X-Sender: leby@nova
To: global-village-inn@kids.geo.ukans.edu
Subject: GVI Reflections on Recent Events


Some reflections on recent events and changes:

1. For now, the change from "Unification Church" to "Family
Federation for World Peace and Unification" seems to be a
distinction without a difference. All the previous offices,
officers, roles, ideologies, and functions seem to continue more-
or-less as before.

The change is, however, potentially most significant, and I,
for one, welcome it. For one thing, I never much liked the UC,
and I hope that a family movement or organization will supplant
the church.

As you no doubt know, some scholar remarked that Jesus came
promising the kingdom of heaven (that too is problematic and
scary -- kingdoms are inherently objectionable, regardless of who
is king -- but that's another topic), but what people got instead
was the Christian church. Church is a form of community centered
on religion or religious ideology and religious officers, and
those all have many problems and limitations, even though they
had virtues and were necessary for a time. A family, however,
does not need an ideology nor officers -- it may need an
(implicit) mission statement and certain principles of
organization and behavior, and it needs parents. But the roles of
the mission statement and the parents and the children in a
family are much more plastic and variable than they can ever be
in a church. In a good family, these necessarily change over
time. It is much more difficult for a church to countenance such
changes.

A confederation of families is, I think, also necessarily a
more democratic arrangement than a church. I don't think Tolstoy
was correct (in *Anna Karenina*) when he said that all happy
families are alike, although there may be important similarities
between happy families. A family is one of those mediating
institutions, between the individual and the larger polis; a
church tends to function like a mini-state, and tends toward
coerciveness. Families may be coercive too, but, at best, they
are not, at least in the long run (young children are coerced
into good behavior by good families, but this role ends when the
children leave their parents' home). But even at their best,
churches cannot escape their totalitarian and coercive character.

2. The move from church to family federation, and the opening up
of the Blessing to anyone who will receive it, regardless of
faith or belief, means that the denominational and exclusivistic
character of what was formerly the UC will fade away (whether
gradually or quickly remains to be seen), I believe. Even now,
when someone asks you what church you belong to, what can you
say? If there is no Unification Church anymore, then there cannot
be Unification Church members, no? And if all who receive the
Blessing receive equal merit -- and I believe they do so -- then
what special status or merit can long-time Unification members
claim for themselves? It would seem that the answer is: none. I,
for one, welcome that outcome.

There is the problem of seeming unfairness. Those who worked
all day in the heat -- and maybe got beat up, dissed, and/or lost
their health, lost opportunities for education, etc. -- seemingly
get the same pay as those who got there just a few minutes before
closing time. Is this fair? It depends, I think, on your notion
of fairness. If fairness means equal pay for equal work, then it
isn't fair. But if fairness means equal ability of all --
regardless of circumstances, faith or other conditions -- to
receive God's equal Blessing, then it's fair. It seems to me that
the latter notion is the one that operates here (as it does in
Jesus's parable of the workers in the vineyard).

It is a fact that those of us who joined the UC some time
ago and received the Blessing earlier had to work and sacrifice
so much more than those who are being Blessed now, and that seems
unfair. But it's also unfair that some children are born poor and
without significant life prospects in Rwanda or Haiti, while
others are born to wealth and good prospects in America or
Western Europe; there's absolutely nothing that can be done about
that, at least for now. So, in a way, you can think that we were
all born in Rwanda.

Yet, who can say with any certainty what his life trajectory
would have been had he continued on without meeting the
Unification Movement and the Divine Principle? For myself, at
least, I doubt that I would have had the educational
opportunities and experience, and the religious and theological
training and teaching, that the UM provided. In addition the UM
provided a wealth of other experiences and opportunities. Now,
for example, I have met and conversed with presidents and
ambassadors, with university presidents, with finance experts,
with journalists, and also with people at the lowest end of the
social scale. I have something useful to converse about with all
of them. But, in comparison with the level of conversation and
interest I find that I share with many of those who have gone
through the experience of being UM members, the conversations and
interests of most other people seem frequently trivial and arid.
There is a horizon of knowledge, interests, and abilities that I
now have that I doubt I would have acquired apart from my
membership in the UM. So, I think at least I have to admit that
there have been compensations for all the horrible stuff that
came from and because of the UM. Each other person will have to
decide for himself whether there were sufficient compensations.

3. I myself am very glad that the Blessing is now open to all who
will receive it, regardless of their knowledge, training, or
whatever, and that every Blessed couple is empowered to give the
Blessing. I know that some people feel differently, thinking that
it should be reserved only for those who have at least some
understanding of its value and significance. Some people seem to
think that the K of H will come about mostly through education
and training. I guess that I think otherwise -- I think it must
needs come primarily by divine action: divine magic.

In any case, can those of us who received the Blessing at
any previous time really say that we knew much if anything about
what was happening to us? I don't think so. So why should any
previous recipient feel that it is being cheapened or made
trivial when it is now being given so seemingly indiscriminately?

