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S.M. Moon: Inaugural Address of the Universal Peace Federation, September 2005
Written by Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon, Founder, Universal Peace Federation
Monday, September 12, 2005
New York, United States - Declaring the world to be at a pivotal "historic turning point," Reverend Dr. Sun Myung Moon asked an international peace gathering to consider, "Can everlasting world peace take root, or are we doomed to repeat the 20th century's dark and oppressive history of war and conflict?" Addressing a standing-room-only house in Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall on September 12, 2005, he spoke on the topic, "God's Ideal Family: The Model for World Peace." The address marked the inauguration of the Universal Peace Federation. Below is the address given that day and throughout the world during UPF peace tours and rallies on six continents. On many occasions, Father Moon elaborated on various points in the speech.
I address you as leaders from around the globe who do not hesitate to make extraordinary efforts for the realization of world peace. I would like to express my deepest gratitude for your being present here tonight in spite of your very busy schedules.
Ladies and gentlemen, as we begin the 21st century, we find ourselves at a truly historic turning point. We are at a point of decision. Can everlasting world peace take root, or are we doomed to repeat the 20th century’s dark and oppressive history of war and conflict?
The 20th century was a period of ceaseless struggle, including wars for colonial dominion, the First and Second World Wars, the Korean War, and the Cold War. Living through this era, I dedicated my life entirely to the accomplishment of God’s ideal of peace. I have always prayed sincerely that the United Nations, founded after the Second World War, would be an institution of peace, and that it would uphold God’s will for the realization of eternal world peace.
The United Nations has made important contributions for peace. Nevertheless, at its 60th anniversary there is a broad consensus, both inside and outside the organization, that the U.N. has yet to discover the way to fulfill its founding purposes.
The number of member states is approaching 200, but the offices of these states do little more than represent and even insist on their own interests. They seem inherently unable to resolve conflicts and achieve peace.
For these reasons, I declare today before all humanity the founding of a new international organization, the Universal Peace Federation. Its mission is to renew the existing United Nations and provide a new level of leadership as an “Abel-type” United Nations, that is, a United Nations whose efforts for peace are offered to Heaven, investing itself ceaselessly in living for the sake of others. To commemorate this day in its fullness, I am declaring a message from God to humanity in this age. It is entitled, “God’s Ideal Family—the Model for World Peace.”
God’s Ideal Family
Respected world leaders, what do you think is God’s ultimate purpose for creating human beings? Simply put, it is to experience joy through relating with ideal families filled with true love. What does an ideal family look like? First, each person in the family is an owner of true love. When God first created human beings, He made Adam representing all men, and Eve representing all women, with the intention that they become owners of true love. The quickest way for them to cultivate a character of true love was to secure a parent-child relationship with God, whereby they could live in attendance to God as their Father. They were to have followed the path of living as one family with God.
I invite you to enter into a mystical state and prayerfully ask God, “What is the center of the universe?” I am sure that the answer you hear will be “the parent-child relationship.” Nothing is more important or more precious than the relationship between parent and child. This is because it defines the fundamental relationship between the Creator God and human beings.
Then, what defines the parent-child relationship? Three things define this relationship: love, life and lineage.
Without our parents’ love as a precondition, none of us would be alive today. God created human beings out of His absolute love, in order to be His partners in love. This relationship forms an axis of love, linking God the Father with human beings as His sons and daughters.
Is there anything higher or more precious than to be a son or daughter of God? If anything were higher, then surely human desire would aspire to attain it. But there is nothing higher. Do you think that when the omniscient and almighty God created Adam and Eve, He secretly reserved the highest position for Himself and made Adam and Eve to be only second best? We cannot imagine that God would do that to His children, to His partners who share absolute love with Him. As our eternal True Parent, God invested Himself 100 percent into the creation of human beings and endowed us with the right to have equal status with Him, to participate in His work as equals, to live with Him, and to inherit from Him. God bestowed upon human beings all of His attributes.
