David Kasbow Acknowledgments M
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
My Life with Rev. Sun Myung Moon My Life with Rev. Sun Myung Moon M David Kasbow Acknowledgments M want to acknowledge the many friends who helped with advice on the I writing and design of this book. Especially, I want to thank Koji Foreman, a nineteen year old young man, wise beyond his years, who asked to read my original draft. To my surprise he sent me many pages of comments and reflec- tions that helped me begin forming a stack of stories into this book as it is today. I am grateful to the members of my church and my family for their patience as I took time away from them to accomplish this account of my life. Finally, I wish that I could personally acknowledge each person, famous or unknown, who throughout history sought God, especially those who were drawn to God when God was doing something new, when the road was not clear, not in line with traditional customs. I give thanks to all of them for creat- ing the incredible spiritual foundation we stand on today. 5 Contents Acknowledgments . .5 Preface . .9 Rev . Moon’s Ministry and Mission . 11 The Mission Unfolds . .14 Gaining Followers . .17 My Early Life . 19 Joining the Church . 24 The Tours . 28 President Nixon . .34 The 32 City Tour . 38 Madison Square Garden . .40 Global Team . .44 Korea . .47 Prayers for Ancestors . 53 Bismarck . .57 Yankee Stadium and Washington Monument . .62 Vermont . 67 6 Mobile Fundraising Teams . .72 Marriage . .79 The Washington Times ................................... 88 Tuna . .95 Unification Theological Seminary . .99 Going Home to Detroit . .103 Seminars in Russia and Ukraine . .107 Shigeko’s Family in Japan . .112 Becoming Pastor . 115 Adopting Our Son . .118 The Role of the Clergy Expands . .124 World Trade Towers . 127 Reconciled in Jerusalem . .131 Sunday in East Garden . .135 The Peace Palace . 139 The International Tour . .143 The Last Tour . .145 Women’s U .N . .151 Losing Father . .154 Foundation Day . .158 PREFACE M am getting older. As I check the news on our church website, I am seeing I reports almost weekly of early members of our unification movement who have passed away, members who I have known and worked with over the years. I think about the value of their lives and our work together. I thought about these early members again when I walked into our church the other day and saw the flags hanging from the ceiling of our social hall. It is not uncommon for churches to have flags displayed. They usually represent the countries where a church has sponsored missions. But ours represent not mission countries but countries where the members of our church were born. In our congregation we have flags from over sixteen nations. The members all have stories of how they joined our movement and found themselves here in America, and how we worked together with Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Yet as I read about those who have passed from this earth, I am not seeing that they have written an account of their lives in this movement. Since I have been blessed to have had a host of experiences following Rev. Moon, experiences in forty-seven of the fifty states, in seven nations as a front- line follower for forty years, I cannot leave without sharing them. This is all the more true now that Rev. Moon himself has passed from this earth. The experiences we had with him as he went through the trials and tribulations of establishing this movement in America and around the world will never be repeated. They are invaluable for our children and for Americans in general to know about. What Americans do know about him comes from the media, but it was 9 My Life with Rev. Sun Myung Moon a media that usually stood against him. Journalists were quick to interview people who disagreed with us. They exaggerated the difficulties our movement went through and blacked out news of the good we did, so much so that a fair picture has been almost impossible to ascertain. They were reporting about my life, and they did not report my life accurately. I never imagined myself as an author; however, Rev. Moon’s autobiography, As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen, changed my mind. As I looked through it, I saw that he wrote it as vignettes of his life. As I read it, I said to myself, “I can do this.” So I am. I dedicate this effort to Rev. Moon who gave me so much and to Mrs. Moon who now leads our movement with a care and concern that Rev. Moon would be proud of. 10 Rev. Moon’s Ministry and Mission M entral to Rev. Moon’s ministry was the pursuit of peace: peace within the C human soul, peace within the family and in the world. From the time he was a child, he longed for it, prayed for it, and sought it. His prayers were answered on an Easter morning when he was just fifteen. Jesus appeared to him and began to guide his way. Jesus visited and taught him for years to impart the knowledge he would need for his future mission. As he was guided, Rev. Moon learned that God had an original plan for a peaceful world. God’s plan, God’s hope, is laid out simply in Genesis 1:28. There, it says that God blessed his children to be “fruitful,” we are to grow and mature to experience God’s heavenly, pure, tender, deep, and intoxicating love as a living reality in our personal lives. And there is more. We are to create families so that we can experience this heavenly love more fully; we are to “multiply.” God longs to participate in and enhance the varieties of love that flow between parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, grandparents and grandchildren, and the other members of the extended family. As the ultimate place where love and peace must dwell, the family is the root of a heavenly culture. The core of Rev. Moon’s ministry cen- tered on revealing the way to create peaceful God-centered families. Further, we are to have “dominion”; we are to create an environment con- ducive to such families. To this end, Rev. Moon fostered a peaceful spiritual environment by seeking harmony between the Christian denominations and 11 My Life with Rev. Sun Myung Moon among the world’s religions. He also sought to integrate the internal world of religion and the external world of science. These things he pursued through an almost infinite variety of conferences, assemblies, seminars, and service projects. To enrich the cultural environment for peaceful, loving families, he devel- oped projects in the arts such as the Little Angels, the Universal Ballet Company, and the New York City Symphony. In sports, he created the World Peace Cup Soccer tournaments. He fostered projects in education, business, the media, and more. To bring the world’s families together, he proposed a system of international highways that would connect the continents. To feed the families of the world, he sought ways to bring food from the ocean. He educated the world on these matters for some seventy years with messages and sermons now recorded in hundreds of volumes. I will touch on these ministries and projects as I encountered them in my life. I will not be going into great detail on their many facets as information can be found in other sources. My aim here is to share my life with Rev. Moon. In order to understand my connection to his life, we have to understand not only that he created ministries and projects but that he had a mission, a mission to vanquish evil, to turn people toward the good, to create peace. It was a duty given to him by God so that the ministries and projects he created could flourish and grow. In order to accomplish this, he had to discover and reverse the evil that our ancestors Adam and Eve unleashed. Rev. Moon led the way, explaining the principles that govern the restoration of goodness and putting them into prac- tice. In this book, I will focus on one of the principles Rev. Moon taught that is central to this process: the principle of Cain and Abel. In the Bible, the book of Genesis tells the story of Cain and Abel, two broth- ers who were sons of Adam and Eve. In the seemingly simple story of enmity in which an elder brother, Cain, kills his younger brother, Abel, we find arche- types of good and evil. We also find a paradigm for human history that helps to explain the rise and fall of peoples, cultures, and nations. We see the elder brother’s eyes looking at us not just from the Garden of 12 Rev. Moon’s Ministry and Mission Eden but throughout history through those of countless murderers. From Cain to Hitler, dictators and thugs have threatened the world as they wielded power. They have mercilessly dominated, plundered, and subdued those around them. And we see the younger brother as well in the eyes of those we call saints. During their lives, saints are usually unrecognized, mistreated, maligned, mis- used, and often forgotten. But in some mysterious way, they are more powerful than Cain nonetheless. We see Cain and Abel today in our cultural psyche: in superhero movies we find the Cain-like Joker against the Abel-like Batman, Darth Vader against Luke Skywalker, the Lizard against Spiderman, Lex Luthor against Superman. Despite the listing of so many Abels together with their Cains in the book of Genesis: Shem and Ham, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Perez and Zerah, Joseph and his brothers, there is no biblical explanation for the appearance of these couplings; none.