
successes achieved during the past ninety years! However, my wife and
I cannot look at the lives we have led in such a worldly way. We have
had to complete the mission of the actual True Parents, given to us
by God, who is Himself the vertical true parent of all humankind.
Now, with three years remaining in this mission to make God’s
kingdom, Cheon Il Guk, a reality, we are leading each day of our
lives with more seriousness than ever before.
Throughout my
life, I have offered myself for the liberation of God, the one and
only true parent of heaven and earth, to restore to Him His rightful
position as parent, to save all human beings who suffer in the realm
of death, and to return them to God’s bosom. For this purpose I
have persevered and triumphed, alone, over countless tribulations
while leading the people of the world, who are like lost and unaware
orphans searching for their parents, toward the goal of global
salvation. Due to the Fall, brought about by our first ancestors,
people are born into the false lineage. Every one without exception
wanders in darkness even now, unable to break free of Satan’s
bondage. Under such circumstances, how could my wife and I be
anything less than completely serious in our lives as we show the 6.5
billion people of the world the way along the path toward the
building of God’s kingdom on earth?
Three Stages of
Re-creation
Ladies and gentlemen, God created human beings as his
children. As the original absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal
being, God created people by breathing His love into them to endow
them with a soul. If not for the Fall, we would have been able to
perfect ourselves as God is perfect, fulfill the way of absolute
faith, absolute love and absolute obedience, and attain eternal life.
But unfortunately, human beings are living as descendants of
the Fall. In order to live a perfect life, all people without
exception must receive life through the blessing from True Parents in
the three stages of rebirth, resurrection and eternal life. Rebirth,
in this context, refers to an individual attaining new life.
Resurrection is when a family and nation attains new life, and
eternal life refers to all of humankind attaining perfection and
living forever in God’s homeland after establishing the kingdom
of heaven on earth and in the spirit world by attending True Parents,
who have attained the position of the king of kings.
Your
ancestors who are in the spirit world shall now return to this earth
according to the time of the True Parents who directly govern all
life and all things as the substantial entity of God who exists
without form. They will go through the three-stage blessings of
rebirth, resurrection and eternal life and complete the Original
Divine Principle education—the education on absolute sexual
ethics—organized by True Parents. Only then can they enter the
original realm of Seunghwa and attain the qualifications to become a
citizen of Cheon Il Guk.
We can easily see that each person’s
life goes through three stages. Everyone is conceived through the
grace of God and the love of his or her parents. The first stage of
life is the long (yet short) nine months spent in the mother’s
womb. No one is exempt from this! Whether we are conscious of it or
not at the time, all of us without exception spend nine months in our
mother’s womb. Even though a woman’s womb is smaller than
some rice cookers, from the perspective of a fetus, it is larger than
the entire universe.
What about our birth into the second
stage of our lives, which occurs on earth? How could we find words
adequate to describe the struggle of a newborn baby as it is faced
with a completely unfamiliar, new world? The first lonely cry of a
newborn as it experiences the large and wide world that it finds upon
coming out of the womb is a blessing and celebration of a new time
and space that promises a one-hundred-year future.
Today we
are all blessed to be living in the second stage of our lives.
Although a hundred years is much longer than the nine months we spend
in the womb, please do not forget that there is still a course we
must follow to a higher end. Although we have all forgotten the
standard of consciousness that we possessed in our mother’s
womb, and we are now enjoying our lives fully in this big, wide
world, this is merely preparation for the final stage of our lives,
which is eternal life.
That third stage occurs in the world
of eternal life, which we can enter by reaching perfection—this
is the spirit world. It is a world that cannot be imagined by people
descended from the Fall. It is a world in which we transcend time and
space. Just as the baby in a mother’s womb cannot imagine life
on earth, we, as people living and breathing air in this earthly
world, cannot easily understand the spirit world, where we will be
reborn in our spiritual bodies, living and breathing true love.
Ladies and gentlemen, as people face death, they may tremble
in fear and terror if they do not understand the true meaning of
passing on. Although human history has continued for more than six
thousand years, no one, unfortunately, has clearly taught the truth
regarding death. Now, in the Last Days of history, I have been able
to reveal this truth, this heavenly secret, as the True Parent of
humankind.
Ladies and gentlemen, the word ”death”
is sacred. It is not a synonym for “sadness and suffering.”
