God’s investment in the universe and us is not impersonal, theoretical or ideological. It is very personal. We are unique in the creation. We are not stars and planets, or cute Koala bears but human beings created in the image and likeness of God. We are meant to be like our Heavenly Parent and close to him/her. The only way to be close to someone is to have emotional qualities and virtues in common. Like tends to relate with like – a common base is fundamental to the spiritual law of “give and take.”
Because we are designed at the very core of our being to connect with God and ultimately become one in love with God then it stands to reason that we have to grow in love, to become givers of love. Our Heavenly Parent hopes to receive love from us! To become givers of love it is essential that we have creativity, free choice and freedom.
Love requires creativity
Love needs creativity to express itself. Think of all the heroic deeds performed in the name of love or love’s myriad of expressions in art and literature. Love would be stale without creativity. This is why God values creativity and any society that stifles creativity loses God’s attention. To live without creativity is to have the life sucked out of you. God is waiting to be surprised by our next creative effort to express love.
Free choice
To become givers of love we have to have free choice. If you cannot freely choose to love someone then love is not love. Love requires free choice. In this respect God took an incredible risk in giving us free choice because we can choose not to love him. But at the time, perhaps it didn’t feel like a risk because the realm of “sin” was yet unimagined.
Think about it. God hadn’t anticipated what Christianity describes as the “Fall of Man” or what Buddhism portrays as humanity’s descent into ignorance. God planned for joy and the achievement of his children in whatever they did.
When your child is born you don’t gaze into their face and think about all the possible failures that could destroy their life. You have hope for their future. Other emotions may hit you later but the original, first love of a parent is trusting, hopeful and willing to give all. This was the original love of God.
God, like any parent, grieved at his children’s self-destructive decisions and actions. He hadn’t planned for their fall from grace.
“So the Lord regretted he had ever made them and put them on the earth. It broke his heart.” Genesis 6:6
God’s grief described in Genesis made all joy hollow. We can certainly know what that means. When love is betrayed it hurts beyond imagination and things that everyone else seems to enjoy feel shallow and without meaning. Our world becomes hollow.
But God couldn’t have made the world any other way because in the words of William Shakespeare:
“Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.”
(Sonnet 116)
The value of love is so great but it requires creativity, free choice and freedom. Love cannot be born in any other environment.
However, our free choice has to be subject to an unchanging set of virtues that reflect the nature of God. Our freedom rests on the exercise of these virtues in our everyday life.
The story of Adam and Eve in the garden explains that they were required to inherit the virtues that would create true love. They were meant to practice fidelity by remaining faithful to a commandment or word to “not eat of the fruit.” In losing faith with the word they lost the environment of freedom they had previously enjoyed. You may consider the story of Adam and Eve simply a moral tale or fable but in reality it is a symbolic account of a real event, which is now imprinted on our collective consciousness.
The impact of that loss is felt by us today. We lost the environment of freedom that is necessary for love to grow properly and although we are not slaves in a physical sense, we are slaves to habits and addictions that destroy our spiritual and emotional well-being.
Humankind did not fall away from God because God gave us freedom. Rather in choosing to violate the virtues of love, we lost the environment of freedom that we were meant to have.
“When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.” (We lose our freedom.) – James 1:13-15
Creativity, free choice and an environment of freedom are all necessary for the growth of love. If we want our children to grow in a healthy way, just like our Heavenly Parent we must give them creativity, free choice and an environment of freedom. Our hope and desire is they honor the virtues of heart which are the bedrock of that freedom.
“Our Heavenly Parent, who observes the universe from the highest heaven, wants human beings to lead. He doesn’t want people to merely obey as if drawn around by the neck. That is also what the mind desires, right? Your mind wants to be completely free. Ask anyone: no one wants to be controlled. You will enjoy complete freedom once you attain the status of a person of true love. Then you can travel anywhere, even to the throne of God. You can meet God anytime you like. You can become God’s friend!” – Sun Myung Moon (Earthly Life and the Spirit World 1.5.3.2)
Attaining the status of a person of true love
It is all important that we use our creativity and freedom to choose to become people of true love but we find ourselves caught between heaven and hell so to speak. We aspire to goodness but find ourselves mid-sentence gossiping, or putting someone down. In an almost out of body experience we see ourselves and realize our actions and words are out of integrity with what we supposedly believe.
You add someone else to the mix and it gets worse! Now you not only have to battle a disconnect within yourself, between your own mind and body, but you have to resist the temptation to ally yourself with friends who are pulling you down to what you know is your baser self. You suddenly find yourself asking, “How could I have said that?” or “How could I have done that?”
The reality is that the connection between our mind and body which was meant to be anchored in our relationship with God is weak and easily broken. St Paul famously spoke of our common problem:
“But there is another power within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me.”
There has to be a solution. It’s not just Paul’s problem. It’s a universal problem which has taken down the mightiest of men and women.
