Beyond Restoration – Hope for the New World

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The Heart of God in the New Era

— The Divine Principle from a Unification Thought perspective

In the previous article, we’d been examining Unification Thought’s explanation of the Heart of God. Over the decades since I discovered the Principle, the effort to grasp God’s Heart has become an urgent concern in my life. It’s the main key to securing my mind-body unity, loving others, and how/what I do in life. Despite that, it was only relatively recently that I first noticed that it’s mentioned in the very Introduction to the Exposition of the Divine Principle textbook. (A reminder yet again that, if you keep your heart’s eyes open, there’s many gems yet to be unearthed in that textbook, even in the pre-matter.)

“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.”
• Divine Principle, p. 8

The New Essentials of Unification Thought takes special note of that small sentence in the Introduction and it frames the entire Divine Principle within it using those terms: the heart of joy, the heart of sorrow, and the heart of pain. Earlier Unification Thought texts use slightly different translations that I like to refer to as well. They are: the heart of hope and expectation, the heart of grief, and the heart of suffering.

Through my experiences as a missionary in a few different countries for my first 30 years in the Unification movement, I’d especially learned the second and third hearts of God: the heart of grief (about the human condition) and the heart of suffering (about striving for a peaceful world amid the realities of this one). And once in a rarer while, I’d experience the beauty of nature, or see an article or documentary about the wonders of the natural world, its oceans, geology, the Milky Way we’re part of, or the billions of other galaxies out there. And then I’d have at least a fleeting glimpse of the heart of joy. I thought that these moments might be analogous to a dreaming soldier when he has a few moments of respite and can reflect briefly of the peacefulness of home. Eventually he opens his eyes and returns to the tougher task at hand.

But developments in recent years point to a change in the air. As indicated by Rev. Moon, we have moved from a life in the wilderness into an age of settlement. A Foundation Day was declared, the calendar was reset, a new nation is to be built — “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” -Matt. 6:10 children-479692_1920

A fourth heart of God?

These events coincide with another change which I didn’t fully notice before: that in the decades since Exposition of the Divine Principle was published — and I mean the original language version from 1966 — Father Moon has been speaking more and more extensively about the original world. I can remember my delight when it dawned on me that the Cheon Seong Gyeong book was largely about life in the original world. What I mean is that, where the Exposition of the Divine Principle dedicates only about 40 pages out of 400+ to summarizing some original ways of life (the Principle of Creation), in the new book, more than half of its 2000 pages explain those original ways of life.

I thus began to perceive that the emphasis of our teaching has increasingly shifted from explaining God’s providence of saving and restoring us from death, to explaining how God originally intends us to live. What I’d missed during the succeeding decades after I began this journey was that Father Moon was gradually adding to our understanding of the Principle of Creation, moving us closer and closer to it, as we approached the change of eras and how we needed to adjust to it. Only now, when I have all the teachings of the past nearly 50 years in one place (the 3 new holy books) is this shift of emphasis clearly evident. Which is what made me take note of this passage that I found in the Cheon Seong Gyeong:

“…to be a son or daughter of filial piety, you have to know your father and mother’s heart. …the heart of God before creation, His heart during the process of creation, and His grieving heart after the Fall. …the sorrowful heart with which He has been leading human history toward restoration, and His heart of hope for a new world after restoration is completed.” (14-174, 1964.10.03)

heart of GodSo, whereas in the past decades, my explanation of the Heart of God has always arrived at a place of rather grim resolve (because the 3rd heart is one of pain), something new is growing in my heart: a guarded excitement that an era of hope has already begun amid the chaos. I’ve considered that 2000 years ago, when Jesus said “It is finished” it may have seemed like the end of the world, but in fact he’d initiated a new era.
In like manner, when I think of Father Moon’s statement that he’d “completed everything”, my heart has something new to hold on to, a motivation that augments my hope to comfort and liberate God’s painful heart. It’s the anticipation of increasing joy, as God’s hopeful expectations can once again return.

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