Therefore, the True Parents have created the term seunghwa
[ascension] to explain the true significance of “death.”
The moment we enter the spirit world is the time that we enter a
world of joy and victory with the fruits born of our lives on earth.
It is a time for those of us remaining on earth to send off the
departed with joy. It should be a time for great celebration. We
should be shedding tears of joy instead of tears of sadness. That is
the significance of the sacred and noble Seunghwa Ceremony. It is the
first step toward enjoying eternal life in God’s embrace. The
moment of death should be a time of greater excitement than that of a
newlywed bride going to her groom’s home for the first time.
In order to open the door for all people to experience this
kind of precious eternal life, I held a Seunghwa Ceremony at the
United Nations headquarters in New York on March 18 in honor of world
leaders who had recently passed into the next world.
The
following are the names of those commemorated on that occasion:
General Alexander Haig, a former United States secretary of
state, who saved my life by leading the bombing of the North Korean
Hungnam Special Labor Camp where I was imprisoned during the Korean
War ; Mr. Kim Dae-jung, a former South Korean president, who won the
Nobel Peace Prize; Mr. Hédi Annabi, a Tunisian diplomat and
head of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, who died in the 2010
Haitian earthquake; the one hundred UN workers who died alongside Mr.
Annabi; Mr. Rodrigo Carazo Odio, a former president of Costa Rica,
who is known worldwide as “the Peace President”; Mr.
Abdurrahman Wahid, a former president of Indonesia, who gave his
entire life for the sake of his great nation, which has a population
of more than two hundred million; Mr. Steingrimur Hermannsson, a
former prime minister of Iceland, who helped bring about the meeting
of then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and United States
President Ronald Reagan, which accelerated the end of the cold war;
Shaykh Hassan Cissé of Senegal, who is respected as an
exemplary person and a great scholar of Islam; and Mr. Laxmi Mall
Singhvi of India, who is praised as the “Ambassador of
Reconciliation and Peace” by India’s 1.1 billion people.
There are also other people whom we would especially like to
remember through this ceremony and send to the spirit world with the
Seunghwa Blessing. I’m sure you have already heard about the
recent sinking of the ship Cheonan in Korea where 46 sailors suddenly
lost their lives in the course of duty. During my four-city speaking
tour in Korea in April, my wife and I bestowed the grace of the
Seunghwa Blessing on these unfortunate seamen who died.
Later,
during another event in Las Vegas, USA, I bestowed the Seunghwa
Blessing on one Dr. Reiko Kawasaki, a 17th-generation descendant of
Tokugawa Ieyasu, the last shogun in Japanese history, who united the
Japanese archipelago in the 17th century. She was a medical doctor
from Las Vegas, and recently passed away after living a life of
continuous service to others. Through her benign influence from the
spirit world, she will play a major role in Korea, Japan and the US,
and also in resolving problems in spheres such as politics and
economics for the sake of the realization of world peace. Thus, we
have included her in the list of those who will receive this sacred
Seunghwa Blessing.
Distinguished leaders, although the lives
of the people whose names I mentioned were altruistic and
philanthropic, none of them can be guaranteed entry into the world of
eternal life without receiving the marriage blessing and the Seunghwa
Blessing of the True Parent [Rev. Moon] in this world today, in which
the parent-child relationship between God and humankind was severed
due to the Fall of the first ancestors. Please take this point
seriously.
Ladies and gentlemen, this era, when God has
introduced the heavenly calendar, is a serious one. It is now the
time in which all 6.5 billion of the world’s people must
understand my teachings, which I bequeath as the True Parent who is
responsible to give eternal life to all of humankind. Now is a time
that you can share the good news of the coming of the True Parents
throughout the entire world. The time has come to honor and inherit
the tradition and spirit of the Korean people, from which the True
Parents emerged, establish the heavenly tradition, and bring about
world peace by uniting all 6.5 billion people of the world with the
United Nations. With the start of the heavenly calendar, please do
not forget that the Seunghwa Blessing Ceremony is a sacred rite in
which anyone can inherit the worldview of a holy citizen of the
kingdom of heaven and celebrate God’s liberation and all
humankind’s liberation.
