Sunday, February 3, 2013
7 Days of Holy Sex Day 3 - Responsibility of Sexual Love
The uninhibited freedom that spouses may enjoy in conjugal relations and its abundant beauty and goodness are derived from the fulfillment of responsibility that marriage represents. Sexual love like any other aspect of true love means it is dedicated for the sake of others.
Who are the “others” to whom lovers are responsible? There are three principal focuses of responsibility: to one’s conscience and Creator, to one’s present or future spouse, and to one’s existing or future children. Let us explore each briefly.
Three Responsibilities of Sexual Love
Responsibility to the Conscience
The first responsibility is to be true to one’s conscience, that which helps direct the expression of our heart’s desire to find joy through love. Being responsible to the conscience encompasses several aspects.
It of course represents living by the moral truths regarding the larger meaning of sexuality. It is honoring the sacredness of one’s heart and body, and the power of sexuality to merge these with another’s. It is respecting the gifts of love, life and lineage and the potential of sexuality to enhance or compromise these gifts.
Ultimately these represent veneration of God. In addition, respecting the conscience encompasses responsibility to the individual’s parents, grandparents, clan and ancestors and to the larger clan and community.
One aspect is upholding the family honor. “I’ve gone a little farther than I intended to sometimes,” Cal, 21, admits. “But my fiancée and I have basically held the line at just holding hands. Partly it would be against what I believe in, that lovemaking is for marriage. But partly I’d be ashamed in front of my parents.
My father’s first and only woman was my mother and he was pure and inexperienced when he married my Mom. It was the same with my grandparents. Dad once told me he had been really tempted one time during his marriage, but one reason he didn’t give in was because he did not want to set that kind of example for me. Times are a lot different than they were for my father, but I still feel I want to uphold my family’s principles.”
Another aspect is acting in a way that ensures that one’s sexuality is a force that blesses one’s community and nation and not the opposite. Clearly there is a public dimension to the private sexual act.
The possibility of conceiving children who become partly the responsibility of the community, the legal and other ramifications of the devastations to families wrought by extramarital affairs, the link between sexual morality and all other morality—these and many other reasons mean that, in the words of ethicist Raymond J. Lawrence, “what happens in any bedroom is always potentially the business of the whole human family.”
Furthermore, being responsible to the conscience involves the determination to achieve maturity of heart and character, to become a person of sufficient mind and body unity to be worthy of the privilege of sexual love and able to fulfill its other two responsibilities. It follows that if we compromise our chastity in any way, that we heed our conscience in making amends and rededicating ourselves to the original standard.
Responsibility to the Present or Future Spouse
This second responsibility of sexual love recognizes the obligations of a lasting marriage. The potential for conjugal love is destroyed if shared with anyone besides the spouse.
For married couples, this responsibility means a commitment to cherish and care for their husband or wife and dedicate their heart and sexual expression to them alone. This is preserving trust—the bedrock of love—by being faithful to each other.
For single people, this means to be mindful of their future husband or wife and practice fidelity to them in advance. “I imagine it’s my future wife,” explains a high school student about an empty picture frame near his bed.
“I’ve had it there since I was 13, and I sometimes write letters to her when I get lonely. When my friends tell stories of fooling around with their girlfriends and I start to feel left out, I think about my future wife and how I want to save the excitement for her.”
Responsibility to Existing or Potential Children
Entering into sexual union implies this third responsibility, the commitment to the possible fruits—a new person, with longstanding material and spiritual needs. The parents have a responsibility to lovingly nurture to maturity the child they have chosen to help create.
This is a right that children fervently claim; how many cling to even neglectful or abusive parents rather than come under another’s care? Without the sincere shouldering of this responsibility, parents do their children and their society a grave disservice. A loving marriage is the most secure foundation for the nurturing of a child. There is little in social science that has been more repeatedly demonstrated.
Children not only want and need the attention of both of their parents, but they also naturally long for their parents to love each other and to be together. This is not only for their physical and emotional nurturing but also as an affirmation of their identity and value. Children want to know that they were born of enduring love. Thus, marriage is the most worthy anchor for the lineage being created.
Furthermore, it passes on a sound legacy and a healthy tradition for the descendants to inherit, imitate and build upon. “As a father of four,” says author Daniel Gray, “I am reaping the dividends [of investments made] years earlier when I heard and put into practice the message of abstinence before marriage,” a key dividend being his moral authority in guiding his children.