Though God is the Absolute Being, He cannot be happy alone. Adjectives such as “good” and “happy” cannot apply to any being that lives in isolation. They apply only where there is a robust reciprocal relationship. Imagine a professional singer who finds herself exiled to an uninhabited island. She may sing at the top of her voice, but with no one to listen, will it bring her happiness? In the same way, even the self-existent God absolutely needs a reciprocal partner of love in order to experience joy and be happy.
Next, how shall we live to become God’s reciprocal partners and return joy to Him? In other words, how shall we live to become children of God, people whom God delights to call “My son,” or “My daughter,” people who embody a divinity equal to His? How can we become God’s partners in completing the work of creation, partners who will ultimately inherit the entire creation? I answer: We should emulate the ideal beginning point of God’s creative process. In the beginning of creation, God set up the principle of “living for the sake of others.” God set the practice of true love as the nucleus, and from that point He began to create.
Therefore, to become God’s children, our first responsibility is to resemble Him. We need to embody true love. The way to embody true love begins by living as a filial child, then a patriot, a saint, and finally a divine son and daughter of God. At that stage we can experience the innermost emotions of God’s heart and resolve the grief that He has experienced for tens of thousands of years ever since the fall of Adam and Eve. God is almighty. It was not due to any shortcoming or lack of ability that God has been imprisoned in great pain and has endured immense suffering behind the scenes of history. It was because there are provisions in the Principle of Restoration, which He was not free to disclose, that called Him to wait with forbearance until Adam and Eve’s positions, lost at the human fall, were recovered with the appearance of the “perfected Adam.” Although God is all-powerful, He will not set aside the eternal laws and principles that He Himself established.
The Importance of Lineage
Do you know what has pained God’s heart most, causing Him the greatest grief over the long history since the fall of Adam and Eve? God lost His lineage. And with the loss of His lineage, He lost His right of ownership. Let me talk about lineage for a moment. Lineage is more important than life and more important than love. Life and love come together to create lineage. Lineage cannot be established if either life or love is missing. Therefore, among the three qualities that define the parent-child relationship, love, life and lineage, lineage is the fruit.
The seed of true love is embedded in God’s lineage. God’s lineage provides the context and environment for a true life. Hence, for us to become the ideal people envisioned by God, that is, people of ideal character, and to create ideal families, we first need to be linked to His lineage. To take it a step further, only when we are linked to God’s lineage is it possible to create God’s homeland, the ideal nation. Only when we are linked to God’s lineage is it possible to establish world peace. Please inscribe the absolute importance of lineage in your hearts. I cannot emphasize this enough.
Without lineage, neither life nor love can endure. You strive to set a good tradition, but it will endure only through your lineage. Lineage is the bridge allowing the parents’ spirit to carry on through subsequent generations. In other words, lineage is the first and final condition necessary for parents to harvest the fruits of their love, the fruits of their life and the fruits of their joy. We need to know this with certainty.
God intended for the seeds He planted to grow into a bountiful crop to be harvested in the autumn in the Garden of Eden. The ideal of God’s creation was that He would raise Adam and Eve, His son and daughter, to the point where they would blossom in true love, give bloom to true life, and bear fruit in a true lineage. God desired to harvest the owners, families and nation of eternal life, eternal love and eternal lineage. Yet when Adam and Eve fell, this lineage, more precious than life itself, was lost. The fruits of true life and true love never matured. They became the fruits of Satan, lacking any relationship with Heaven. From them descended the six billion people now covering the earth.
God’s Suffering in Search of the True Parents
False love, false life and false lineage infested the earth. God’s love, life and lineage fell into the hands of the adulterer Satan, the enemy of love. Heaven and earth were suffocated and transformed into hell. The world became a wretched place, far from God’s presence. Yet humanity to this day lives in ignorance of this. People are deluded into believing that the lineage of the enemy is the lifeline upon which the world depends. This is the wretched truth about human beings, all of whom descended from the Fall. That is why we refer to this world as hell on earth. God views humanity’s tragic situation with a heart full of pain.
