The immense value of the family – it sets the pattern for living together in harmony
The reason we miss the family we have left behind is because at home there is love for one another. It is where the love of mother and father, the love of elder brothers and sisters and younger siblings, and the love of one’s spouse and children and close neighbors are all deeply embedded. It is a place of mutual affection, where all the relationships and affinities are brought together through mutual love.
This makes you want to cherish each and every member of your family. It is the yearning and desire of any wanderer who has left his family behind to boldly re-appear before his family once again as a liberated being, and to embrace mountains, streams and trees, love his relatives and countrymen, and sing songs of ecstasy.
However, the situation of humankind descended from the Fall, has been different: banished from their original heavenly hometown and destined to wander around in isolation and defeat, human beings are unable ever to go back, no matter how much they miss their family, for they have lost the root of the heart of their original homeland.
However, with the ushering in of the era of a new heaven and a new earth, human beings have been pulled out of the swamp that was sucking them down, and the way has been opened for them to return to their hometowns – hometowns that they could not forget even for a moment – and meet with their true family. Could there ever be a day of greater blessing for humanity?
The time of heavenly power and fortune has now come, making it possible for us to reestablish the original family that was lost through the Fall of Adam and Eve.
[…] God will dwell in such a family. That family would be one of three generations – grandparents, parents, and children – living in harmony. Parents and children will serve and attend to the grandparents because they represent the family’s ancestors and their historical roots.
The family sets the pattern for living together in harmony. The family wherein parents and children love and respect each other, husband and wife are grounded in mutual trust and love, brothers and sisters trust and rely on each other, and all live together as one is the model ideal family.
This means that you need to establish a true family wherein the stem of true love emerges from the root of true love and bears the fruit of true love. Such families contain the living root of history and the roots of the kingdom of heaven. In such families, the kingdom of heaven on earth takes root. They are the soil in which God’s everlasting kingship is firmly planted.
The grandparents, parents, and children represent the roots of the past, present, and future, respectively. The root of the past represents the spirit world; the root of the present is the palace representing the world today; and the root of the future establishes the grandsons and granddaughters as princes and princesses.
Through such a family, we erect the palace of peace, representing the harmony of the two worlds, the spirit world and the physical world. In this manner, the three generations of grandparents, parents, and grandchildren should live together as one family, serving the eternally existent God. […]
You should form families that God will miss and yearn to return to after He has been away. You should raise families to which He can come freely as a parent visiting His children. This is what it means to live in service to God.
To such a family, God becomes the subject of our conscience, acting vertically. Following that vertical subject, your mind stands in the position of the vertical subject of yourself and brings your mind and body into unity.
That is where parental love, conjugal love, children’s love, and siblings’ love – in short, the four realms of love or the four realms of heart – are perfected. Only in such a family can the upper and lower, front and back, left and right be connected as one, and spherical motion ensue.
This leads to God’s everlasting model ideal families and nations and His peace kingdom.
(“The Value of the Family” is an excerpt from Peace Message 2, delivered by Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han in March 2006 and on a global speaking tour to 180 nations the same year.)
More about the immense value of the family from the Peace Messages
Even more about the value of the family: Family values
