The orderings of these relationships, affects the way the realms of heart function.
The love of a mother and child nurtures and harmonizes the developing relations between the child and his or her siblings and peers.
The harmony of the child's realm of love affects the sibling's or peer's realm of love.
For example, one Saturday afternoon, Erica's 8-year-old son, Tim, and his friend were playing with Lego blocks.
Usually Tim gets along with his friend, but this particular afternoon they were quarreling. Tim did something out of his character. When he and his friend disagreed over a Lego piece. He tore apart his friend's Lego construction and threw the pieces all over the floor.
His mother recognized that this behavior came from the busy week's toll on his relationship week with her and his emotions were running on empty.
Because of her motherly instinct, she took him aside and spent time alone with him. She spent time holding him on her lap, speaking gently to him, and getting him involved in funny little finger plays.
After only a short time, Tim became calm and happy again, and went back to apologize to his friend. He even offered to help his friend rebuild his toy construction he destroyed.
Tim needed this vertical connection with his mother in order to relate smoothly with his peers on a horizontal plane.
Often, a family’s problems involving children can be remedied by improving and solidifying the marriage.
Psychologist John Rosemond testifies that when he and his wife shifted the center of their family life from the children to their marriage, getting the vertical order right, their children were more obedient, more respectful, more compliant, and—importantly—happier.
Rosemond likened a happy, healthy family to the solar system: “The marriage was the nucleus of the family, the children were satellites that revolved around the nucleus like planets to a sun.”
A Healthy Ecology of Love
Relationships between the vertical and horizontal create a greater ecological system that encompasses all four realms of heart (parent's, children, siblings, spouse).
This becomes a support system that surrounds the individual and stimulates him or her needs to internally grow.
When this ecology is imbalance, people feel vulnerable and often try to fill this need in a substitute way.
This explains why a child latches onto her cousin as her 'older sister', the widower joins a dance club, and the infertile couple adopts a son.
For example, 14-year-old Elena is in the children's and sibling's realm.
When her complementary partners of parents, grandparents, and brother and sisters and maybe cousins, she enjoys a wealth of possibilities in terms of giving and receiving love and thus develop her character. These relationships are necessary for growth in Elena's stage in life.
Jon, on the other hand, who is 27 year old may have different relational needs than Elena who is still a teenager. He may be more challenged and fulfilled to mature by being invested in the spouse's and parent's realms.
He thrives best by having a good friend and children as reciprocal partners to relate with.
But this is in addition to the parents and siblings with whom he continues to have a relationship. Jon's ecology of love includes all the four realms of heart. The absence of any of these aspects will make Jon feel an emptiness in his life.
Ecology of Love
In an ideal world, people would progress naturally from realm to realm, nurtured by their partners in the realm and nurturing them back in turn.
We would achieve the necessary level of heart that resembles God's heart.
The reality of course is that humanity is far from the ideal. There are forces that seem to prevent people from attaining the growth of heart they need in each realm.
A daughter who is becoming an adolescent may need her father's reassurance and support more than ever before, but he is struggling with finances and turns to alcohol to cope.
A mother who just gave birth to twins, may not be able to stretch her love resources to her husband and her babies which causes the marital relationship to breakdown just when she needs her partner the most.
An older sibling may say something to a younger brother or sister that was biting and stay with the children for years affecting his or her self-image.
We see that people are imperfect in their ability to love. Yet, the realms of heart march on.
The abilities of other-centered love or love others than yourself are still too underdeveloped to cope with the demands of the realms.
This causes many difficulties.
Because of this, divorce, domestic and child abuse may result. This inability to love can emerge as more subtle problems such as a mother who rather be her daughter's best friend and live vicariously through her
Many people may feel that they lack the heart to have concern and compassion, and do not have the ability to be refreshed from naturally giving true love.
Then people find themselves depleted. This pattern of people who are immature in relationships raising immature people has multiplied ever since the disastrous interruption of the love relationships of parents, spouses children and siblings in the Garden of Eden.
Reverend Moon has said, “The Fall was initiated when one person claimed self-centered love.
The one who proclaims love centered on himself, they deny the value of all other relationships in his desire to make himself the center of the universe.
Such a person seeks to bring benefit only to himself, and the disease began when this desire entered ther ealm of love.
The first parents were thus cut off from God and from one another and started a negative pattern from their brokenness and immaturity.
We see these patterns continue and proliferate to this day.
People who are not able to fulfill the earlier realms of heart, they must perform the later realms of heart and do so badly.
Psychotherapist Arthur Janov writes, “The major reason I have found that children become neurotic is that their parents are busy struggling with unmet infantile needs of their own . . . In this way the sins of the parents are visited on the children in a seemingly never ending cycle.”
The family needs great infusions of God’s love in order to repair the brokenness and restore health.
A society that had families who exhibited true love, this would be a world of peace and harmony – a true Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
Religious history has been one of God and humankind desperately seeking to repair and restore the original love relationships where individuals, families and societies from. Thus, they can be healed and made whole.
Therefore, it is important to understand how the four realms of heart in the family work and need mending.
Return for Tomorrow's Post: Importance of Children Growing in Love
This post was rewritten and derived from the religious textbook “Educating for True Love” which was written by a team of writers to explain the philosophy of Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
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