The Blessing of the True Bride and Groom

In the Garden of Eden, Adam was Eve's father. He was also her brother, and then he became her husband. This is restoration: since she needs to seek God, Eve is in a position where she has to seek for her true father, then her true brother, and then her true husband. I had to find such a person, and among all women, True Mother was the best person. I could not do otherwise than to choose this young bride who had no worldly knowledge.

I myself had studied a lot and done many things, but for my wife I thought the best choice would be someone who has only studied in grade school. I thought to find someone who is not a daughter from a rich family but an innocent country girl who didn't know anything. Because I thought like that, God allowed me to marry such a beautiful woman as True Mother.

I formally met Mother for the first time when she was an innocent fourteen-year-old girl. I met her just twice before she became my wife. I had to see if she was qualified. The daughter of a woman who had been working sacrificially without speaking about it, living in the depths of poverty, pledging that she would follow this path by all means, was the one chosen. Because of that old woman's faith and dedication, I chose her daughter, who was in her second year at high school. I did not choose her based on my desire to find a wife.

Also, when I married Mother, I did not do so saying, God, I will get married because the time has come for me to get married. I got married because God said, Get married because the time for you to marry has come. That is in accord with the Principle. Mother, also, was not thinking about marrying me. She was a young lady attending high school.

When she was told "Rev. Moon is calling you," she said "Why? He does not know me; why is he calling me?" When she was told "They say that you are going to get married tomorrow," she responded by saying "Is that so?" She was like that. She did not oppose anything.

I tested her. When I told her to draw a picture, she did it very well. She drew a picture immediately and showed it to me very elegantly. Her frame of mind was even more beautiful than her drawing. She was a very lovely and elegant girl. She was wonderful.

Conditions of unity were necessary

The mother, as a servant, had to raise her daughter carefully. Then, she had to conduct a ceremony to register that servant's daughter as God's daughter, though before the ceremony her daughter was in the position of a servant's daughter. Only when she held that ceremony, could the proclamation be made that the bride of the Lord, who comes as the bridegroom, had been decided. It was Mrs. Soon-ae Hong, True Mother's mother, who did this.

Two mothers became necessary because the woman who should have become Mother was lost. For that reason, I gave the title "Great Mother" [Dae-mo in Korean] to Grandmother Hong.

It was difficult for the first mother to be in that role. Leah and Rachel must become one. There must be no division in their hearts. The realm of unity must be accomplished to the extent that Leah and Rachel have become like twins and that the Cain-type woman and the Abel-type woman can take each other's place. They must establish the kind of internal foundation of unity in which the elder can become the younger, and vice versa. In 1960, I was able to receive Mother after she had passed through this process.

Heo Ho-bin succeeded Kim Seong-do. This was preparation for Heo Ho-bin's daughter to receive the Lord. The Lord comes on those internal and external foundations and has his wedding ceremony with the cooperation of three women. The three women are in the formation, growth and perfection stages. From grandmother, to mother to daughter, the unity of three generations is the connecting of the Old, New and Completed Testament ages. Because this was done, the age when parents could be firmly established began....

There must be a woman in the position of a fallen mother who in front of the Father plays the leading role in indemnifying all the failures of Eve, bearing the individual-level cross, the family-level cross and all other crosses.

True Parents' Engagement and True Parents' Day

True Parents first had to inherit the qualifications of spiritual parents.... In order for True Parents to appear on earth, they necessarily had to fight in substantial struggles. They had to win the victory in order to qualify as the True Parents. Parents' Day was possible only on the foundation of their having been successful in paying indemnity, both spiritually and physically.

Parents' Day is the day when a man and a woman became husband and wife centering on original love -- that day was established for the first time in history in the Unification Church.

When this came about, a man's mind and body and a woman's mind and body became perfectly united horizontally, and the ideal realm of perfection desired by God came into being.

Parents' Day means our parents came into existence -- parents representing God's glory and acknowledging this victory of humankind, parents who have the authority to make judgments against evil based on the laws of justice. This fact is the most essential gospel on earth. That those things were proclaimed (on the first day of the third month of the lunar calendar) is the reason True Parents' Day is significant.