After creating Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and once they matured in His true love, God intended to wed them with His Holy Blessing and bequeath to them Heaven’s right of ownership. God wanted Adam and Eve to inherit from Him the ownership of the entire universe. Because of the fall, however, all this came under Satan’s control. God is like a father who worked and sweated his entire life to accumulate assets for his children, only to have a thief steal everything in one night.
Who can comprehend the sorrowful, painful heart of God? God lost His lineage, lost His children, and was forced to hand over the ownership of the nations and world to Satan. There was only one way to recover this lineage and ownership. This was the path to win the natural subjugation of Satan, to have Satan surrender voluntarily. What is the secret to accomplish this? It is only by the power of true love, when we love our enemies more than we love our own children.
Was there ever a time when God, as their True Father and True Mother, could rejoice with human beings, enjoying the natural bonds of parent and child? Has God enjoyed even a year of comfort with His children, knowing that what He created was good? The answer is no; God has not enjoyed this even for one hour. And has anyone been able to comfort God in this pain? No, because no one has known the reason for this unbridgeable gap between God and humankind. No one has known why God and humanity are in such a tragic circumstance.
The biblical account of Cain and Abel reveals the beginnings of human conflict right in Adam’s family. It provides the archetype for humankind’s unending history of struggle, war and conflict. We are conflicted on many levels, beginning with the war between the body and mind within each individual and extending to wars between nations and even to the global conflict between materialism and theism.
Extreme selfish individualism threatens our prosperity even today. We deem young people to be the hope of humanity holding the promise for the future, but drugs and free sex enslave them. Advanced countries seem to believe that material goods are all that matter. They recognize only their own interests while ignoring the misery of tens of thousands who die of starvation every day.
Who can untie this ancient knot of Cain and Abel? It has been tightened for thousands of years and grows ever more tangled. Do you think the United Nations can do it? The U.N. at its founding proclaimed a movement for world peace, and for sixty years it has dedicated itself to this task; yet world peace still remains a far distant dream. Peace among nations can never come when those entrusted with the task have not resolved the Cain-Abel relationship between their own mind and body. Therefore, the time has come to launch an Abel-type United Nations that will set its course according to God’s will.
God eagerly anticipated that someone would come and resolve these tragedies, but no such person appeared on earth. God waited and waited, looking for anyone who would take on the role of the True Parent. If someone had come forward, I am certain that God would have appeared in his dreams, carried the sun and moon to him, and showered forth lightning of joy and thunder of ecstasy from the heavens.
In this sense, it is a miracle of miracles that for the first time in history a man has succeeded in establishing the position of Adam, securing the position of the owner of true love, and received God’s anointing as the True Parent of humanity. It is an amazing fact that his lifetime coincides with yours, and that you and he breathe the same air. I gained victory in the position of the horizontal True Parent, who comes to rescue fallen humanity.
On that foundation, on January 13, 2001, I dedicated to Heaven the “Coronation Ceremony of God’s Kingship.” Through that ceremony I liberated and released God, the vertical True Parent who has taken responsibility for the Providence of Restoration. In all of history, this was the highest and greatest blessing humanity has ever received. This victory was absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal. Through this absolute providential victory, God’s body and mind are completely liberated!
The Way to Peace Through the Holy Blessing Ceremony
Respected leaders! Our bondage to the lineage of Satan has caused so much suffering throughout history. Let us now boldly step forth to sever it and be grafted onto the root of the lineage of the True Parents. Why should we foolishly continue to live and die as wild olive trees? A wild olive tree, even if it lives a thousand years, will only continue producing the seeds of more wild olive trees. Where can we find the path to escape this vicious cycle? It is through the Holy Blessing.
The Holy Blessing Ceremony offers the grace of being grafted onto the true olive tree. It was inaugurated through the True Parents, who bring God’s true lineage to humankind. Once you change your lineage to God’s lineage, your offspring will belong to God’s lineage naturally. The Holy Blessing is received in three stages: resurrection, rebirth and eternal life. Once you receive the True Parents’ Holy Blessing, you can give birth to pure, sinless offspring and build an ideal family.
