Category: Religion & Spirituality

My Daughter Asks: Cult or Community?

By Eileen Williams

My daughter asked me recently, “Mom do you still think you were not part of a cult?” She had just finished watching a show about a dubious, if not dangerous, social media cult, and she caught me off guard. We’ve had these conversations before but now that she is in her thirties and I, recently turned 70, wisdom has hopefully given us a little perspective. 

Cults hold an unending fascination with the American public since the infamous Jim Jones and the diabolical Charles Manson came on the scene during the searching 70s. When I joined the Unification church in 1973 the ‘cult’ word was not a part of the daily lexicon. The language I was  drawn to in that flowered-power era were terms like kibbutz and commune, which in my youthful longings would include: sewing, farming, baking bread, and doing yoga (and eating yogurt which was only sold in ‘health nut’ stores as my mother called them).

As a teen living in a lazy American suburb where neighbors were strangers the idea of greater connectedness appealed to me. But so did a deeper understanding of Christianity. I was enamored with the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar and C.S. Lewis and disillusioned with my Catholic upbringing, although I appreciate aspects of that now especially when the next world crisis nearly brings to my knees in prayer.

Today, cult-like groups offer people a sense of belonging in a world where despite our ability to connect like never before through social media, ironically, we feel more alienated than ever.

 “Were you able to visit home?” she continued to query me. This question has been lobbed at me before as if it were a litmus test for being held captive in a cult.

“Yes, I was.” Our church was based in New York, and since I was from Delaware, I could pop home on occasion. Not sure I wanted to more than any other self-involved eighteen-year-old. But there was, in the church milieu, the unspoken: you’re all in, or you’re not. The Unified Family, as we called ourselves, circled the wagons against deprogrammers and focused exclusively on the ‘mission’ to save America. Although members were repeatedly instilled with the importance of family values, we often sacrificed those values in service to a higher purpose.

There existed an underlying tension, a twixt and between inside the church/outside the church. There were A members and B members. Home members weren’t really considered members by those in the mainstream movement. And children born outside the faith were in a separate category altogether. Ouch. 

Through the Unification Church’s evolution and outreach work, primarily in the form of interdisciplinary conferences, this cognitive dissonance between inside the community and outside grew less jarring over time but never completely dissipated. Traces of identity crisis as a movement still reverberate from Korea to Las Vegas. It’s challenging for an international organization whose pride is in diversity to create one defining cultural experience where everyone—in or out—can feel welcomed.

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Finding Our Own White Bird

Movie Review of “White Bird”

By Kathy Winings

If you are a parent, a grandparent, or have taught school, you may have heard of or witnessed instances of bullying.

Society has experienced its fair share of bullies for decades. Recent statistics show that one out of four students, ages 9-17, or 20-22%, have experienced some form of bullying. Generally, more boys than girls have been bullied. One out of five “tweens” (ages 9-12) have experienced cyberbullying and 46% of bullied students have reported the bullying to adults in the school.

Bullying can be verbal, physical, emotional or a combination of these forms. The reasons for bullying are equally widespread from physical disabilities to racial/ethnic, religious or economic differences. Such statistics have challenged school boards to look for effective ways of dealing with this significant problem. This has led to programs emphasizing conflict resolution and kindness initiatives.

While there have been books and films on the topic, a new film, “White Bird”, released this autumn, takes a unique vantage point of bullying. The film takes up where the 2017 film “Wonder” ended. What makes it unique is that instead of looking at bullying from the victim’s viewpoint, it looks at the bully.

“Wonder” presented the story of 10-year-old August “Auggie” Pullman, a young boy with a facial deformity that marked him as a target for the class bully. The twist is that instead of following Auggie, it follows the bully after his expulsion from the one school and now beginning life in a new school where he does not know a soul. No longer the center of attention, Julian Albans (Bryce Gheisar) is anxious to put the expulsion behind him and quietly fit in with his new surroundings.

