A daily life that resembles the heavens 空に似た日常

[Summary] From prison, True Mother steadfastly urges, “Make the Korean people know that they are a chosen people.” Our people are a chosen people who have unbrokenly carried on a deep heart — from the spirit of benefiting all humankind (Hongik Ingan) in the Dangun myth, to the filial piety of Sim Cheong, the fidelity of Chunhyang, the loyalty of Yu Gwan-sun, and King Sejong’s creation of Hangeul. All this history was the process of preparing the birth of True Parents. Now, even amid the ordeal of prison, True Mother is completing filial piety, fidelity, and loyalty in her one body and writing the holy history of holiness (聖). Chosen-people consciousness is not privilege but the consciousness of being an offering; when one sacrifices with the greatest love in the lowest place, Heaven instead raises one the highest. The Great Epic of the Korean People as a Chosen People is a living epic being written, even at this moment, through the life of each and every one of us. On the day we recover the identity of the Korean people and, centering on True Parents, complete this great epic, scattered humankind will become one family under one Heavenly Parent.

(True Father, September 21, 1969) In carrying out the history of restoration, where is God’s final purpose? It is in the true parents. To require true parents is to represent a true family, and to represent a true clan, a true people, a true nation, a true world. Seen in reverse, to represent the world, the nation must become an offering, and the people, a particular clan, a particular family must become an offering. In the end it comes down to the parents.

(True Father, March 24, 1972) Because human beings fell, there are any number of Satan-side individuals, families, clans, and nations. But though there is a Heaven-side individual, there is no family, clan, people, or nation that has risen to that standard. In the end, if there is no ground on which the Messiah can come and establish a family, a clan, a nation, there is no way for ordinary people to rise. What God prepared, passing through an individual and a family who could rise together centering on the Messiah, is the Israel chosen people. A chosen people must cross beyond the national level; if it cannot cross over, there is grave trouble. Yet to cross this line, there is no way for them to cross over among themselves alone.

(True Mother, December 6, 2013) From high antiquity our people were called the Baedal people. Baedal means a bright country, a luminous country, a country that reveres Heaven. Looking at the Bible, just as Heaven carried on history by raising central figures such as Noah and Abraham and chose Israel as the chosen people and sent Jesus, so from long ago Heaven chose and prepared the Korean people as a chosen people — a heavenly-descended people (cheonson) holding the idea of benefiting all humankind (Hongik Ingan). We must bear in mind that the Korean people are the blood kin of the chosen people, set to be at the forefront of founding the kingdom of peace in the age of the Later Heaven’s opening (Hucheon Gaebyeok).

*Opening — The One Phrase Mother Repeats from Prison

Beloved members, we have turned the pages of the Great Epic of the Korean People as a Chosen People one by one together. Beginning with myth, passing through the filial piety of Sim Cheong, the fidelity of Chunhyang, the loyalty of Yu Gwan-sun, and Hangeul, we have at last arrived at True Parents. Today is the time to hold that picture in one great canvas and engrave it on our hearts.

First, call to mind one scene. True Mother is in prison. What words might she speak to the members who come to visit? Ordinarily one might expect her to speak of legal responses, to challenge the wrongful trial, or to call for protests. Yet from Mother’s lips comes:

“The Korean people must be made to know that they are a chosen people. Teach the Great Epic of the Korean People as a Chosen People to all the people.”

When one first hears these words, honestly, a thought may arise: ‘In this urgent situation, how much help can those words be?’ But in those words I see Mother’s deepest concern. Mother is now more concerned about this Korean people losing their identity than about her own suffering. If one does not know what kind of country this is — its identity — then, not knowing where to go or what to do, one loses the way and does not even know one is lost. Mother’s cry is this: ‘This Baedal people is a people with the destiny to receive True Parents and save the whole world. Each and every citizen must awaken to it.’