The best way to receive the Holy Blessing is with someone from another race, nationality or religion. I call this an “exchange marriage.” This contributes to the enormous task of transcending the barriers of race, culture, ethnicity and religion and creating one family of humankind. In God’s sight, skin color makes no difference. God does not stand behind the barriers of religion and culture. They are nothing more than the Devil’s tricks. He has used them to rule over humanity as a false parent for tens of thousands of years.
Imagine two enemy families who have cursed each other throughout their lives, people who would never dream of living together. What would happen if these families joined together through an exchange Holy Marriage Blessing? Would the parents of two such families curse their son and daughter who became husband and wife, loved each other and built a happy home? If their son were to love this beautiful daughter of a hated enemy, and she were to become their daughter-in-law and give birth to Heaven’s grandchildren as pure and clear as crystal, the grandparents would smile with pleasure. In time the lineages once soaked with enmity would be transformed.
What method other than exchange marriages will empower Whites and Blacks, Jews and Muslims, Orientals and Westerners, and people of all races to live as one human family? The ideal family is the model for living together in peace. The ideal family is the nest where we live and learn to become one. There we have the foundation of love and respect between parents and children, shared trust and love between husband and wife, and mutual support among siblings. For this fundamental reason, you should receive the Holy Marriage Blessing from the True Parents and establish Heaven’s tradition of ideal families.
A Life of True Love
Let me reiterate: To resemble God, the original Being of true love, we should become the owners of true love. We should embody true love and practice it in order to develop our character. This is the way each of us can become true parents.
Then, what is a life of true love? True love is the spirit of public service. It brings the peace that is at the root of happiness. Selfish love is a mask for the desire to have one’s partner exist for one’s own sake; true love is free of that corruption. The essence of true love is to give, to live for the sake of others and for the sake of the whole. True love gives, forgets that it has given, and continues to give without ceasing. True love gives joyfully. We find it in the joyful and loving heart of a mother who cradles her baby in her arms and nurses it at her breast. True love is sacrificial love, as with a filial son who gains his greatest satisfaction in helping his parents. God created the universe out of just such love: absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal, investing everything without any expectation or condition of receiving something in return.
True love is the wellspring of the universe. Once a person possesses it, true love makes him or her the center and the owner of the universe. True love is the root of God and a symbol of His will and power. When we are bound together in true love, we can be together forever, continually increasing in the joy of each other’s company. The attraction of true love brings all things in the universe to our feet; even God will come to dwell with us. Nothing can compare to the value of true love. It has the power to dissipate the barriers fallen human beings created, including national boundaries and the barriers of race and even religion.
The main attributes of true love are that it is absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal, so whoever practices God’s true love will live with God, share His happiness and enjoy the right to participate as an equal in His work. Therefore, a life lived for the sake of others, a life of true love, is the absolute prerequisite for entering the Kingdom of Heaven.
Respected leaders, you are now living in an age of blessing. God’s promises are coming to fruition. The Kingdom of Heaven on earth, the Kingdom of Peace that is God’s ideal of creation, is being established before your eyes. My life of more than eighty years, a lonely path trod solely for Heaven and stained with blood, sweat, and tears, is now bearing victorious fruit for the sake of the world’s six billion people. From the spirit world, the Founders of the world’s religions, tens of thousands of saints and your own good ancestors are watching your every movement. Whoever, therefore, strays from the heavenly path will be punished accordingly.
In more than 180 countries, Ambassadors for Peace who have inherited Heaven’s will and tradition are making serious effort, day and night, to proclaim the values of true love and true family. They are moving forward with full force to establish peace on this earth. In the Middle East, one of the world’s tinderboxes, Jews, Christians and Muslims have found the resources in my philosophy of peace to engage in a new dimension of dialogue. In past decades my Unification Thought played a decisive role in ending the Cold War. Now I am successfully leading behind-the-scenes efforts to bring about the reunification of my homeland of Korea.