On his first day at school, he finds himself sitting alone during lunch, hoping to become invisible, wanting just to fit in with the right people when a young girl befriends him, welcoming him to the school and inviting him to a club meeting later in the week. Another student walks by, stops to greet Julian and promptly lets him know that he can introduce Julian to the “right” sort of people who can help him fit in. He further lets Julien know that it is a kiss of death socially to sit at this table and to be seen talking to a certain group of students. Julian immediately feels trapped. On the one hand, he wants to desperately fit in. But on the other, he doesn’t want to commit the same mistake twice.

When he got home after his first day in the new school, it was evident to his grandmother, Sara Blum (Helen Mirren), that it was a tough day for her grandson. When Julian tells Sara about the challenges of transferring to a new school, she promptly reminds him that it wasn’t a simple transfer, but he had been expelled for bullying a fellow student and that he needed to come to terms with that essential point. She then decides that the best way to help her grandson understand how horrible bullying can be and how kindness is the better path is to share her story about living in occupied France as a young Jewish girl. The film then goes back in time as she recounts her story.

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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:

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Drawing Parallels Between Reagan and Trump

By Serge Brosseau
I recently watched the movie “Reagan” with some friends at a local theater. It is based on the book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.

We follow former KGB agent Viktor Petrovich, played by Jon Voight, recounting and commenting on the life of the 40th president to a young Russian agent. Dennis Quaid plays Reagan in a convincing way. I find that actors do well when they have affection for the characters they play, and clearly, this is the case here. The love story between Ronald and Nancy brings also a romantic touch to the narrative.

This independent production illuminates Reagan’s life of faith. It is part of a new trend in Hollywood of Christian-based productions, like the 2022 movie “Sound of Freedom” about sex trafficking, that were successful at the box office. The critics gave it mostly negative reviews, but it draws public interest as the election season is heating up.

One of the happy memories I have of my early years in the movement was the night that Reagan was elected. I joined in Berkeley, CA, in June 1977, and by November 1980, I was fundraising with a team in Little Rock, AR. We stayed at the church center where Rev. Richard Buessing was the state leader. We celebrated the election result with a few members, which we felt was very hopeful for the country. Watching the movie brought some of this back. It inspired me to draw several parallels between the presidency and the personalities of Reagan and Trump in connection with this current election season, namely Ronald and Donald.

First of all, the movie opens up with the scene of Reagan delivering a speech at the Washington Hilton on March 30, 1981. He is shot and wounded as he departs. Three people are injured, including his press secretary, James Brady. When Reagan arrived at the hospital, he was considered ‘’right at the margin of death,’’ but he recovered quickly. It is said that Reagan came to believe that God had spared his life ‘’for a chosen mission.’’ We know that True Father, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, went deep into prayer, considering how important Reagan’s life was to be spared as the nation’s political leader.

Some 43 years later, Trump is holding an open-air rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. He is shot and wounded in his upper right ear. He is one inch away from being assassinated. One man in the audience is killed, and two others are critically wounded. On the day of the rally, on July 13, True Mother, Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, is in Las Vegas. Upon hearing of the shooting, she sends a message delivered to Trump expressing the fact that it is ‘’providential’’ that his life was spared. He has frequently stated that it was God who saved his life.

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Unificationist Perspectives on the LGBTQ Phenomenon

By Mark Lincoln

About ten years ago, I was working for a large corporation in my hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. The company, like many large corporations, was eager to develop a reputation for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) by supporting groups within the company. Groups already existed for veterans, African-American employees, and those with disabilities. A new employee resource group for gays and lesbians had just been created.

While the campaign for gay rights had been framed as a civil rights issue, I had always seen it as a moral issue. I let my views be made known in our online company chat room. At one point, my manager called me to his office to explain that if I continued airing my views in the company chat room, I could be in danger of losing my job.

Preferring not to interrupt my breadwinner status for my family, I ended my participation in the online discussion. So ended my first public experience with the LGBTQ phenomenon. The issue was highly emotional and politicized; a hot topic with little middle ground.