We have established True Parents' Day, but it must not be a day for the Unification Church alone. True Parents' Day must be for everyone, a day that all people around the world can celebrate, not only a small group of Unification Church members. It can be celebrated for a long time into the future.

The Holy Wedding took place fourteen years after our national liberation.? Since Adam and Eve married at the perfection level of the growth stage, we had to be in the position of having gone beyond the seven-years of the formation stage and the seven-years of the growth stage and of having connected with the formation degree of the perfection stage. In other words, we had to transcend the national level.

In 1960, I gathered the Unification Church members and established at least a hundred and twenty basic churches representing a hundred and twenty nations. We established this foundation to protect our church from any national-level trial.

Severe opposition

I could not have my own wedding simply by bringing to the ceremony a woman I personally liked. I had to solve problems in providential history. I established conditions of indemnity to resolve the historic problems in Adam's time, Noah's time and Abraham's time, and thereafter. In order for the Holy Wedding to be held in 1960, all the problems from the four thousand years between Adam and Jesus and the two thousand years between Jesus and today's people needed to be indemnified.

Indemnity conditions had to be established from 1953 to 1960. Consequently, this period had to be one characterized by persecution. The people of Israel, the religious leadership and Judas Iscariot together contributed to the death of Jesus. We were placed in a similar situation in April 1960. At that time, opposition was at its peak. We were at a progress-or-not, live-or-die, restart-or-fail crossroads. Twelve people put their signatures to a complaint against me and I had to undergo interrogation in court. In those days a number of famous Kunkuk University scholars had become our family members, but they left when they heard the bad news and rumors. Jung-shil Kim, who was a church district director, packed all his belongings and ran away, didn't he?

At the Ministry of Home Affairs, papers were drawn up and I had to fight it out with them on the day before our wedding. Since Jesus died as the result of a court case, I had to come to a court to restore that. This was indemnity. I was attacked in the court until 11 o'clock in the evening on that day, and began my wedding day at 3 o'clock in the morning the following day. I fought to that extent in order to prepare the foundation of peace and happiness for all people. No one knew that. President Eu helped significantly at this time. Under such circumstances we had our Holy Wedding on April 11, 1960. Thus, we crossed over one peak and moved upward. Satan began to be crushed.

Reaching the age of forty

We had to hurry. You do not know how serious I was at that time. Through the study of Divine Principle, you all know how important it is to reach the number forty in the process of restoration. I had to not die before I was forty.

Every time I faced the zenith of opposition from the enemy, I repeatedly said to myself, I must not collapse. I must not die. If I die, who can do God's will? No matter how much suffering I may have to undergo, even if I become a cripple or am bedridden, I must not die." You don't know how determined I was. Longing for the day when I would become forty, I hoped, without saying a word, that time would pass quickly. During those days, I would say to myself, Youth go quickly away; pass quickly, time! Even if all my treasures are taken away, I will be a winner, not a loser, when I become forty years old.

Three generations of inner anguish

What kind of family is the family of the coming Lord? Measured in terms of human misery, his family is more miserable than any other family. In other words, all miserable things done by men and women throughout history are repeated, even to a small degree, in his family. Otherwise, indemnity is not paid....

You must know that I had to bear an even heavier cross in my heart than Jesus did. Losing the nation and losing the church were sorrowful experiences. Even more painful for me was the loss of my own family, which I had established to resolve six thousand years of bitterness and to resolve Jesus' anguished heart over his not being able to have his own family. I reestablished the family foundation, and the result is the family I have now.

Thus, for the first time vertical history came to be indemnified horizontally. In six thousand years of history, indemnity had to be paid for the ages of Adam, Jesus and the Second Coming. Sung-jin's mother corresponds to Eve; Hee-jin's mother corresponds to Mary; and our present Mother corresponds to Mother at the time of the Second Coming. Because such a mother emerged, the four-position foundation could be established.

Holy Salt

Where did Holy Salt originate? It originated from the parents, from the occasion of True Parents' Holy Wedding. Contamination of everything started from fallen parents' love, didn't it? That's why Holy Salt originated from the Holy Wedding, based on True Parents' love.

