The Conjugation of Love

Couple-Walking-03_sm

By Laurent Ladouce

“Marriage is a long conversation,” Friedrich Nietzsche said.

But how long, exactly? Can the conversation be eternal? Can lovers conjugate the verbs of their conjugal feelings beyond the veil? 

Nietzsche didn’t say, but Elisabeth Seidel provides insights. Her new book, Letters Beyond the Veil, is not just another volume about life after death or communicating with the dead. It’s about the languages of conjugal love on earth and in heaven. 

“Love is strong as death” said King Solomon in Song of Songs 8:6. In her Unificationist song of songs, Seidel suggests that love can be stronger than death. We learn how Dietrich and Elisabeth declared their nascent love when they were young, how they conversed while on earth, not always with romantic words, and how the quintessence of eternal love is expressed after Dietrich’s ascension in 2016. He is absent in the chores of daily life but remains a spiritual presence with whom the conversation continues on another level.

Before passing, Dietrich told Elisabeth that death is natural, as natural as life is. Those who were truly one in heart on earth continue to communicate with their beloved. Here, “truly one” means naturally one. Special powers, spiritual gifts, or techniques may help establish communication. However, a genuine and blissful communion can only come through natural feelings that connect hearts. The love after is only a prolongation of the love existing before.

Any person with a genuine heart may keep talking to the beloved, provided the couple has a record of saying love on earth and not just making love. Nietzsche said, “When marrying, you should ask yourself this question: do you believe you will enjoy talking with this woman into your old age? Everything else in a marriage is transitory, but most of the time that you’re together will be devoted to conversation.”

Why could Dietrich and Elisabeth keep a lasting love in their marriage, with the promise of living eternally together? The book provides some insights, especially this letter of Elisabeth to Dietrich: 

I miss the places where we were together: my Alpine mountains, your Austrian Alps. When we saw mountains, we felt at home. We saw God in our mountains (…). We were sharing our dreams together with our Heavenly Parent. We wanted to be victorious for the sake of our Heavenly Parent.

Here, the couple is depicted in relationship to the Creator and His creation, which is like the shrine of love. Dietrich was a typical Austrian, whereas Elisabeth was born in France, near Mont-Blanc. Nature is omnipresent in their love story. Anyone familiar with European culture remembers how the Alps have constantly inspired modern lovers since the romantic age.

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God Has Been Homeless

By Tyler Hendricks

A homeless shelter. Eww, who wants to go to a homeless shelter? Who wants to be with beggars, vagrants and derelicts?

That was my attitude toward the homeless my entire life if I so much as ventured to think on the subject. So, here I am, living in the upscale town of Milford, CT, a beach town on Long Island Sound, full of pricey Airbnb’s, a village green, quaint neighborhoods, and picturesque churches.

Oh-oh, I see a homeless person. He’s got a shopping cart full of plastic bags stuffed with who knows what. He is on a corner with a sign asking for help, for prayer. Oh, wow, glad it’s a green light.

This spring, I returned from Korea, moving from a lovely mission assigned by True Mother, with her permission. She agreed that, at this point, I have work to do in the United States. My lovely mission now is under a new central figure, our local pastor, Simone Doroski.

Milford is a place to make the Principle real and the theory into reality. So, I get involved in the community. I ended up meeting the director of the local homeless shelter, the Beth-El Center, and participating in one of their weekly meetings for spiritual guidance.

Grace at the Beth-El Center

A woman named Tess led the spiritual guidance meeting, and seven women with three little children participated. It was noisy, unorganized, informal. We set up chairs as needed, no refreshments, no music, just sitting in a circle in the shelter’s kitchen.

In that one hour, I heard twenty sermons from them. Some of them knew the Bible quite well, although one did mix up Corinthians with Chronicles. They all shared their real heart, the grit and grime of life, and drew lessons from a poem by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, read by the hostess. The poem was about patience, that God works slowly. I realize that these homeless people are just like all of us. And their hearts are eloquent.

Based on that experience, I had a realization: God is homeless. I recently heard someone say that God did not kick Adam and Eve out of the Garden; they kicked God out. I agree. God is our Heavenly Parent, and parents do not kick out their children. I used to think that God lived in a palace, and once in a while, I had a glimpse and experience of it. No. God is in the darkness just as I am. God experiences the light and love together with me. Love and light come through give and take. God is my light, and I am God’s light. True Father expressed this well:

“God’s joy remains dormant until He can have full give and take with us. So far in Christianity, many churches placed God so high up in heaven and pushed humanity so low in hell that there has been an uncrossable gap between us and God.” (God’s Warning to the World, pp. 7, 12)

We left God homeless, and True Father was no stranger to homelessness. Of his life as a refugee in Pusan, he said:

Continue reading “God Has Been Homeless”

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