In this way, the ideal of a
family based on true love can be completed, and God and all people,
the heavenly spirit world and the earthly physical world, can be
completely united to usher in a reign of peace over the world. Please
take this time to express your gratitude to God and True Parents for
giving the keys of the Blessing Ceremony and Seunghwa Ceremony to all
the worlds’ nations, allowing for the establishment of the
traditions of God’s kingdom, Cheon Il Guk, through True
Parents.
Please join me in giving a round of applause to our
Heavenly Father for His benevolence, through which we can receive the
grace of precious life without Him asking for anything in return.
One Family under God
Ladies and gentlemen, what is the
path that humankind should take today? Even now tens of millions of
innocent lives are being lost each year to war, disease, starvation
and natural disasters that arise in all parts of the world. In every
field you observe, from the individual to the collective
level—whether religion, politics, education, culture or
ideology—people are deeply mired in the swamp of self-centered
egoism, raising walls around themselves. We now live in a world
brought to ruin, where genuine communication has broken down.
Ultimately, the problems afflicting humanity can only be
resolved through the worldview of One Family under God, in other
words, the ideology based on true love, which my wife and I, the True
Parents, have learned from Heaven and have championed and taught
throughout our lives. This is the only way for humankind to find the
path toward peace and happiness.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are
living in a historic time of great cosmic transition. It is a time
for a great cosmic revolution to change history, to unite the
spiritual and physical worlds and to create the ideal kingdom of
heaven that God has longed for since the beginning of time.
We
can no longer postpone or prolong the fulfillment of His wish. I have
already proclaimed that January 13, 2013 will be ”Foundation
Day.” That day will be the actual beginning of Cheon Il Guk.
That day will be the origin. Yet, less than three years remain until
then. Therefore, it is time for all people to be humbly obedient to
Heaven’s decree. An unavoidable time is upon us today when we
must invest ourselves completely with a life or death commitment for
the remaining three years under the guidance of the True Parents who
carry out the providence on earth as the substantial representatives
of God, the king of kings. All the good spirits in the spirit world
are mobilized and are already moving forward, a step ahead of you.
Ladies and gentlemen, do you have any idea how much pain God suffered
the moment our first ancestors, into whom God had invested His
complete and unreserved devotion since time immemorial, fell and
disappeared into darkness, becoming part of Satan’s lineage?
Are you even remotely aware that our Heavenly Father—who
endured tens of thousands of years of excruciating heartache so great
that His bones shed tears and His flesh quivered—had to go
through the long, dark tunnel of indemnifying the human Fall in order
to save His lost children? How many have spent days and nights in
tears, yearning to comfort our Father in Heaven?
The Mission
of the Korean People
Ladies and gentlemen, God raised and prepared
the Korean people over a period of thousands of years. All people of
the Christian faith recognize that God sent His true son Jesus Christ
to earth two thousand years ago to save humankind. However, Jesus
suffered a miserable fate.
The leaders of Judaism and the
people of Israel were supposed to receive Jesus as the Messiah and
follow him with absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience.
They should never have allowed Jesus’ crucifixion to take
place. He suddenly left this world, leaving behind the words, “It
is finished.” Yet these words apply to salvation in the
spiritual reality only. After two thousand years of preparation, his
Second Coming, on the Korean Peninsula, has finally borne the fruits
of his labor.
From the past, the Korean people have worshiped
God as the highest and primal ancestor of their forefathers. They
called that single being and progenitor of all people the “One”—in
other words, God. They served Him as the lord (who created night and
day). Thus, all numbers begin from one and two. With the sense that
He is their original ancestor, the Korean people have served God and
thus the spirit of interdependence, mutual prosperity and universally
shared values is alive in the soul and tradition of the race. They
have maintained themselves over five thousand years of history, yet
not once have they invaded or plundered another nation or people. The
spirit of benefiting all mankind still flows in the veins of the
Korean people.
The spirit of filial piety, fidelity, and
loyalty, which are the fundamental virtues of human life, are still
alive and breathing in Korean history. These values can be found in
the men and women of Korea and reflect the pride and spirit of the
Korean people.
I have inherited such traditional values as
the true filial piety exemplified in the folk tale Shimcheong, about
a devoted daughter who offered her life so that her blind father
could see; the profound love and fidelity displayed by Choonhyang,
who overcame the fear of death in order to keep the promise she had
made to her husband; and the unbreakable loyalty exhibited by Admiral
Yi Soon-shin, who gave his life to save his nation and people despite
being abandoned by his king and other leaders. These lofty Korean
values and traditions are not just matters of historical chance.