God cannot use what has been stained by Satan's blood in Satan's world. Therefore, by getting married, I became the subject person representing True Parents' original love, life and lineage. As such, I must burn what Satan has stained. However, people must eat and wear clothes. Therefore, instead of burning, I established conditions of sanctification and created a realm on earth that has nothing do to with Satan, where people can live, eat food and wear clothes. You must know these things. You must search for your True Parents, unite with them and work with them to restore the nation to the point that using Holy Salt is unnecessary.

The marriage supper of the Lamb

What was the meaning of the day, April 11, 1960, when I got married? It is set apart from other days because the Holy Wedding happened then. Though in all appearance it may have seemed a very simple occasion, the history of that day will be studied when it is understood as a core event embracing everyone. It is remarkable that this Adam, for whom God had waited six thousand years, came to earth and indemnified everything, and thus held the Holy Wedding in 1960. You do not know! From God's viewpoint, it had been a time of suffocating tension, like treading on thin ice on the verge of life and death.

The Holy Wedding was not just for an individual; it was a global event. If the beginning of one family that is more loving than any other is declared in front of the global providence of God at the place integrating the origin of heart, then the heavenly laws and heavenly fortune cannot but be moved centering on the beginning of that family.

Because we laid the family foundation in 1960, we cannot perish. If we did not have that family foundation, we would have met with destruction. That illustrates what a historical event the Holy Wedding was. On the foundation of the endeavors made in the six-thousand-year history of the providence to restore Adam, Adam himself has set the standard on earth by which he can receive Eve as the perfected Eve. This means that the spiritual and physical worlds, which had been separated, have finally been reconnected on earth. Man represents heaven and woman represents earth, and so through them the separated spiritual world and physical world are reconnected. In short, the wall dividing Adam and Eve as enemies has been broken down, the wall that prevented Adam and Eve from meeting God has crumbled. Satan has no choice but to leave.

Internal trials for True Mother and her mother

I also told True Mother's mother, Grandmother Hong, who is right here, not to come to our home for three years. From the secular viewpoint, to my old mother-in-law, I commanded, "Don't let her see you just because she is your daughter. Don't enter by the front door where I can see you come and go. For three years, don't appear in front of me." Do you know why I did that? It was because everything could have been ruined if they had got together and started whispering.

What I mean is that True Mother was not to gossip or talk with the other women, behind others' backs. Because she was to inherit the position of Eve, all who come to talk to her are bound to stand in the position of the Archangel and try to make her go astray, because that is the Principle. Therefore, if Mrs. Hong had come and whispered things into her daughter's ear, her daughter could not have become the True Mother. In her head, and in her thoughts, there had to be nothing else but Adam, her husband.

Moreover, Mother should not have had any ideas about her relatives, so I told her to cut them all off. She was not to have had her heart violated by thoughts about her family, when she had her own major responsibility to fulfill, because then problems would arise. I had Mother stay in a small rented room in In-cheol Kim's home for three years, cut off from everyone.

That is to say, I made her stay in someone else's home. I didn't even allow her to come to the church twice a day. I gave her permission to come once a day during the evening, but not more than that! On top of that, when she came to the church, she entered through the front gate, but when she left I made her leave through the back door. Who on earth treats his wife that way? I made her stay out of her own home.

Mother shed many tears during that time. Being married, she should follow her husband wherever he went, shouldn't she? But I didn't take her with me wherever I went; instead, I took the trinity of grandmothers and mothers.`' Not once did I let her accompany me. How much she must have struggled until we had gotten through that course.

More than a hundred and twenty women competed with her. If they had remained unchanged, they would have been more terrible than worldly women. To protect her from the arrows of hatred from these others, she had to stay away for three years. She gave birth to Ye-jin during that time, and because it was drafty where she stayed, she suffered postnatal illness. She was shivering with the cold, and even her husband did not visit her. How could I go to see her every day?

