Happy Father’s Day 2021!
This Father’s Day, June 20, we’re celebrating all the dads and father figures out there and wishing you a wonderful holiday! Our very own True Father, the late Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon, was a father to the world.
As co-founder of Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU), Rev. Moon’s message of peace and unity as one human family under God penetrated millions of hearts around the globe. Let us remember Rev. Moon’s peacebuilding legacy of true love, embracing our parents, our siblings, and our brothers and sisters worldwide as a global family centered on God, our Heavenly Parent.
Below is an excerpt from Rev. Moon’s 2009 autobiography, As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen, from the Chapter One subsection, “What I Learned about Peace While Being Carried on My Father’s Back.”
As a child, I thought of the meadows as my home… I would often fall asleep in the hills after playing there. My father would be forced to come find me. When I heard my father shouting in the distance… I couldn’t help but smile, even as I slept. The sound of his voice would awaken me, but I would pretend to still be asleep. He would hoist me onto his back and carry me home. That feeling I had as he carried me down the hill—feeling completely secure and able to let my heart be completely at ease—that was peace. That is how I first learned about peace, while being carried on my father’s back.
The reason I loved the forest was also because all the peace in the world dwells there. Creatures in the forest do not fight each other. Of course, they eat one another and are eaten, but that is because they are hungry and need to sustain themselves. They do not fight out of enmity. Birds do not hate other birds. Animals do not hate other animals. Trees do not hate other trees. There needs to be an absence of enmity for peace to come. Human beings are the only ones who hate other members of the same species. People hate other people because their country is different, their religion is different, or their way of thinking is different…
I have dedicated my life to building bridges of peace between countries that hate each other and became enemies because of ideology or religion. From the time I was old enough to know what was going on in the world, there has been only one objective for my life: that is for the world to live in peace, as one…
The truth of the universe is that we must acknowledge each other and help each other. Even the smallest animals know this. Cats and dogs do not get along, but if you raise them in the same household, they embrace each other’s offspring and are friendly toward each other. We see the same thing in plants. The vine that winds its way up a tree depends on the trunk to support it… The principle of the universe is for everyone to live together, for the sake of one another. Anyone who deviates from this principle faces certain ruin.
I have lived my life without ever letting go of that hope and have always kept alive the dream of peace… To heal a world where there is no hope, and which is lacking in love, we need to go back to the pure hearts that we had as children. To shed our desire to possess ever-increasing amounts of material wealth and restore our beautiful essence as human beings, we need to go back to the principles of peace and the breadth of love that we learned as we were being carried on our fathers’ backs.
You can buy a copy of Rev. Moon’s autobiography here.