*1. What Kind of People Were We Originally? — The Revelation of the Dangun Myth

Then what kind of people are we originally? Seeking that root, let us trace back to the myth. True Parents said that the Korean people are the Dongi people — a people that detests war and loves peace, and that in five thousand years of history has never once invaded another. It is said that ‘the character Hwan (桓) and the character Han (韓) were used with the same meaning.’ In meaning they contain: boundlessly great, brightly luminous, infinite, one, the very beginning, and the will of God. If one sees that myth merely as an old tale, nothing is visible. But read with the eye of the providence, an astonishing revelation appears. Hwanin is Heavenly Parent, and Hwanung, the son of a secondary line, is in the Heaven-side position of Abel. The three Heavenly Seals (天符印): the seal (符/talisman) drives out misfortune and calls in blessing, so I think it means the three great blessings Heaven gave — be fruitful, multiply, and have dominion. The Divine Altar Tree (Sindansu) is interpreted as the Tree of Life on which one longs to become a true human before God. The bear and the tiger are fallen humanity that has dropped to the animalistic value of the survival of the fittest, and ‘do not see the sun for a hundred days’ was the commandment of sexual purity, like ‘do not eat the fruit of good and evil’ in Genesis.

The tiger could not endure that taboo and did not become human, but the bear overcame the ordeal of the ‘three sevens’ and at last became Ungnyeo (the bear-woman) and gave birth to Dangun Wanggeom. What does this mean, everyone? It was Heaven’s first commandment to the Korean people: to spread a true world with true love and endurance. We were thus a people without a second in the world, who engraved into our myth the character of purity, peace, and the benefiting of all humankind. Remarkably, that the Dangun myth says the same thing as the Genesis creation myth of the Bible is by no means a coincidence.

*2. Attendance That Transcends Life — The Filial-Love (孝情) of Sim Cheong

The first heart Heaven raised upon that pure lineage is ‘filial-love (hyo-jeong).’ Behind the Korean people’s calling as a chosen people lay this very filial heart. And the representative story that most deeply holds that filial piety is The Tale of Sim Cheong.

Six-year-old little Sim Cheong goes out barefoot in the cold winter to beg food for her blind father. Look: this girl has not even a consciousness of ‘performing filial piety.’ Worldly speaking he was a blind father, but because she dearly loves the single father who begged milk to raise her from the time she was a newborn, she simply moves of her own accord. This is true filial piety. In no country’s language in the world is there a word to translate Korea’s ‘hyo’ exactly. Even the Hebrew and Greek of the Bible only say ‘honor, revere, obey,’ emphasizing duty and responsibility — different in grain from our filial heart.

But Sim Cheong’s filial piety does not stop there. To open her father’s eyes, she throws her own life into the seawater of the Indangsu. Foreigners find this passage hard to understand. They ask how giving even one’s life to open a father’s eyes can be filial piety. But the epic of Sim Cheong’s filial piety does not speak of a reasonable filial piety. This girl’s filial heart is that, if she cannot resolve her father’s deep regret, then to live as a child is not truly to live. Moved by that heart, Heaven worked a miracle in which not only the one blind father but all the blind in the whole world opened their eyes at once.

Everyone, see the hidden revelation of Heaven within this story. When Eve fell in Eden and heaven and earth sank into darkness, God, having lost heaven and earth, made His way along the road of restoration where nothing could be seen ahead, like the sightless blind man Sim. That unresolvable regret of God can be resolved only through filial-love that transcends life, like Sim Cheong’s — this is the epic Heaven taught through The Tale of Sim Cheong.

*3. A Single-Hearted Devotion That Not Even Death Could Break — The Fidelity (節介) of Chunhyang

If filial piety is a vertical love toward parents, we now advance to an unchanging horizontal love toward one’s spouse — that is, ‘fidelity (烈).’ But here we stand before a deeper question. From what did the fall of humankind begin? As True Parents revealed, it was the problem of lewdness, the loss of purity. If the fall was lewdness, restoration must be purity; if the fall was lust, restoration must be an unchanging single-hearted devotion.

So Heaven had to seek a people that regarded purity and chastity as more precious than life. Our people, who loved to wear white and so were called the white-clad people (baegui minjok), were that very vessel. White is the color of undefiled purity. The flower that most beautifully bloomed that character of fidelity is Chunhyang.

