Rearing Monarchs #8
A child’s understanding of Heavenly Parent
Unification Thoughts, December 2021
Welcome
Blessed December (and Winter if you’ve got that where you are). Thank
you for your continued interest in these Unification Thoughts.
In case you’re joining us for the first time, the focus of this series is to look into the remarkable role of grandparents in a family. This article is the seventh in the series and its foundation points are here ⇒ Realms of True Love and here ⇒ Three Great Kingships. If you take a look at those two links, you’ll understand the perspective of the preceding six articles, if not the details.
So then, picking up from where we left off: In November, we’d mentioned that every child needs an education of genius1 to fulfill their third blessing. But they need education to achieve their first and second blessings as well. (And it’s not just teachers who are responsible. But that’s an entire topic unto itself.2)
UT’s concept of education is governed by the very purpose of creation, so it defines education this way:
“…in its most fundamental form education is the guidance that parents give to their children so that their children may fulfill the three great blessings…”3
This starting premise is apparent in this graphic of the Theory of Education:
As shown, the first of the three primary tasks of education is to help a child resemble God’s Perfection by perfecting their individuality.
For a person, what constitutes their perfection? The Principle gives us one paragraph that’s extremely dense with meaning. But for the purposes of this article, we'll just simplify it to:
“The key to God’s first blessing is the perfection of individual character. …In order for an individual to perfect his character…his mind and body (must) become one…with God as their center. …They experience the Heart of God as if it were their own. …Sharing all the feelings of God as their own, they would never commit any sinful acts that would cause God grief. This means they would never fall.”
• Exposition of the DP, p. 32
Let’s break some of that down and see how UT can help us make this “ideal” into an attainable reality.
1. “The key to God’s first blessing is the perfection of individual character”
Helping our grandchildren discover (and develop, begin to appreciate, enjoy) and be grateful for their unique individual character was the topic of our last three articles on Rearing Monarchs. Though it wasn't the top priority in the Wilderness Age4, it should be paid serious attention now, because our grandchildren were or will be born in this post-Foundation Day, Settlement Age of Chung Il Guk. Now, we and our descendants are largely responsible to achieve and celebrate original ideals, which include each of our grandchildren’s unique individuality.
2. “Mind-Body Unity with God as their center”
This might be considered another rarefied accomplishment. Indeed, many of our young people think of God-centered mind-body unity as something that only a few very holy people can actually achieve.
But basic mind-body unity isn't uncommon. Athletes, musicians, and serious hobbyists experience it so regularly that they have a name for it: it’s called being in the Zone, or the Flow. Many of our own young become so immersed in what they're doing that they experience this—a thrilling, euphoric “oneness”. Potentially, that’s just a step away from what the first blessing brings. The Principled differences of course are that in the first blessing 1) the purpose is generous—i.e., it embraces others and 2) it’s second nature to bring God into the center of our activity.
But of course many activities that require mind-body unity are not enjoyable. So in that case, what can bring a body to follow its original mind? Is it the will? Have we found that the force of our will alone can consistently make us do the right thing? The answer is often “no”. Then what about the intellect? Does just knowing what the right thing is make us consistently do it? That answer is also often “no”. The strongest incentive for doing a difficult thing comes from being in love. When we are in love with someone or something, sacrifice can become easier. I think that this is the reason that Jesus said that the first commandment is:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” • Mark 12:30-31
And certainly Father and Mother Moon’s whole emphasis on the heart of filial piety—i.e., hyojeong—advocates the same fundamental thing. It’s because Jesus and True Parents know from tough first-hand experience that even the very hardest sacrifices become doable when one is in love with God.
That then is what Unification Thought’s first method of education is directed towards:
3. “Experience the Heart of God as if it were their own”
OK then, that’s clear: a child’s heart needs to be educated to love God above all. But where to start? The Theory of Education explains:
“God’s heart has been expressed in three ways during the process of creation and the dispensation of restoration. These three forms of God’s heart are His heart of hope, His heart of sorrow, and His heart of pain.”
• New Essentials of UT, p. 250
UT then goes on to explain those “three hearts”. But first, consider this: When I happened to re-read the Exposition of the Divine Principle after learning this point about the Three Hearts of God, something jumped out at me that I’d completely overlooked before:
“Can we ever grasp the Heart of God? The new expression of truth should be able to reveal the Heart of God: His heart of joy at the time of creation; the broken heart He felt when humankind, His children whom He could not abandon, rebelled against Him; and His heart of striving to save them throughout the long course of history.”