Being faithful to the word
A recent survey of 1,000 Church leaders in America discovered that reading Scripture is the surest means to spiritual growth: “Nothing has a greater impact on spiritual growth than reflection on Scripture. If churches could do only one thing to help people at all levels of spiritual maturity grow in their relationship with Christ, their choice is clear. They would inspire, encourage, and equip their people to read the Bible—specifically, to reflect on Scripture for meaning in their lives.”
Words and images can impact us deeply. Encountering God’s words can strengthen our spirit or mind and gives us the power needed to create mind-body unity so that our lives can reflect God’s nature. That is where we will find real freedom.
As he writes in his autobiography, Rev. Moon has cherished devotional reading ever since his student days: “On my desk in the boarding house, I always had three Bibles lying open side by side. One was in Korean, one in Japanese, and one in English. I would read the same passages in three languages again and again. Each time I read a passage, I would underline the verse and make notes in the margins until the pages became stained with black ink and difficult to read.”
Reverend Moon’s way of life centered on the reading of God’s words. He called it hoon dok hwe, which in Korean means “gathering for reading and learning.” He encourages us to make this practice a part of our daily lives. He points to this practice as his main source of spiritual clarity.
Finding God in a world of sound-bytes
But how can we, who live in a world of 3-second sound-bytes, texts, email, and commercials on fast-forward, go deep into God’s words? We can, through the spiritual practice of study.
In reading scripture, re-live what happened.
Have you ever seen a movie that spoke to your life? That lifted you up with possibilities for your future? That caused you to reconsider the path you were on? A great movie can do that because it draws you to identify with the characters and what they are going through. Devotional reading can do the same thing. Rev Moon always encouraged us to make scripture come alive. He told us to live God’s story.
“I would like to advise you who are studying the Principle. …I not only understood the Principle, but lived it. When I came to the fall of Adam and Eve, I felt as if it were my own business. I felt the sorrow of God to see Adam’s fall. I felt Adam’s sorrow in himself. It was not Adam’s story, but mine. I felt the story of Cain and Abel as my own. Through their mistake, God felt so much sorrow, and I felt the same. So with Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses and Jesus. In each event all through the history, I put myself in the position of those involved and felt with them, and with God. It is not someone else’s history, but my own life.” – Sun Myung Moon
In reading these stories, we have the opportunity to identify with the people and relive what they experienced. You can discover what really happened. What was the consequence of breaking off communication with God? You can also experience rebirth through the word. The word of God can guide you to complete your growth to spiritual maturity.
In reading wisdom literature practice re-reading passages to discover its secrets
I am sure you are familiar with the concept of “mantra”? A mantra is a divine word or short phrase that one repeats over and over for the sake of focusing one’s mind and heart. Perhaps that might seem an unnatural practice but think about it in this way.
“When you eat food, it becomes more delicious as you chew it fully. If you just chew once or twice and swallow it, do you know the real taste of the food? With a thing of value, you must repeatedly practice with it and try to know the taste of it, and it will give you more and more. So repetition does not fatigue you. The same applies to learning the Principle.” – Sun Myung Moon
Devotional reading of wisdom literature is aided when you savor and digest the words through reading over and over, memorizing and repeating them. You might want to try this simple to remember pattern.
FIVE STEPS OF SPIRITUAL STUDY
- Select: choose a reading
- Take It In: read the text and think it through
- Underline: underline the words or phrases most meaningful to you
- Dialogue: have an inner dialogue or shared discussion
- Yours to Keep: capture the message
Allowing God’s way of thinking to infuse our lives
Reading wisdom literature helps us to rediscover and inherit God’s way of thinking. It shows us how to be faithful to God’s ideal so that we can be free and use our creativity to become a person of true love.
“True Religion teaches freedom for the entire cosmos, liberation for the whole, and unity in the heart of God. Freedom is a state where we can rejoice together with God and the entire world. However, most people in the democratic world today insist on an individualistic concept of freedom. As a result, they deny their nation, their society, their community, and even their family and the relationship of husband and wife. Eventually, they come to deny the very Center of their mind [God].What do they have left? Loneliness. When their loneliness reaches the extreme and explodes, they no longer trust others or even themselves. Their feeling of loneliness and distrust becomes an all-encompassing fear and depression, which leads to self-destructive behavior. This
trend is ever more evident in contemporary times. Hence, if we really want freedom, we should not cry out for the irresponsible freedom that people sought in the past or are seeking today, but we should seek for the true freedom that accompanies the ideal of God’s love.” – Sun Myung Moon (October 12, 1958)
To come closer to our Heavenly Parent we need to develop our heart of love so that we reflect God’s nature and leave a trail of happiness wherever we go. To do so we have to invest our creativity and free choice in the right way and create an environment of freedom for ourselves and others.