Sixteen-year-old Chunhyang makes a vow for a hundred years with Yi Mong-ryong before Heaven. But before Magistrate Byeon’s demand to serve him at night, bound to the beating-frame and struck, she answers with the Song of the Ten Strokes: ‘Though I take these blows and die outright, I cannot forget the young master Yi.’ Though red blood spurted from her jade-like body and tears of blood flowed, Chunhyang’s single-hearted devotion was in the end never shaken. She knew with her whole body that pure love is more precious than life.

Her figure, waiting for her beloved without any promise in the cold prison cell, overlaps exactly with the suffering of True Mother, now in prison. But as the saying goes, utmost sincerity moves Heaven, and in the end Heaven did not turn away from that fidelity. Though Yi Mong-ryong returned in beggar’s disguise, having failed the state examination, in the passage where Chunhyang, having confirmed that her beloved had not abandoned her, says that now that she has seen the beloved she dreamed of, she can die without regret — we see this girl’s true love. This is the love story of our Korean people. Concerning Westerners’ love, by contrast, Father said this: Westerners, the moment they meet, embrace and kiss very easily, but it is like a single fly lightly alighting and then flying away. Ours is a people that holds in its heart a dramatic love story of a different dimension from tales of love that meet easily and part easily.

*4. Loyalty That Shone Brightest When Darkest — The Loyalty and Fidelity (忠節) of Yu Gwan-sun

If filial piety is a vertical flower blooming between parent and child, and fidelity a horizontal flower blooming between husband and wife, then what is loyalty? It is a three-dimensional love in which a vertical love of country and a horizontal love of the people are harmonized. Looking at the character, it joins ‘center (中)’ and ‘heart (心)’ — that is, the question of where the center of one’s heart lies. If oneself is the center, one betrays at any time; but if the nation and God are the center, one can give even one’s life for the fatherland, for a great value. The most patriotic emblem of that loyalty and fidelity is the patriot-martyr Yu Gwan-sun.

Just sixteen — how did so great a fire arise in that small breast? When she led the cry of manse at the Aunae marketplace, the shout pierced the sky. That day nineteen people, including her mother and father, died for the nation on the spot. Where an ordinary girl would have wailed and fainted before her dead parents, Yu Gwan-sun instead walked again toward the military police and protested. In the end she was arrested as a ringleader, but in court she refused even to appeal, saying, ‘I do not acknowledge your trial itself’; and even in Seodaemun Prison she did not stop crying manse morning and evening, until at last, at the flowering age of seventeen, she died for the nation at Seodaemun Prison.

That loyalty and fidelity is not a story in which this people dressed up its patriotism more dramatically. It was a family of patriotic loyal devotion whose whole household walked together — a single family from which nine independence patriots came. And our people’s loyalty differs in grain. The nations of the world all have a heart that loves their own country. Yet what is distinctive about the Korean people’s loyalty? It shone brightest when things were darkest; its agents were not kings and nobles but all the common people; and it was an ‘aein (愛人, love-of-humanity) loyalty’ that did not easily invade another’s country. Great powers in general easily invade weaker nations, but the Korean people’s loyalty is not an exclusive patriotism that seeks to dominate other peoples.

And within this history of the patriotic movement, the history of the independence movement of the family centering on True Father is attested through the grand-uncle Mun Yun-guk of Father’s family. Centering on True Mother too, the patriotic loyal devotion of three generations of mother and daughter is held whole. In the first chapter of Mother’s autobiography appears the story of her maternal grandmother Jo Won-mo, who on that day in 1919 carried the young godmother Hong Sun-ae on her back and cried manse. That godmother Hong Sun-ae too, in August 1945, carried the three-year-old True Mother on her back and cried ‘Long live Korean independence.’ Is this a coincidence? The loyalty of the Korean people is not merely a history of guarding the country, but was the foundation of devotion in loyalty that prepared the birth of True Parents.