All children deserve to be proud of the quality of love that conceived and raised them.
These three responsibilities of sexual love encompass the deep dimensions of sexuality: The first to conscience, the second to love and the third to life and lineage. Only the practice of committed, lifelong, mutually faithful monogamy and purity before marriage can
fulfill these three inherent responsibilities. This is reflected in the words of one young adult, a male virgin, who gave these common sense conditions for beginning a sexual relationship: “a willingness to spend a lifetime with my partner and/or the children we create.” Such a standard allows the nurturing and cohesive power of love to bind individuals, families, and ultimately a society together in
strength and safeguard their futures.
Return for Tomorrow's Post:
This text was rewritten and derived from the Textbook: True Love, Chapter "The Meaning of Sexuality".
Saturday, February 2, 2013
God's Ideal True Family
The father represents heaven and the wife represents earth. The children represent all of humankind.
The family represents the sovereign of the nation with the father like the present of the family;that means he must take responsibility for upholding all of the laws and orderliness of the family. In this respect, he is in the position of the judge that distinguishes what is right or wrong in the family. The mother is the lawyer and the law itself is the prosecutor.
Law was created because of selfishness and is important to uphold the country. After the fall, if humanity unceasingly was disobedient without those who upheld God's law like Moses who obtained the 10 commandments, society would cease to exist. Likewise, within each family, there should be certain standard and laws which are upheld and enforced by the father. That is one of the father's responsibilities.
"There is a great distance today between this original standard and the reality of today's families. Young people in many families deny that they need the guidance of their parents. What those children are actually saying is, "I don't care about the past or the future; I only care about now." That is animalistic."
Grandparents represent the past, the parents represent the present and children represent the future. Therefore these three time periods must unite into one for the betterment of all of mankind.
Throughout the ages, there have been revolutions in areas of economics and politics, but there can never be a revolution of heart within the heart of a family. Love is eternal and unchanging and thus is beyond revolution. Children grow up in love of their parents, but leave the home for the sake of a higher love or ideal. When parents love their children, the children must eventually return to their parents.
Before you stand as a completed individual of ideal love, you must experience three generations of love: grandparents, parents and the love of brothers and sisters. These are the three purposes of love.
To qualify as an ideal family, the husband and wife should live for the sake of the past, and future. If they live just for the present they only have a horizontal connection and no vertical connection. Here is a simple question, do you need your mother and father-in-law no matter how old and crippled they become/. Do your children respect and love their grandparents who represent the past?
The most important human connection is the vertical rather than the horizontal because it is the basis of the universe. Love comes to mankind from the vertical, position, from above. Thus the first direction of love is vertical and then the horizontal direction comes into existence.
This explains why we value our grandparents. Everyone has heard tales of their grandparents certain experience or two and learned from the elderly about lives that the grandchildren would not know about without their grandparents.Whom should a person love first-his spouse or his grandparents? He should love those in the vertical direction. Two people love each other horizontally, but they must always reconnect to that vertical relationship. Thus their love can flow downward to their children and create one complete cycle. The husband and wife should love each other with all their heart; then together they love their parents and their children.
We see couples divorcing more and more each day and children divorcing their parents, but who has heard of parents divorcing their children?
Why is that?
The love of parent and child is more fundamental than the love of a spouse. The love between parent and child is along the vertical line which connects each person to God. The first question that arises when a couple thinks about divorce is who will have custody of the children.
Western civilization must take heed of this truth that the ideal couple loves each other and their children, but they must also have love for their very own parents as much no matter how old they become.
This fulfills the original ideal God planned for creation. The nation is basically a collection of families in which all the generations are included. Each extended family symbolizes one small country.
Unless a nation establishes their families with the proper center, that civilization will perish. Look at the Roman empire and many nations, they all began to crumble with the breakdown of the family unit. Wars did not destroy that civilization, immoral acts and self-centeredness instead of God-centered did. Because the law of the universe will not allow an unlawful citizen without subject to change to exist for very long.
This is why we say the family is the textbook of love. It is how a peoples learn about the ideal family and ideal nation. Once this is accomplished in one country, that country becomes the textbook for the ideal world. Then the ideal world becomes the textbook for the ideal universe, thus we have four textbooks with the family as the basic one. In order to have a world of peace, each family member should love one another and completely devote themselves for the sake of their children and their own parents.