But I am not yet satisfied, because I began my life’s work at the command of Heaven. I have come as the True Parent of humankind with God’s anointing and I am determined to keep my promise to Him. I am determined to obliterate all national divisions and barriers that have poisoned this earth and to establish the world of peace, where all people everywhere can live hand in hand.
A Project for Peace
Leaders from around the world, let me take the opportunity provided by today’s distinguished forum to reiterate my proposal for a truly providential and revolutionary project. For the sake of peace and human welfare, I propose that we build a passage for transit across the Bering Strait, where Satan has historically divided east and west, and north and south, and where the North American and Russian land masses are separated. This passage, which I call the “World Peace King Bridge Tunnel,” will link an International Highway System that will allow people to travel on land from Africa’s Cape of Good Hope to Santiago, Chile, and from London to New York, across the Bering Strait, connecting the world as a single community.
God is warning that He will no longer tolerate separation and division. Carrying out this project will bind the world together as one village. It will tear down the man-made walls of race, culture, religion and country, and establish the world of peace that has been God’s cherished desire.
The United States and Russia can become as one. The European continent, China, India, Japan, Brazil and all nations, and also all the world’s religions, can combine their energies to succeed in this project. The success of this project will be decisive in establishing a Peace Kingdom where people will no longer make war with each other.
Ladies and gentlemen, some may doubt that such a project can be completed. But where there is a will, there is always a way—especially if it is the will of God. The science and technology of the 21st century render it possible to construct a tunnel under the Bering Strait. The construction costs are also not a problem. Think of how much money the world is wasting on war. Humanity needs to realize that we are committing fearful sins in the presence of history and our descendants. Let us take one example. How much money has the United States spent on the war in Iraq during the past three years? It is approaching $200 billion. That budget would be more than enough to complete the Bering Strait project.
In this age, war is a most primitive and destructive means of resolving conflict, and will never lead to lasting peace. Now is the time, as the prophet Isaiah taught, to beat our swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. Why must we continue this tragic path, pouring countless dollars into wars that, in the end, will never bring the reconciliation of enemies? The time has come for the countries of the world to pool their resources and advance toward the world of peace desired by God, the Master of this great universe.
Ladies and gentlemen, humanity is traveling down a dead-end street. The only way to survive is to practice the peace philosophy of true love, true life and true lineage taught by Reverend Moon. Now that we have entered the Age after the Coming of Heaven, your good ancestors are activated and the heavenly hosts are sweeping down upon the earth. Soon the countries and peoples that appear strong and mighty will change course and shift in this direction.
Our Mission
I leave you with a choice. There can be no perfection in ignorance. The message from Heaven that I convey to you today is both a blessing and a warning to this generation. I, Reverend Moon, will take the lead in establishing true families, true societies, true nations and a true world. Will you join with me as I rise and gain strength in accordance with heavenly fortune? Or will you remain captive behind the same old walls, all of them Satan’s handiwork: the wall of your religion, the wall of your culture, the wall of your nationality and the wall of your race, and spend the remainder of your time on earth in agony and regret? Heaven is summoning you to be the wise leaders who will set aright this world of evil and establish a new heaven and new earth.
Today we are participating in the inauguration of the Universal Peace Federation. It represents God’s victory, the fruit of the True Parents’ blood, sweat and tears, and the world’s cherished hope. It will carry out the role of an Abel-type United Nations in relation to the existing United Nations. Under the banner of the Universal Peace Federation, we will serve as a “peace police” and a “peace army” to safeguard global peace. I hope that you will put on new, “true love armor” in this new age and be wise and brave activists in this worldwide peace force, for the sake of humanity’s future.
Please inscribe this warning from Heaven deep in your hearts. Remember that the only way to inherit Heaven’s lineage, and to establish for eternity the ideal families that God has longed to see, is through the Holy Marriage Blessing established by the True Parents.
In closing, I ask you to devote your best efforts for the development and success of the Universal Peace Federation.
Thank you.
To download a report booklet of the UPF Founders' 2005 World Peace Tour, click here.