About five years later, I approached a middle-aged lady in the Family Dollar parking lot asking if she would help us with our One Million Family Blessing campaign. She immediately asked me what I thought about gay people. I told her I felt sorry for them because they could not have children. That offended her. She became upset and complained to the manager. He came out to talk to me because he could see how upset the lady was, but he had received the Blessing a few days before.

So ended my second experience with the LBGTQ phenomenon leaving me dissatisfied regarding my ability to relate with the people of that community.

A few years later, after I retired, I was doing American Clergy Leadership Conference (ACLC) ministerial outreach at an Episcopal Church. I was aware that this denomination had a very liberal policy on gay ordination and marriage. Father John, the pastor, was kind enough to sit down with me for a chat. I brought up the topic of the need for the body of Christ (i.e., all Christian churches) to unite as one and use their combined strength to fight evil in the world. Seemingly out-of-the-blue, Father John asked me what I thought about homosexuals. 

This time, I was not in a parking lot talking to a local shopper. We were two ministers with a background in Biblical scriptures; a strong common base, I thought. When I answered that the Bible is very clear about homosexuality calling it wrong (Lev. 18:22), he disagreed with me, arguing that “God is a God of love, not judgment.” 

I chose the word “phenomenon” in my title because a “phenomenon” is defined as a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen, especially one whose cause or explanation is in question. If I have learned anything about the LGBTQ phenomenon, it is that the phenomenon is very complex with a constellation of issues. 

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‘Twisters’: Taming Nature’s Fury

By Kathy Winings

Tornados were a constant for me as a child in Indiana.

Each summer, when a violent storm took place, we listened attentively to the radio for alerts warning us about a possible tornado. Our family rehearsed what to do in case one actually touched down in our neighborhood.

Fortunately, I never personally experienced a tornado or its destructive force. The closest I got to them was providing disaster relief and mitigation to the families and businesses who did experience one.

Throughout my extensive career directing the work of IRFF, a sustainable development and disaster response agency, I have witnessed the devastation that even a relatively weak tornado can do to someone’s home or business. Having witnessed first-hand the pain and devastation that results, I could relate to the disaster-based movie, Twisters, currently in theaters.

This film, directed by Lee Isaac Chung, who helmed 2020’s multiple Academy Award-nominated Minari, picks up where the 1996 movie, Twister, left off. Whereas the storm chasers in that film were trying to get special sensors into the heart of a tornado to collect vital data on its inner workings to create a more effective early warning system, now the study of tornadoes has developed beyond data collection.

In this new film, the focus is on developing a chemical compound that, once launched into the tornadoes center, will stop a formed tornado. Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar Jones), a young, bright-eyed doctoral student who has a sixth sense about storms and tornadoes, is committed to finding a way to stop tornadoes in their tracks to prevent the loss of more homes and towns. The chemical compound is the brainchild of Kate and her fellow researchers.

However, when Kate and her research team encounter an EF-5 level tornado, the strongest kind, she loses all but one of her teammates when they are trapped by the tornado and sucked up into the storm. Her grief and sense of guilt over the loss drives her to drop her studies and leave the Oklahoma tornado alley for the safe confines of a meteorological research center in New York. 

As with many disaster-themed movies, Cooper is drawn back into the fray when the other surviving team member from her past, Javi (Anthony Ramos), contacts her and invites her to return to Oklahoma to provide much-needed wisdom and advice to his new team of storm chasers. She reluctantly agrees to give the team one week, which becomes one filled with old ghosts, nightmare images of that earlier storm, and new possibilities. 

She quickly learns how much the field of storm chasers has changed during her five-year absence. Not only did the technology become more sophisticated and powerful, but those engaged in the chase now represent a broad spectrum of individuals and groups who are not all concerned with the science of tornadoes.

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Mental Health is a Spiritual Topic

By Esfand Zahedi

What comes to mind when we hear the term “mental health?” We often consider mental unwellness to mean the presence of undesirable qualities such as anger, depression, guilt, or other negative emotions. Being mentally ill might also mean being a threat to oneself or others.