You must make your family one which is loved and approved by all those around you-your parents must approve and your children must appreciate it. That is when the man actually becomes the "president" of his family, which is a micro-country.
How can a president run a country full of lawbreakers? God meant for the world to be governed not by direct civil laws, but by love. One philosopher said that one who enforces strict laws on their people when they are about to do something evil, otherwise, love is enough.
"Thus the directions of up and down, left and right and front and rear must remain connected harmoniously to the couple."
Then as much as you appreciate your own family, you should respect other families, so in this way, the nation of families interconnect to create one peaceful nation.
How can a peaceful nation begin?
To begin to love your nation and world, you must first love the people in your immediate surroundings, love your distant relatives, and then branch out your heart of love further and further until you can love each person within the nation.
To beginning this task, you must focus on learning to love all of your relatives. Once you master loving all the different personalities of you relatives, you can then travel to any nation, any part of the world and love anyone there.
This is the basic qualification of any president of any nation. It is said that a woman who has 12 children learning to love the 12 different personalities that represent all of humankind, she can become perfect.
This principle will stretch to govern the whole world and a king that rules over the world can be possible if he has such a level of love. Then this standard will spread throughout spirit world and all of the cosmos.
This standard sounds simple, but how can you find hope in a world of peace that connects to thousands of generations from thousands years ago if we can not find the unity with our own parents or grandparents.
This path is very difficult on just the individual level within the family. Then we have to expand to the level of the world and be able to love nations and races of people. After this, we must accomplish on the level of the universe, love beyond time-past, present and future within your realm.
This principle will apply in the future.
All of these levels begin with one individual who obtains this knowledge by observing the love within their family, how their parents, siblings and grandparents interact. Is this possible to have a world of peace beginning with one individual in a family? The ideal was to have Adam and Eve populate the entire universe centered in oneness with God.
Then through the passage of time, they would populate the earth through their good descendants and eventually all of spirit world would fill up with their ancestors. Adam's and Eve's family and country would be God's direct family and country sharing in complete oneness of blood lineage without a trace of sin.
Earth was supposed to be the place where Adam's descendants would have ruled according to Adam's tradition. Such a world would have been Heaven on Earth. Do you understand the reality of Heaven on Earth now?
Every human has an innumerable amount of ancestors and when we pass to spirit world, we are bound to rest where our ancestors are. When they enter the spirit world, their ancestors will judge them using their own standard. How does one surpass the level of judgement from their own ancestors?
That qualification comes through the standard from within your own family. The Messiah returns in the last days to bring about the standard of a true family, society, nation and world and guides us toward Heaven on Earth.
Return for Tomorrow's Post: Qualification For Marriage
This text was rewritten and taken from the Speech: Ideal Family and Ideal World.
Friday, February 1, 2013
True Love Does Not Fall
"To fall is to lose the center of vertical love and horizontal love. That's why conjugal love in the fallen world is so unstable. Conjugal love these days can be turned around 180 degrees by one word.
That is the fallen reality. That shows that people don't know where conjugal love should aim. The reason that the world is heading toward destruction is that the order of conjugal love has broken apart."
As a couple, you should be luminous and shine like the sun and the full moon in their principled orbit. Do not be like the sun or the moon covered in dark clouds in a dark cosmos.
Heaven is looking for a couple which can represent heaven and earth and whose heart is filled with passionate love. You should leave a legacy of love and raise your children in the atmosphere of such conjugal love.
Be a Couple of Parental Heart That is God's Fence
Economic difficulties cannot crack the affinity of husband and wife. Educational background cannot blur conjugal love. A wife may think that her husband should study a certain field more, but Father doesn't think so.
Love of husband and wife can fill what is lacking. A wife may think that her husband needs to get a degree or become a doctor to become the best husband. This is not Father's thinking. The economic down turn of a nation will not crack the affinity of husband and wife and their educational background will not blur conjugal love.
Conjugal love is the oneness of the love of man and the love of woman.
Conjugal love then should become one with the children's love and then become one with God's love. God's love dwells where the perfect conjugal love begins.
When a husband and wife are live with God and humankind as their center and are about to explode in love, God and the universe will claim and possess that family. This type of love does not begin with the man or woman - its origin is God's love.