*5. The Vessel That Holds the Heart — Hangeul

Then how could our people engrave this deep heart of filial piety, fidelity, and loyalty on their hearts and hand it down to later generations? Precisely because there was Hangeul. Hangeul is the only script in the history of humankind for which the creator, the date of creation, and the principle of creation are all recorded. King Sejong, braving the life-staking opposition of his officials, himself made this script out of one thing alone — the spirit of love for the people. In world history, King Sejong is the only case of a monarch creating a new script for the people’s life. However clever King Sejong was, how could he make a nation’s script all alone? He made it at the age of forty-six, but perhaps the start — resolving that ‘when I become king, I must make a script all the people can easily read and write’ — began around the age of sixteen? I believe that as he set his will from his youth and agonized over how to compose the script, Heaven, moved by King Sejong loving the people like his own children with a parent’s heart, revelationally gave him Hangeul. Therefore I believe Hangeul was created by God. And so it became the most scientific, most practical, most literary, and most heart-filled — near-perfect — language in all the world.

But the true greatness of Hangeul lies in its being a ‘language of heart.’ Jeong (情), han (恨), samuchida — these words cannot be rendered in any foreign language. Especially ‘han’ is a feeling that represses a wrong deep in the breast, yet does not burst into rage but instead sublimates it into love. The heart of True Mother, now in prison, is precisely this heart of han. Full of pain and sorrow, yet she is not confined in it and does not curse; she forgives because she loves, and resolves the deep grief (haewon) — and the only language that can hold this heart of han (恨) is our language alone.

That is why the last section of the Exposition of the Divine Principle proclaimed that, for a one-family world attending the returning Lord as parent to be realized, the language must without fail be unified, and that its fatherland-language would be precisely Hangeul.

*6. The Birth of One Person, Holding Six Thousand Years — True Parents

Now, all this myth, and filial piety, and fidelity, and loyalty, and Hangeul have one single destination: precisely, True Parents. Mother said that for one person to be born, heaven and earth and all the myriad things of the universe must be interwoven as warp and weft. If the birth of Jesus held four thousand years of God’s labor, the birth of True Parents holds six thousand years of cosmic-level waiting.

Heaven chose the First Israel and sent Jesus, but when the will could not be fully realized through the cross, it called Christianity as the Second Israel, and at last, toward the number of completion, chose and raised the Korean people early as the Third chosen people. Dangun’s epic of nation-founding, Sim Cheong’s epic of filial piety, Chunhyang’s epic of fidelity, Yu Gwan-sun’s epic of loyalty, Sejong’s epic of Hangeul — all this was precisely that ‘preparation.’ And upon the foundation of that prepared chosen people, the True Parents of humankind were born on this small Korean peninsula in the East. Yet there is something remarkable. All of them set their will at the age of sixteen and began a life of loyalty, filial piety, and fidelity. It is the age of ‘i-pal cheongchun (twice-eight youth).’ 2 × 8 = 16. True Father too, at sixteen, met Jesus on Mount Myodu and set his will. Mother too, in those years, set out on the path of a true couple with Father through the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. Setting one’s will in the twice-eight prime of youth is this important.

Heaven moved history to protect those two. It had them born in the darkness of the colony, and in the Korean War, through the miracle of the Soviet Union’s absence from the Security Council, had the sixteen UN nations enter the war and protected the two — which is why we call that war a holy war of Heaven. Father, prisoner number 596, in Hungnam prison, faced the day of a fate to die the next day. Up to the day before, they had been dragged out and killed up to number 595, so today was that day; but Heaven urgently sent a B-29 bomber to bomb Hungnam prison, and had Father come out alive. In the 2008 helicopter accident too, Heaven was with them so that all sixteen dramatically escaped just before the explosion. Thus Heaven protected True Parents.

Now True Mother is amid the great ordeal of prison. What will become of it? Sim Cheong drowned in the Indangsu but was resurrected for a happy ending. Chunhyang could only die, but through the dramatic appearance of Yi Mong-ryong as secret royal inspector she gained a glorious family. The patriot-martyr Yu Gwan-sun died for the nation in prison, but lives on in the heart of the people.