If these tendencies are not present, suppressed, or visible, we may consider a person to be in a more or less healthy state. This is a narrow way of discussing mental health because we are defining it by a negative condition. To say that mental health consists of the presence of good characteristics is to define it in positive terms. We will understand mental health better if we have a positive and objective definition of mental well-being.

Jesus described this health in terms of a person either “having life” or being “dead,” terms used to refer to people alive from a physical point of view. A person who is truly alive and fruitful is exceptional, and these individuals are the light of the world. Spiritual vitality and not belief in a doctrine is what “having life” means. Many people who are about their worldly business in truth resemble a barren fig tree and are not truly aware and therefore not healthy. Mental health in this sense is not the norm but the exception. The goal of conventional psychology it seems, is not true mental health but adjustment to a minimum standard.

Let us expand our concept of mental wellness to that of well-being for the whole person. This considers the entirety of what it means for a person to be well, embracing the body and mind as well as the character and spiritual state of the individual. In light of this definition, we can understand mental health in relation to other things, including excellence, integrity, productivity, intelligence, and self-control. Moral and spiritual is mental health. A morally and mentally healthy person is one who expresses excellence. An excellent person does not merely pass a test of mental health, but flourishes and stands out as unique, capable, and successful. 

Mental illness in today’s world is increasing and is not improving by treatment with medications or by a true understanding of psychology. This means that many medical practices are based on error and must be discontinued and replaced with sound practices. Whether mental illness is produced by the negative influence of new technologies, the lack of a God-centered culture, or the overeating of processed food (who knows the real cause?), we will not solve it by watching the news, increasing funds, or putting more trust in the medical establishment. 

What is certain is that our human problems will not be helped by clinging to the latest form of technology or a new medication as the long-sought solution. We must change our ideas. A human problem needs a human solution, and the solution will involve a true understanding of what it means to be human and structuring everyday life after the pattern of the unchanging truth.

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Unrest in America: What is Going On?

By Sandra Lowen

There have “always” been enslaved peoples in the history of the world. The slavery of the Israelites and of Africans have been considered among the most heinous, however, because of their severity.

Unlike the Israelites, who were made slaves in their own or neighboring countries, Africans were carried far away across a great ocean, where nothing was familiar to them. Israelites and the Egyptians who enslaved them did not look that dissimilar, while the Africans, with their dark skin and other prominent racial features, stood out among the people around them.

Although they were ostracized from Egyptian society, there is no record of the Israelites being deprived of family, religion, language, or culture. However, African slave families were purposefully separated and placed with other Africans who did not speak their language. Learning to read or showing those skills was punishable, in a significant number of incidents, by death. Whippings and forcible rapes were a matter of course.

How were Christian White people able to do such contemptible things? They went to the Scriptures and dredged up the story of Ham, Noah’s second son, whose offspring Noah cursed to be slaves to their relatives. White religious people designated Ham to be a Black man, destined by God to be a slave to justify their treatment of the Africans.

But even this was not enough. Ultimately, they labeled the Black race as “beasts,” who, like other animals, could be beaten and maltreated. Some “studded” their slaves, forcing them to have sex even with close relatives or with the owners themselves. In the latter cases, the mixed-race offspring were not acknowledged as a part of the White family, but were banished to the slave quarters with the rest of the Blacks.

When changing political and social pressures made it no longer easy to bring slaves to America, the Whites coupled with Black women, willing or not, to make more slave offspring. At auction, these mulatto and quadroon children sold for a higher price than their black-skinned half-brothers.

Many people called for slaves to be treated better, but they were shouted down. Ultimately, in political circles, it was allowed for a Black man to count as having the value of three-fifths of a White man. Independence Day — July 4, 1776 — granted neither freedom nor citizenship to Africans in America. A slave might be freed for extraordinary service to his master or upon his owner’s death. However, there was no guarantee, even with legal papers attesting he was free, that an African might not be recaptured by “slavecatchers” and returned to servitude without recourse.

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