When doves are in love, you hear them say, "coo, coo". How does a couple in love sound? When two people who are in deep love meet each other, the sound will be much bigger than that of thunder!
If we have strong love centered upon God, opposition and persecution from the world will be something interesting to play with. "First love" possesses enormous power, like dynamite. Did Adam and Eve live together without getting married, as is the practice of the young people in this age?
True love is the first the last and the eternal. When Adam and Eve experienced their first love, were they married or practice fallen free love as the young people of this age?
God wants a couple to love each other intimately and with passion. When your mind wants to pursue such idealistic love, it will be the driving force to help you push through any difficulties and win over anything including Satan when we are in love.
A spouse filled with true love will love with the oneness of body, heart and blood lineage. Who loves like that? Only the husband and wife can perpetuate this ideal. With a love like this, can a spouse have a fulfilling life when apart from their spouse?
Your spouse is the most lovely object in the world and your relationship as a couple resembles an echo. Your spouse will live and behave according to how you sound and behave. This may be difficult to hear when a spouse seems to be acting poorly toward another.
This is partly why Father Moon believes that through inter-cultural and interracial marriages, the world can become one. What grandfather would bomb the country where his grandchildren reside?
Passionate love outside the holy union of God has been the downfall of many nations and leaders. To keep all the love for the spouse, bachelors and virgins are warned not to even touch each other's hands before marriage. This is to love 100%.
When one keeps all of their love before marriage, they will be able to give this to their spouse wholeheartedly. With a love this passionate, even when a couple is far apart, they will find themselves moving toward each other automatically.
We must correct the mistake of our first ancestors who loved passionately before they were blessed in marriage by God. Afterward, humanity's mind and body contradicted each other. God has used religion to help us correct this problem.
Once we make the mind the subject over our body;s many ungodly wants, then we should make a circular relationship where God can dwell in our mind.
When a man and woman whose mind and body are united enter into the Marriage Blessing directly given by God, they will live giving and receiving perfect love and happiness. This harmonized couple will resemble a flower in full bloom and emanate a beautiful fragrance to God. For thousands of years, God has longed for such a couple.
"God can dwell only in the love of a husband and wife; all things and the universe should be harmonized centering upon that love. The Unification Church is the place for teaching this content."
God's favorite melody is the joyous laughing of a couple in love. When a couple lives with the mind to embrace the whole universe, laughter is produced automatically. Isn't the loving life of a such a couple a beautiful flower in God's sight? This is not a mere ideal or something abstract;this is how the original world was supposed to be.
What is God's favorite melody?
It is the joyous sound of laughter of a couple in love. When a couple lives with the mind to embrace the whole universe, laughter is produced automatically. Isn't the loving life of a such a couple a beautiful flower in God's sight? This is not a mere ideal or something abstract;this is how the original world was supposed to be. A couple becomes united in oneness when they have they desire to accomplish the purpose of the universe as the most significant aspect of life.
When a couple speak, they speak centered upon their mind, personality and love. This makes them equal, correct? If a woman from the country with only an elementary school education marries a king, the people of the nation bow to the wife. Husband and wife go the same way;the wife's love is the wife's love is the husband's love and the husband's love is the wife's love.
When a man laughs, his eyes open wide, and when the women laughs her eyes gently close. The husband and wife's laughter is relative and they become more intoxicated in love.
A couple shouldn't unilaterally desire their spouse's face to remain in a fixed shape. If they remain fixed, each will become really tired of looking at the other. When you look at your spouse with a joyful heart, he or she will look joyful; and when you look at your spouse with a beautiful heart, he or she will look beautiful. Feel your spouse's face anew with every new stimulation.
A husband and wife are happy when they give and receive love with each other. If the husband was to strike his wife, there is no happiness. On the contrary, when a man loves with his loving heart with his physical power, the woman feels complete happiness. When the wife returns her love physically and spiritually to the man, they become a truly happy couple.
When a man loves a woman, the women will feel true happiness. this love is not produced by energy alone or fulfilled by heart alone.
Because human beings were created to always need stimulation, happiness cannot be established without it.
When we are starving, our vegetables will taste good and fresh. We can eat the same meal everyday with the same seasoning. In the same way, love should always be fresh and new. As the days pass their love grows, the husband and wife should miss each other day by day. We do this by studying and researching ourselves and God.