Moreover, from the elderly women to everyone else in the Unification Church, all kinds of rumors spread. People said that Mother is like this or that and that we would get another Mother very soon. This and that. If we had countered them from our side, it would have led to breakdown. Therefore, Mother had to endure in silence. I had her endure them in silence. The others must have been taken aback. For instance, there were even rumors about our having the same birthday, that, "She made it up to make the horoscopic data fit in with Father's." Because she survived under such circumstances, everyone ended up thinking that she was praiseworthy. In the end, people came to realize, "No one but she could be our Mother."

Do you know how much I suffered in the background? One woman came to the room where Mother was staying with her newly born son, lay down on the floor and thrashed about, shouting "Give me this room! It is mine!" She made a fuss with her shouts of "Give it to me! Get out!" How could something like that possibly happen? How shocked and mortified she must have been to do something like that! She must have made thousands of years' worth of conditions to see the day she would become the Mother, and here was young Mother, who didn't look as if she had made any conditions at all, sitting in the position over all of heaven and earth. That woman must really have been stunned. She was thinking, "I should have become True Mother!" That is so sad, isn't it? So I just looked at her and did not react, and Mother also just looked at her. The wonderful thing about Mother is that she remained calm even when she saw things like that.

If the Abel of heart cannot win over the Cain of heart, he has no place to stay. This is the Principle. To occupy the position of the Abel of heart, one has to absorb and keep intact the foundation of the Cain of heart.

And so, though the women of the Unification Church hated her at first, as the days passed and they saw the way she was treated, even the old women pitied her, saying, "How can Father be so hard on her? Now that he is married to her, he should stay with her. Why is he making her stay outside and not living with her?" Thus, all the insults they had thrown at her at the beginning were dissolved through indemnity. They came around to Mother's side. First the old women were won over to Mother's side, then the middle-aged women, and lastly the young girls; everyone came to stand on Mother's side, and thus everything fell into place.

True Mother's indemnity course

What is the ideal spouse? The ideal spouse is the man or the woman we create. Just as God created Adam and Eve so that they might live together, so we re-create our spouse and live together. God spent seven thousand years to find the one person, Eve, didn't He? That's why total indemnity requires seven years. As a result, this became the first seven-year course.

During that time, I taught Mother about the family rules and laws of heaven. Mother did not know it, but by so doing, I restored, in substantial terms, the standard of a daughter, the standard of a spouse and the standard of a true parent in front of God, which had been lost as a result of the Fall.

If she said one wrong word -- even if she said she liked something purely because she liked it -- I made it a point to educate her. If she touched my back even once out of love, I asked her, "Why are you acting in such a way today?" and taught her. She would follow me around, treading delicately, wondering what would come next in her education. And I would teach her some more. She had no freedom, no matter where she went. Her nerves were always on edge and she was always treading on thin ice, living each day thinking, "Will I manage all right today? Will I manage all right tomorrow?"

Nevertheless, she lived each day feeling grateful to God. I know that she lived like that. So, do you think I'm a good husband or a tyrannical one? [Laughter] And yet I did not scold her. I would just say something to her in passing. Even under such circumstances, she still kept up with it all, and in the end she became the True Mother who is greater than even the holy Mother Mary herself. [Applause]

True Mother's course to restore Eve through indemnity

In the course of restoration through indemnity to relieve all sorrow, there must be a history of restoration through indemnity for the perfection of Eve. I passed through the history of struggles for the perfection and restoration of Adam and laid down a victorious foundation, and so I could stand tall as the perfected man. Hence, in order for the woman to stand as a perfected woman, she had to go through the course of restoring Eve through indemnity.

Seven years was the period of suffering for Mother. During those seven years, she was meant to practice absolute obedience and set the condition of indemnity by overcoming all suffering in front of God, and thus to meet all conditions to stand before me as my perfected object partner. In short, it was a time of suffering for her as True Mother. You need to know that during those years she had to shoulder, as a woman, all the hardships the world placed on her. She had to absorb them all centering on God's will, and in the end overcome everything and be triumphant.

