FOLLOW US
W. Lay: Address to Summit 2022, Session VIIa
Written by Prof. William Lay, Adjunct Professor, Unification Theological Seminary
Saturday, August 13, 2022
Address to Summit 2022 and Leadership Conference,
Seoul, Korea, August 11-15, 2022
Thank you so much to our panelists. What a wonderful morning this has been. I feel like this morning was worth the trip from New York. You can see that our audience has been listening very attentively to you and learning. I only wish Rev. Moon could be here this morning because he would have enjoyed learning from our panel. Ambassador DeTrani’s remarks in the earlier panel covered a lot of things, but one of them was we’ve got to keep going, we’ve got to keep going with this noble effort.
Thank you, Dr. Petrovsky, for that survey and analysis of the Northeast Asia Peace Initiative, where we look at what went right and what went wrong, and how we’re going to refine our efforts going forward. And thank you so much, Dr. Kimlong. You have brought the life of Prime Minister Hun Sen to us, brought him to life as a real figure.
Actually, my father was in the service in Korea. He was a U.S. serviceman in the North. He was on the last boat out of Wonson that came down to the South.
I’m so grateful that the United States continued its commitment to Korea. We did not maintain our commitment to the people of Indo-China. It’s good for all of us to think how fortunate it was that Prime Minister Hun Sen was there and could be this kind of stable source of strength for the Cambodian people to allow them to develop. Thank you for sharing that with us.
My colleague, Dr. Ward, told about his experiences with Rev. Moon and the story of Jacob and Esau. I know that that was an important story for Rev. Moon. I think Rev. Moon might say that all this prosperity that you see around us here in South Korea was somehow given by God to be offered to the North to bring the two Koreas together. That was the way that Rev. Moon tended to think. As I said, he would have enjoyed very much hearing all the information today.
He often spoke about the heart. Those of you here know, the more familiar you become with Korea, the more you understand how important the heart is in Korea. He said that when the people of the South have that longing heart to unite with the North, it will come about.
Those are some of my observations. My appreciation to our panel and my appreciation to UPF for being a part of this conference. Thank you very much.
To go to the World Summit 2022 Schedule page, click here.