A married couple might have to think hard to the time before when they were single. The girl felt like she didn't need a man, but once she was enraptured in love in her married life, she could not live without him. Through this ownership of love, she sees that her husband is much more precious than herself.
Where does True Happiness come from?
Families these days are bogged down by the demands of their lives. When a family centers their love upon God, and they can see the joyous God working in their lives, then true happiness is generated. In God's original ideal when He was creating, making love between husband and wife was not something in which o be ashamed. He created love to be the noblest, holiest and most beautiful thing in all creation. The beginning of this reversal in love began with our first ancestor who sin by misusing God's love.
There are now 7 billion men and women in the world, but husband and wife should think that their spouse is the only one in existence. This is Principle that a couple totally invests themselves in their spouse alone. Would a couple who thinks this way, stray toward another person or wish for a better spouse?
The value of love lies in longing.
When you actively initiate love by asking for love with your mouth and your eyes, then your spouse will be happy to pour their love to you in return or else he would run away. Wouldn't a spouse feel bad if their spouse was only passive or not serious in love? We always want to be together with our lover because it feels good to be close and when we are together, everything functions simultaneously. We can see God's love and investment through a couple such as this.
Which love is better, the love where two people shout in a crowded room, "love you" or the couple that expresses their love silently. Deep love kept silent within the heart of a couple is very precious.
Here in America, love is active while in the Oriental culture love is internal. Waves are high in shallow water and gentle in the deeper part of the ocean. The waves of love also get quieter in depth, so in this sense, invisible love is more precious than visible love.
What about God? What would happen if he was a walking, visible God? Every nation would fight even more wars just to possess such a limited being within their boundaries. Fortunately, God is invisible which is the most precious. Because God dwells inside our invisible mind, nobody can steal him from us.
What if love was visible?
It would be no fun. Invisible love is the greatest love of among all love. Because love is invisible like God, it can be the highest, widest, and deepest. Love is compared to the Rocky Mountains and the Niagara Falls to describe love's deep, rugged qualities.
"The invisible God is precious because invisible love is precious."
In order to find God, we must get rid of our ego and become absolute zero in front of God without our own agenda. God lives deeply within the realm of the invisible world and in the visible world which we live.
An Oriental husband and wife stare at each other before kissing and they shyly drop their eyes. This scene can compare to a great masterpiece in any museum. Also, the scene of the wife carrying the briefcase for her husband just before they leave for a business trip. An American wife barely will leave the room or turn her head to see her husband off before he leaves. Therefore, Orientals who are aware of the Western life style don't want to get married to an American woman.
The conversation of a loving couple is much more beautiful than any poem or any picture in the world. How beautiful words are, such as "between lovers," "between ourselves," or "you and me"!
When God blesses human beings, He creates the environment for the couple to be happy. The couples who enter the door of such blessing don't fight with each other right away. After entering the door of love, they are busy exchanging whispers such as, "I've been waiting to meet you for a long time. My life will bloom with the flowers of value through you. I was born to love you and waited to love you until now." There is nothing sweeter than the confidential talk of love.
God creates an environment in which a couple can be happy when he blesses them together. A couple united in this love will not fight with each other right away, but will be happy and be appreciative for such a spouse. This type of couple will tell one another how they have longed to meet them and how their life will bloom in value through them. They will say, "I was born to love you and waited to love you until now."
"Their is nothing sweeter than the confidential talk of love."
The married couple's whispering of love is the most effective refrigerant to cool off all the fatigue and the hatred in the world.
A couple shouldn't demand love forcibly from each other. Love is natural, so the confidential talk of love is soft and beautiful.
Before marriage a man looks creepy and scary to a wife, but the woman's heart quickly changes after marriage. After knowing this love, she would gratefully take a nap in her husband's bosom. Such a woman will do whatever it takes to be with her husband as much as possible and ask him to come home for lunch.
Likewise, a man after knowing love, wants to sleep on his wife's lap whenever he finds leisure time, so he rushes right home at a coffee break or at lunch time. After marriage, he can do whatever the wife wants without a moment's hesitation -- even things that he formerly considered totally belonging to women. This is the typical change which takes place in a married couple with true love centered on God.
Return for Tomorrow's Post: God's Ideal True Family
This text was rewritten from speech given by Reverend Sun Myung Moon who is the founder of the Unification Church.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)