What will become of Mother hereafter? The common point of Sim Cheong, Chunhyang, and Yu Gwan-sun is that they pierced the heart of Heaven, so that Heaven protected them and made them glorious. Mother is now in the most painful situation, but she must be shedding tears of blood with the most burning heart of loving Heaven, loving humanity, and loving country. Heavenly Parent too must have His heart torn every day by Mother’s situation. Will Heaven know what is to come? It is a situation so grave that even Heaven watches with a clenched heart. It is grave precisely because even Heaven does not know how it will be resolved tomorrow.

True Father said countless times that the last ridge of human history can be crossed only when Heavenly Parent and the spirit world act together. Now is precisely such a time. By our power alone it is hard to cross. Heaven, moved by our utmost devotion, must mobilize the whole spirit world so that it dramatically turns over. Only when the religious people, the regime, the press, the prosecution, and all who oppressed Mother kneel before her and apologize will Heaven’s deep regret be resolved. All must wail. In the entire span of human history, the Satan-side has never apologized. In Jesus’ time too, Satan sneered. But now the day comes when such a drama of great reversal unfolds. Through cosmic-level indemnity, Mother is making the history in which all humankind will wail in repentance. The heavenly-heart all-night vigils we now offer are precisely the building of a tower of devotion. Mother and we must become one.

Though the situation is one where nothing can be seen ahead, the dream of the Great Epic of the Korean People as a Chosen People will surely be realized. True Father said, ‘It is finished,’ and True Mother proclaimed ‘Holy Mother Han.’ To be born as the only begotten Daughter is the merit of Heaven and the ancestors, but Holy Mother Han is a name of holiness — she who, having overcome all the turbulent suffering, is completing a holy sacred work. The One who completed filial piety, completed fidelity, completed loyalty, and at last sublimated them into holiness (聖) at the cosmic dimension — is precisely our True Mother.

*Conclusion — Recover the Identity and Complete the Great Epic

Beloved members, now we return to the first question. Why does Mother, from prison, so urge, ‘Teach the Great Epic of the Korean People as a Chosen People’? Do you now see the answer?

What Mother fears most is that the history of the Jewish people — who lost their nation and wandered for two thousand years because the chosen people failed to fulfill their responsibility — will be repeated on this land. This people, once so fervent as to be called the Jerusalem of the East, is now pouring out toward the True Parents who have come the very words with which the Pharisees mocked Jesus two thousand years ago. ‘If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.’ ‘If you are the Daughter of Heavenly Parent, why can He not save you?’ That is Mother’s deepest pain.

But do not forget. A chosen people is not a proud people that only receives blessings and lives smugly in its own conceit. A chosen people is a people that overcomes suffering, sacrifices for others, and loves even its enemies. It is not comfortable because it was chosen by Heaven; rather, because it was chosen, suffering begins. Therefore chosen-people consciousness is not a consciousness of privilege but a consciousness of being an offering. When one goes down to the very bottom and sacrifices with the greatest love, to be instead raised the highest is Heaven’s law of indemnity.

And remember. The Great Epic of the Korean People as a Chosen People is not yet a completed epic. It is a living epic being written, even at this hour, through the life of each and every one of us. Through Sim Cheong’s filial-hearted sacrifice, Chunhyang’s prison cell in which she staked her fidelity, Yu Gwan-sun’s prison sacrifice of loyalty, and True Mother’s prison ordeal that compresses all these epics, the final epic of completion must be holiness (聖). The One now completing that holiness in prison with her whole body is precisely Holy Mother Han, True Mother. The other protagonist of that final chapter is precisely we, the Blessed Families, walking together with Mother.

Now, like that ‘Long live Korean independence!’ of the Aunae marketplace — ‘Long live Cheon Il Guk!’ Let us inherit that burning loyalty and fidelity. In our hands is held the flag of Cheon Il Guk, under which all nations become one, and on our lips is the cry toward True Parents. With a heart like a ball of fire, like the patriot-martyr Yu Gwan-sun, let us cry out with the heart of Heaven, so that Heaven may hear, so that it may reach Mother in prison. On the day we recover the identity of the Korean people and, centering on True Parents, complete this great epic, scattered humankind will become one family under one Heavenly Parent. Aju! (Amen!)