Unification Church women did not leave her alone. They clawed at her to make her miserable. If they'd had their way, they would have pulled out her eyeballs and cut off her lips with a razor. She was being tested in order to receive the certificate of Mother, and the teachers were looking everywhere to find an excuse to fail her. They tried to strangle her with the most difficult questions. Though she was in the position of Mother, during the period of her training, she wasn't exactly the True Mother. She first had to be in a position from which she could embrace all Unification Church women as their Abel, which is a very difficult thing to do. Unification Church members, especially the women, were bound to accuse Mother the most. They were bound to hack at her and make her fall down. She had to pass through that stage and reach the place where everyone loved her.

Thus, she has to be hated the most at first, and then be liberated and become the woman who is loved the most; the people who at first branded her and hated her had to bow to her and say "I'll gladly give her all of my blessings."

Only then could she finally be elevated to the position of True Mother.

Becoming an Offering

True Father said the following on March 27, 1960 (1960 3.1 by the lunar calendar), the day he and True Mother were engaged:

There is something the church members need to know. As I've already told Mother Hak-ja this morning, once we have gone beyond a certain stage in working for God's great providence, there will be people who can claim to be in the position of the children and others who will be given responsibilities from God as leaders.

The people who are given responsibilities as leaders, however, have their own birth parents. Be that as it may, God does not regard the birth parents as the parents. He is hard-hearted when it comes to establishing this new heavenly providence. In other words, we need to march forward with a standard of heart never before seen in history.

Therefore, there may be people who are close to those established leaders, like their friends or parents, and whether they are Unification Church members or not, they may come and ask for favors to place their sons and daughters or their relatives in high places. I will not allow that to happen. I will not allow anyone to come in through the back door.

That is why I summoned Mrs. Soon-ae Hong today and told her to make a solemn commitment. She has pledged that she will live from now on as if she has no connection whatsoever to Mother Hak-ja. I may also make others commit to the same. This is because Mother Hak-ja must first be established in her position in order to set the condition for the generations to come. So I told her to be prepared for anything because she may be asked to do anything during the next three years. As you can see, you need to be prepared to go to such lengths to establish God's will.

That is why you, the other members, should not think of Mrs. Soon-ae Hong in secular terms as the mother of somebody or other. From God's viewpoint, He does not recognize her as the mother at present. God has to stand in such a position. Therefore, I hope you will not think of her in those terms, and treat her accordingly. Only when such a standard is set up from the beginning can it serve as an example to the coming generations and the people who might wish to come in through the back door. Soon-ae also needs to be prepared for that. Do you understand? [Yes.]

We have come a long way and suffered much to find the path of our faith, but all our suffering has been for the providence. Now that we are on the way to achieving God's will, no matter what hardships may come our way, we need to face them with grateful hearts and do our best to go beyond the standard set by God. Do you understand? [Yes.] You have promised to move forward with gratitude no matter what you are asked to do, and I hope you will keep your promise.

From A Speech to Leaders

February 23, 1977 at Belvedere Training Center

In a way, this is a clear display of my strategy; many mothers had been hoping for their daughter to become the bride of the Lord someday, so I had them see how unfortunate and desolate True Mother's mother was. In short, I made her sacrifice herself so that no one would envy her. That was the only strategy I could employ to placate them and win them over.

The mothers with eligible daughters, or daughters in their late teens, thought that their daughters were candidates to become the bride. They were all devoted and faithful people, and because of that, they were also the people who caused the most problems. Consequently, some even came to see me and tell me that I was wrong to place Mrs. Hong in such an unreasonably difficult situation. They said, I don't understand, Teacher, how you can treat True Mother's mother this way; I cannot help feeling sorry for Mrs. Hong.

They comforted her. But the truth is, I had been hoping for this very outcome.

For a year after marrying Mother, I treated her in such a way that others would have thought she was my maid and not my wife. I told her, "You must not come to my room without permission. You will stay in a small room downstairs and come when I summon you."

In other words, she started from the position of a servant. I actually wanted Mother to start from the lowest position possible because many candidates for the bride of the Lord were closely watching us, to see how their teacher treated Mother. Those women saw for themselves that I treated her badly and stopped feeling envious of her, and instead thought themselves lucky not to have been chosen as the bride. That, too, was my strategy.