Based on these values, Heaven has prepared this people; this was all
part of the providence of creating a foundation to send the Messiah.
On the foundation of such preparation, and riding on the energy of
this peninsula, I finally came, having received Heaven’s seal
as the True Parent of humankind and the king of kings.
The
Path Humankind Should Take
Distinguished Guests, your
Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen:
The path that humanity
must now take is clear. What would give you cause to hesitate in the
face of the D-day that Heaven has revealed through us, the True
Parents? There are now only 919 days remaining. Heaven’s
blessings will be with you on your ambitious and busy course.
If
you view the flow of history through eyes that focus on God’s
providence, you can see that the changes of the times can be broadly
classified into three stages. First is the “era of worldly
matters,” in other words, a time when materialism took
precedence. Next came the “era of human affairs,” a
humanistic era when peoples’ knowledge and emotions took
precedence in and dominated the world.
However, these eras
were transitional. They were courses of preparation necessary in
order to enter the era in which people could rid themselves of their
fallen nature, return to their original selves and live as one united
family where they attend God as their father.
The “era
of heavenly affairs” is the final stage, in which human beings
should follow the path of living for the sake of others. They should
do this through establishing an absolute standard on the foundation
of purifying themselves, both inside and out, through the holy
Blessing Ceremony. This is the time of opening up the era of God’s
kingdom, Cheon Il Guk, a time in which we can return to the heart of
the one true God. Please continually engrave this point on your
hearts.
Once the actual era of Cheon Il Guk begins, the
spiritual and earthly worlds will be connected and brought into
oneness, and all things will be governed under the Union of the
Spiritual and Physical Worlds, which will be established on earth for
the first time. Moreover, the providence will be carried out
according to the heavenly law and the heavenly way. Elections
conducted in a purely secular fashion will disappear from the face of
the earth. All people will become one family through cross-cultural
marriage and the World Peace Marriage Blessing, and we will enjoy
tranquility and happiness in the sacred reign of peace. Let me say
that this day is drawing near.
As part of preparing for that
time, a few days ago, on February 14, I proclaimed to all of heaven
and earth the start of the new heavenly calendar. The Gregorian
calendar and lunar calendar shall now stand in the positions of Cain
and Abel and serve the role of supporting the heavenly calendar, by
which we will record and indicate the progress of God’s
providence.
You must all now engrave True Parents’
teachings onto your bones and practice them in your life. We have no
choice. If we do not prepare now, we will surely be left behind. We
should learn from the courage and fortitude of the white-necked
cranes that fly across the Himalayas—which are more than seven
thousand meters high—in preparation for winter.
My
Final Words for Humankind
True Parents have already prepared the
last words I will give to humankind. These have been prepared based
on my triumphs over six or seven life-or-death situations, including
six periods of unjust imprisonment. I am leaving behind eight
textbooks and teaching materials for humankind to use for all
eternity. These are published in almost a thousand volumes.
They
are The Sermons of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, Exposition of the Divine
Principle, Cheon Seong Gyeong, The Family Pledge, Pyeong Hwa Shin
Gyeong [Messages of Peace], True Families—Gateway to Heaven,
Owner of Peace and Owner of Lineage and World Scripture. These are
textbooks you will have to read and study even after you go to the
spirit world. They are not just teachings that come from the mind of
one person; they are textbooks and teaching materials that teach the
heavenly way that God has granted to His suffering children for their
salvation.
You should now set up the tradition of hoondokhae
in your families using the books I have mentioned—that is, the
tradition where three generations of a family start each day by
reading Heaven’s word, and lead a life of practicing what they
read, with a new heart. Let’s create a world where people in
the spirit world and the earthly world can both attend True Parents
at the same time, and read the word on the heavenly path together.
Once this happens, no matter how hard Satan may try to worm
his way in to infest your lineage, once he encounters the hoondokhae
tradition he will find no room to move. If a family is aligned with
God as at high noon, where no shadow is cast, and still does not
receive God’s blessings, who then could be deserving of them?
When such heavenly families fill the earth, the world will
automatically become the heavenly kingdom on earth and in the eternal
spirit world, fulfilling the vision of one family under God.
Ladies
and gentlemen, last year, my memoirs, As a Peace-Loving Global
Citizen, an honest, candid account of my life, were published.