• Exposition of the DP, p. 8
How had I ever missed that? For a long time, I’d appreciated the Principle as a holy book of profound insights into the Bible, revealing secrets and laws that been misunderstood or missed for ages. Of course there was an underlying drama in the Messiah lecture, but too often I was overwhelmed with the sheer number of explanations and revelations in each chapter. (Dozing in lectures doesn’t happen when we’re emotionally engaged.)
An understanding transformed
But UT’s emphasis on the three hearts of God opened wide the emotional essence of the Divine Principle: within the Principle of Creation was God’s heart of hope; within the Human Fall was God’s heartbreak and grief; within restoration history was God’s long-suffering heart. That led to a very memorable meeting I once had with Hyo Jin Nim. During it, he asked me what I thought of the Principle, and I told him that, to me, the Principle was the greatest epic saga in all the world’s literature. It was a story about Someone’s most cherished hopes and dreams; it was about the horrendous catastrophe that decimated them; and it was about that Person’s tortured life trying to save His children from an enemy consumed by vengeance. Seen through the eyes of Unification Thought, that’s what the Principle had become to me…
Getting back to the point, UT then goes into an explanation of each of the three hearts. You can find all of that here. But for now, here are short excerpts from each of the three sections.
God’s Heart of Hope:
“…the universe began to be formed about 15 billion years ago. …What was everything for? It was all for the sake of creating Adam and Eve…. God spent much time creating the universe, in spite of the grueling character of the effort necessary…. God, being filled with hope, however, did not feel the process of creating the universe as too long or too arduous, its length and difficulty notwithstanding.”
• New Essentials of UT, p. 251
God’s Heart of Sorrow:
“Since His expectation and hope at the time of creation were so great, His sorrow and disappointment due to the human fall, was all the greater. Even among human beings…when a child’s illness is very serious and the parents are told that the child will die, they will still try everything in their power to keep the child alive…. So, when the child does eventually die, even though the parents knew it would happen, they still feel as though their hearts have been cut to pieces…. This is the heart of parents, especially the heart of a mother.”
• New Essentials of UT, p. 252
God’s Heart of Pain:
“God’s heart of pain refers to the bitter feelings God has experienced …watching the central figures in His providential history being persecuted…. God did not abandon fallen human beings, but continually sent prophets, saints and sages…. Nevertheless, people…persecuted them, and sometimes even killed them. …Those saints and sages were righteous men whom God sent to save human beings…. Accordingly, God felt as if He Himself had received contempt, ridicule and persecution.”
• New Essentials of UT, p. 252
For this last heart, UT gives a remarkable summary of Biblical history5 that focuses only on the emotional experience of God. The nearly 100 extensively detailed pages on Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus are condensed into just five focused pages. Yet I’ve never felt the tragic essence of those chapters as clearly.
What a child eventually needs to understand
And regarding this third heart, I was perplexed to read:
“Through an education of heart, children should come to understand the three kinds of God’s heart as described above, especially the heart of God in the course of the providence of restoration.”
• New Essentials of UT, p. 253
How sad is this, that an innocent blessed child should have to be connected to feelings of the deepest anguish? But that is indeed a life-changing understanding.
It’s helpful to note however that this is to be developed over time. It does say after all that “children should come to understand”, not that they must immediately digest that third heart during their infancy. Actually, to first understand God’s enormous investment and innocent excitement during the 15 billion years of Creation, and then its violent destruction in a tiny fraction of that time, provides a much deeper backdrop to understand just how devastating the loss was.6
Since we can’t include UT’s whole summary of the history of restoration, let me share one poignant insight into God’s Heart:
“There may be those who suspect that, since God is omniscient and omnipotent, He might have known from the very beginning that Adam and Eve…would fail. …This, however, is not a correct understanding. God was, of course, aware that there was a possibility of the human fall. Even so, since God is the God of heart and hope, His desire for human beings to succeed and not to fall was incomparably stronger than his fear that they might fall. …Since God’s expectation for (them) was so great and His hope was so strong, He virtually ignored the possibility of their failure in the offering. Here we can distinguish a difference between heart and reason. God’s impulse of heart is so strong as to override reason.”