I think that the DP account of the Fall of man is more-or-
less objectively true (although I think that God was 95%
responsible, and that the other actors in the drama were 5%
responsible -- to carry forward the DP metaphor, consistently,
into that problem too) and that the solution is effected
primarily through the Blessing. I think that the Blessing works
to effect an ontological change in the person(s) who receive it,
whether they are aware of any change taking place or not. So the
present dispensation for the Blessing represents, I think, a
change to a more Protestant notion of salvation by grace, instead
of salvation by education and training, which was, I think, the
previous UM notion and the notion that many UM members still seem
to hold.

To be sure, behavior will need to change. But here I think
it is useful to refer to the nature/nurture controversy in
psychology. I think that although both are crucailly important,
nature is paramount and that nurture is secondary -- nature
trumps nurture. (The Marxists had it the other way around, as do
almost all other socialists -- which is why so many people still
cling to the notion of nurture as paramount.) The ability to
receive and profit from nurture depends on nature, and nature can
sometimes make its way without nurture, while the other is not
true. No amount of training can make a person untalented in and
unsuited to music into a Mozart, while a Mozart emerged
spontaneously almost without the aid of much training.

As DP shows, the entire history of restoration is primarily
concerned with the problem of creating an untainted lineage.
Also, this is why Jesus said that in order to be saved people
must be born again. (This is an un-Jewish notion of salvation, at
least as I understand Judaism, and it is also an Un-Islamic one,
at least as I understand Islam.) Whether they know it or not,
people are born again through the Blessing, more so than was ever
possible in Christianity.

Now, if you insist on doing so, you can say that this is the
Achilles heel of Unificationism: because Unificationism both
promises and requires that salvation be achievable in the
physical world, which means that it must be made visible, it
shows itself to be fraudulent, because success is visibly absent
-- it has not created anything which could be reasonably called a
heavenly world. You can also say, as some do, that the observable
failure of many of the children of Rev. and Mrs. Moon to
demonstrate any noteworthy goodness of life -- in fact, their
demonstrating the opposite -- shows that the UM and, by
implication, Rev. Moon is a failure. But this conclusion does not
necessarily follow. It may turn out that the world will soon
undergo some dramatic and unforeseen change -- just as the fall
of Communism was a dramatic and unforeseen change; unforeseen,
that is, by almost everyone except for Rev. Moon -- and a new
world that can reasonably be called heavenly will emerge. In
other words, I think it is too soon to conclude that Rev. Moon
and the UM are failures because Rev. Moon's children -- some of
them anyway -- have turned out so seemingly badly, or because
many of the people and families who have been members of the UM
for some time are so unhappy.

4. One problem with the demise of the Unification Church -- if it
actually does die, as it should -- is that of having something
for children. Perhaps some form of Sunday School will be
necessary for a long time, and maybe some form of a Sunday
Service too. But it would be much better if it were organized by
families, without a pastor or Unification Church official taking
charge. If the pastor or FFWPU official(s) were really an
employee of and responsible to families, this would make things
very different and much better, I think.

5. The demise of the UC also raises the problem of the status of
the Unification Theological Seminary. I see several possible
roles for such an institution, although it may now need a
different name. In any case, it's strange -- I'd say goofy -- to
try to preserve it as a denominational seminary, since the
denomination is now presumably defunct. (1) Research in and
critical examination of received Unification Doctrine, the
speeches of Rev. Moon, Unification Thought, and so on. This could
be done both by adherents of those doctrines and by those who are
non-adherents. To the extent that these doctrines, speeches, etc
are good and true, that will emerge in the course of critical
examination. To the extent they are untrue or indefensible, they
should be exposed as such. Doing this would require extensive
knowledge of Unification texts and doctrines, as well as of
cognate and competitive texts and doctrines from all the world's
religions and philosophies. This would make the institution a
truly unificationist one, rather than a denominational training
center. (2) Training young people who wish to become pastors or
officials of FFWPU in pastoral, administrative, and counseling
skills. These people would then serve at the pleasure of
federations of families who wish to hire them as their pastors,
counselors, or administrators. In this case, a seminary graduate
would become a pastor of a group of families who hire him/her to
minister to them, much as ministers are now hired by many
Protestant congregations. (3) Research and training in family-
building and family-counseling. This would require a great deal
of critical knowledge and training in all the received methods
and ideologies in this field.

I think any attempt to make the institution into something
committed to being a training school for Unification faith and
doctrine -- to faith-building and doctrine-holding -- in its
students is unworthy and should be discarded, and any people on
the administration and staff there who see this as their primary
mission are failing to do what they should be doing.

Maybe a good name change would be something like the "Family
Federation Seminary." (I suggest that the word "Theological"
should be dropped from the name -- it's too restrictive.)

Lloyd Eby