LADIES and gentlemen and CARP members of the world welcome to this sports festival. Today, I would like to offer my deep appreciation to God for allowing me to open the eighth Hanmadang Sports Festival in Korea, our religious fatherland.
I am especially and deeply grateful that our True Parents, the founders of the CARP movement, are here today to encourage us. With our whole hearts, we appreciate their presence among us.
In this first World Culture and Sports Festival, it is deeply meaningful that the CARP rally opens centering on the Hanmadang Sports Festival.
Forum of unity
If people’s minds and bodies had truly reached completion without any fall, we would be a temple in the service of the infinite God. Our very existence could be united directly with God, and all people would represent God visibly as complete, holy individual beings.
However, because of the fall of the first human ancestors, we became sinful descendants. Our body has become subject to our mind, and the sinful mind has become subject to the good mind. Such a reversal of dominion caused us to become friends with evil and produced corruption, immorality, and unrighteousness.
The root of problems is egoism. From individual self-centeredness has evolved social, national, and world-level egoism. Egoism ultimately split into democracy versus communism, theism versus atheism, and idealism versus materialism. As a result, the whole of human culture has become centered upon a corrupted body and characterized by domination through force, causing abuse and war.
Uncivilized and dehumanized, people act in self-destructive ways.
Hyo Jin Nim
However, since the beginning of God’s restoration providence, people have always yearned for true freedom and true peace. Sick of such a disordered society, we long for true order centered upon new hope and true love.
The model of God’s ideal world
The world of God’s ideal will be modeled on the form of an ideal person who is unified in mind and body. If the mind becomes a subject of goodness, it can give clear direction to the body.
All the power of the physical body flows from the action of a healthy and true mind. Therefore, if our minds become the subject of goodness, we can build the ideal world long desired by our original, God-given nature.
Through the Hanmadang Sports Festival, we can achieve the original harmony of mind and body, enlarge our experience, and build a new world centering on the mind and its desire for goodness. This festival includes many different games.
Some events, such as the marathon, feature individuals, while team events involve many people. Team games can become beautiful masterpieces of cooperation, achieving unity and harmony through compromise and understanding, through love and virtue while also helping players develop a strong spirit of competition.
Participants in team games must keep the rules of righteousness and obey decisions made in the game. At the end, the loser holds up the winner’s hand. The winner should also inspire the loser. When such support and inspiration are exchanged, we all feel deep brotherhood and love.
Spirit of cooperation
The term “Hanmadang” is very important to understand: “han” means large and wide, and “Madang” symbolizes the community spirit and working together. The spirit of the conventional Olympics has become a fight for medals, and the nations that win few medals are disregarded in the competition. In contrast, the Hanmadang Sports Festival was founded to foster a spirit of cooperation. Only mutual love can form the basis of a new culture.
Through Hanmadang let us passionately appeal to the world’s youth to build an ideal world of principle. Let us give our very best effort and apply the skills for which we have trained. Then both winners and losers will ultimately be victors.
World CARP members, the significance of your participating in the Hanmadang Sports Festival transcends winning or losing competitions. This is a forum where you can share true brotherhood and sisterhood and participate in the great global family of God’s ideal of creation. Through the games, you can experience true brotherly and sisterly love centering on True Parents.
It has been the lifelong hope of the True Parents to see the ideal world. Now that the twentieth century of tension, confrontation, n, and conflict is passing away with the end of communism, the coming twenty-first century will herald the new Eden culture and open a new chapter of a harmonized humanity. Today, the youth of the world can demonstrate the model of the ideal kingdom of heaven through the Hanmadang Sports Festival.
Let us make a fanfare of harmony, of friendship, of love, and of peace. Let us work together in this forum for true love, creating eternal and unchangeable friendships, moved as we are by the natural passion of youth to open a new world. Thank you again for coming, and God bless you.
Hyo Jin Nim