Through this book I have clearly shown where you can find God’s
will for humankind and the path that we, as God’s children,
should follow. My life has been a typical model of the saying, “If
at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.” I have
as much faith in this book as in the hoondok textbooks and teaching
materials I have mentioned. For this reason, I recommend it to you,
believing that it will show you how to lead your lives according to
true principles. It does not subtract or add anything to the ninety
years of my life, which I have led under Heaven’s decree. I
pray you will carefully read this articulation of true love and find
great inspiration.
I have already mentioned that a life of
vertical “noon-time” alignment casts no shadow. If we can
all shine as we live such glowing lives, there will be no chance for
the shadow of sin to be cast. Those who receive the light will be
indebted to the light. I pray that we can now wipe away the tears of
people in misery and poverty, and lead an illuminated life of eternal
true love that dissipates all darkness.
Proclamation of the
Era of the Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind
Ladies and
gentlemen, in Las Vegas a special proclamation was given centered on
God by the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind on two
separate days—one part at 2:20 AM on the 8th day of the 5th
month of the Heavenly Calendar (June 19, 2010) and the other at 3:25
AM, on the 15th day of the 5th month of the Heavenly Calendar (June
26, 2010).
The number 3 from 3:25 AM represents the three
eras from the saying “Success comes at the third attempt.”
It also symbolizes the Old, New and Completed Testament ages.
Twenty-five minutes, or the number 25, is a quarter of one hundred.
The True Parents have achieved ultimate unity and offered and
proclaimed the era of [God’s] full transcendence, full
immanence, full authority and omnipotence upon the standard of
perfection, completion and conclusion.
Furthermore, with the
Seunghwa Ceremony for former United States secretary of state General
Alexander Haig, I proclaimed that the ceremony for the victory of the
first, second, and third Israels, which completed the ceremony for
rebirth, resurrection and seunghwa during my lifetime, was
transferred to Korea.
As a result, God’s homeland and
hometown is now Korea. By proclaiming that Korea is God’s
homeland, the Convention to Proclaim the Word that Firmly Establishes
the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind can be completed in
Korea. This has been declared on July 8.
Through this
proclamation ceremony, all the borderlines in the entire cosmos have
been abolished. Consequently, centering on the autonomous God, heaven
and earth shall exist eternally, night and day, under God’s
reign and with the support of the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and
Humankind.
Distinguished guests, at this serious and
important time, a revolutionary and cosmic change must now take place
in your lives. Let us summarize the message Heaven has given to us
today in light of this.
First, all blessed families should
first attend God at the center of their families and every day carry
out hoondok education, which can completely unite parents and
children. In other words, you should thoroughly teach the Divine
Principle, the textbook and teaching material True Parents have
bequeathed, True Father’s autobiography, and absolute sexual
ethics taught through the Original Divine Principle.
Second,
Heaven has permitted the grace of the realm of seunghwa for rebirth
and resurrection to be bestowed on the family unit. Here, a requisite
condition is the complete unity between parents and children. In
other words, you must establish the standard for absolute parents and
absolute children, and establish an absolute family.
Third,
humankind has moved out of the realm of the era of restoration
through indemnity, thanks to the grace of True Parents who have
suffered hardships through which they sweat blood. Therefore, do not
forget the fact that during True Parents’ lifetimes we all have
the responsibility to liberate families, tribes, peoples, nations and
the world from the realm of hell. Now that the era of restoration
through indemnity has ended, what kind of era is dawning? The reign
of tranquility and prosperity in the victorious realm centered on God
and True Parents shall be eternal.
Fourth, we are now
entering the era of God’s direct dominion. Ladies and
gentlemen, I have said that less than three years remain until the
D-day proclaimed by Heaven. I beg that you inscribe in your hearts
the fact that we have entered the era of the realm of the cosmic
Sabbath in which your family members in the spirit world shall return
to the earth to receive Original Divine Principle education, and
where eight generations will live together and share the together in
a single family. Aju!
Once again, I offer you my heartfelt
thanks for your gracing this occasion with your presence and
celebrating this providential event. I pray that you will live in
good health and in the abundance of God’s love. It is my hope
that we can offer greater glory and honor to God the next time we
meet.
I pray that the blessings of God, the king of kings,
will be upon you, your family and your nation.
Thank you very
much.