• New Essentials of UT, p. 253
Explanations like that are why I could use the word innocent to describe our Heavenly Parent, before the Human Fall…
4. One last thing
Remember those last two sentences in the Principle’s explanation of the first blessing?
“…Sharing all the feelings of God as their own, they would never commit any sinful acts that would cause God grief. This means they would never fall."
• Exposition of the DP, p. 32
For a very long time, I glossed over them. I suspect that many people do, including our young ones. After all, our world is, and always has been, full of stories of well-regarded and even great people—secular and religious—who fell into illicit relationships.
But studying this Education of Heart, I came to understand the certainty in that sentence. And it goes back to the same thing: once a heart is fully consumed by love for someone, not only can the lover endure severe trial for their beloved’s sake, he or she also cannot bear to hurt their beloved’s heart. This doesn’t hold true only for messianic persons, but it can hold for regular ones too. A true story inspired a fine movie about this. Basically, a foreign missionary was confronted with a native family’s misguided attempt at seduction. He remained faithful and explained his love for his fiance and for God. Clearly, he’d taken his education to heart.
Conclusions
In closing, two things occur to me:
First, I believe that this view of Education isn’t only a theory that was created by a divinely inspired educator. I also see it as a very detailed breakdown of the why and the how Father and Mother Moon have tried to educate our hearts. Actually, it’s more personal than that: it’s how They’ve been trying to shape my own heart, all these years. The fundraising, witnessing, pioneering, Tribal messiahship—they’re all to let us experience God’s Heart as our own. So that once a student inherits the master’s knowledge, he/she can replicate it.
And second, for our grandchildren to learn about God’s heart, I don’t believe that Sunday school and one camp each summer are enough. Neither would I rely on any gap program the movement offers for young people. Because by the time they pass through public education and reach that age, only some are connected enough to enroll in those programs. No, the education of heart needs to begin much earlier and much closer to home.
So we return again to the basic premise of this series of articles: the existence and the love of God is ideally best expressed in a family through its grandparents7.
And so dear Golden Agers, our children and our grandchildren need us (to say nothing of HP/TP ;-). And with a little inspiration, engaging tools are available. The theory of education recommends this:
“Through an education of heart, teachers and parents should introduce the heart of God to children. In addition to talking to them about God’s heart, they can teach them through TV, radio, movies, videos, novels, plays, paintings, and various other means of communication.”
• New Essentials of UT, p. 257
So maybe in this holyday season, you might think of some inspired film, music, picture, or poem that God has managed to speak through; that reveals something about God’s heart. It could make for a very memorable family evening.
Endnotes
1. "…the Chinese characters for 'genius' indicate a person with talent which is given by Heaven" • NEUT, p. 265.
2. The Three Great Subjects concept is that a true subject of heart embodies three roles: that of parent, teacher, and owner. See CSG, Book 1, Chapter 1, Section 3. And UT offers a concise summary, in subsection "II. Three Great Subjects Thought".
3. But it’s not all the parents' responsibility. The definition continues: "…Along with the development of culture, however, the amount of information and learning has increased …therefore, the place of education was extended from the family to the school …teachers, as the representatives of parents, must instruct students with a parental heart. This is the original way of education."
4. The Wilderness Age was a 40-year period whose purpose was to indemnify the failure to receive True Parents when they were young and first began their mission. Understanding those dire circumstances, we first gens set our individuality on the back burner.
5. This summary is viewable in Section 3. Understanding God’s Heart on this web page. I know that UT has the reputation of being hard to read, but I promise that this section isn’t.
6. The Ontology chapter of the New Essentials of UT book explains that before the Creation began, there was an entire Conception stage. Only when that supremely difficult work was done did the physical creation start. (If you were with us from the beginning of this series, you might recall that it was summarized in the fourth article.)
7. The centrality of the grandparents in a family was explained in several of the first articles in this series. The gist of that content can be found here, under Chapter 2, Section 1. Grandparents’ Love
| Gerry Servito was appointed by Dr. Sang Hun Lee to the Art and Culture section of USA’s Unification Thought Institute. Currently, he’s Senior Teaching Fellow of RIIWT. He found Unification Thought after spending college looking into philosophy (esp. existentialism), the Gita, and doing transcendental meditation. He was very grateful to find a spiritual path that pursues not only centered mind-body unity, but a 2nd and even a 3rd Blessing, all for a higher purpose! |