Sun Myung Moon
Modern life is ripe with ambiguity, pain and a lot of disappointment.
All people enter the world with a hope to have fulfilling relationships, happiness, and a meaningful and rewarding role in work and society. This path can be called the 'true way of life”.
This path is not easily founded. It requires the same amount of lessons that are taught in school. Schools successfully teach students knowledge necessary for a successful career. But even with a six-figure income, a person's life can be for naught if they fail to have lasting relationships and have healthy families.
The youth today have high hopes to have love and happiness in their marriage and their families. But they are left feeling incapable of living in the harmony they once dreamed.
Then pessimism sets in about have a good family relationship, and many youth expect to follow the pattern of “Marry. Divorce. Marry again.”
Thus, as a result, the modern lifestyle has left the natural human longing for community in shambles.
Neighbors rarely look after the other and are often cold and distant. Neighbors tell one another that just want to live in peace and rarely take the steps to foster a genuine community of mutual help.
Instead, when problems arise, citizens blame one another or the politicians.
When there are problems with the children at school, the parents blame the teachers and the teachers blame the parents.
Can a community really live in peace where there are a knowing of others who are suffeing? These concerns of conscience are drowned by the thought that the less fortunate are not as meritorious, hard-working or deserving. This smug self assurance incline others to not help the less fortunate.
On the national level, partisanship divides national policy; racism abounds, corruption festers, and issues seem unsolvable.
Nations act in their own self-interest instead of the interests of the world community.
Even generous gifts or aid from other countries come with strings attached.
Quarrels between nation spiral into a revenge-retaliation-revenge whirlwind with each side claiming that they are evening the score of past conflict.
Humankind lives in disharmony with their environment. They often take more than is given back ruining delicate ecosystems and sacrificing God's long-term blessings for short-term profits.
Humanity is unable to share with the natural systems that sustains us.
Is there a solution to the worlds problems, or is humanity doomed to wait for the actual end to the world?
Can humanity as a whole live a true way of life that has positive results on every level?
Answers have been sought through philosophy and religion, yet the answers generated there have often created more confusion and conflict.
Also, political and educational programs flounder in half truths and superficial solutions which fail to touch the core of humanity's problems.
In seeking an objective truth, science has tried to dispel the ignorance that pervades human life. All of these efforts have helped the enormously, still goals of curing diseases, improving communication the root of the problems have not been effectively addressed.
Men, women and children have yet felt satisfied a yearning – a hunger – they experience. Something missing.
Writer John Steinbeck described it: “You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields.”
King Solomon wrote how he built majestic palaces and gardens and had a satiable appetite for learning and other accomplishments only to feel that the big void howling inside his soul was yet unfilled. In the end, he wrote, “this too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” Ecclesiastes 2.11
Also, Buddha did not find any gratification as a young prince and left the pleasures of the palace in order to pursue enlightenment.
Satisfaction and fulfillment is always out of reach, just over the horizon, coming tomorrow, or next year or the next.
People think they will finally be satisfied when they hit the lottery or when they make more money or when a person finally loves them.
Yet, they find that when they finally get these things, happiness still eludes them just as mercury slips away from pursuing fingertips.
The Qur’an affirms, “The life of this world is but the comfort of illusion” (3.185).
St. Augustine said that the human heart will always be restless for God until it finds a resting place within Him.
One modern preacher said, “There's a God-sized hole inside of us. No matter how many steaks, electronics, liquor, drugs, entertainment and sex we pour down it, only God can fill this hole.”
To many people God is an abstraction.
To many, God seems like a god of punishment with many rules and demands to follow.
Worse still, is many people of faith have done horrible things in the name of God. There is a lot of terrorist violence, the Inquisition, and the Crusades were all violence falsely done under the use of God's name.
Loyalties to denomination and religions set believers apart rather than bringing them together. Religion has even been seen as a tool of capitalist or colonialist imperialism and exploitation.
When one witnesses all these caveats about religion, how can we say that God is the answer to the universal human longing of having world peace?
The apostle John said, “God is love” (1 John 4.8). What people actually long for is inside and behind God. They want the essence of God, which is thoroughly love. People want to feel and know pure, selfless love. They want that love to pervade all of their relationships and their world.
Such a love of God is the true key to filling filled and fulfilled.
Paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin said, “Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, Love alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest within themselves.
When people have hope in something, wish for something, buy something dream about attaining something, they truly wanting to further their experience of love.
In every relationship, in every action and transaction, all day, every day, people are seeking true love.
This universal need is found in all people at all times under different circumstances and situations.
Mother Teresa stated that people throughout the world may look different or believe in different religions, hold separate positions and have a different education, but they are all same..they all hunger for love.
She said, “The people you see in the streets of Calcutta are hungry in body, but the people in London or New York also have a hunger which must be satisfied. Every person needs to be loved.”
True love is so ultimately valued that it encompasses and informs all other values.
People are drawn to love like bees are drawn to nectar.
Love is the wellspring of value and the standard of all value. It is so ambrosial, satisfying and fulfilling that once have a taste of it, they will not let it go.
If a bee sucks the nectar from a flower, you can try to pull him away, but the bee will not let go, his body will half. He still will never stop sucking the nectar. Selfless love is that delicious.
Return for Tomorrow’s Post: Where is the School of Love?
This post was rewritten and derived from the religious textbook, Educating for True Love, Chapter 1 written by a team of writers to explaining Dr. Rev. Sun Myung Moon's thoughts on morality, society and Family.
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