Prayer in the Unification tradition is direct, purposeful communion with God oriented toward His will rather than toward personal petition. Rev. Sun Myung Moon taught that prayer is both a daily spiritual discipline — he recommended at least “one-tenth of the day” — and the means by which a person aligns his or her heart with Heaven's grief, purpose, and love for humanity.
The essential posture is sincerity (jeongseong), persistence, and the conviction that prayer, rightly offered, is always answered.
These teachings rest on the Divine Principle's understanding of the human being as mediator between God and creation and on Rev. Moon's own prayer life as a template for disciples.
Divine Principle Basis
The Exposition of the Divine Principle treats prayer within its broader teaching on restoration. Prayer is one of the key conditions by which a fallen human being re-establishes give-and-receive action with God, alongside study of the word, witnessing, and acts of sacrificial service.
In this framework, prayer is not primarily a request for divine intervention in personal affairs but an act in which the human being takes up the 5% portion of responsibility that Heaven, by the principle of creation, will not bypass.
The Divine Principle presents Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane — "not my will, but Thine be done” — as the archetype of prayer aligned with the Father's heart, and Rev. Moon returned to this passage repeatedly as the standard against which all prayer should be measured.
→ Exposition of the Divine Principle
Key Concepts
Jeongseong (정성) — Devoted sincerity or utmost effort; the wholehearted investment of heart, time, and energy that lays the foundation for effective prayer and all spiritual life.
Shimjeong (심정, heart) — The deepest inner source of the impulse to love and be loved; the dimension of God that prayer seeks to reach and to resonate with.
Portion of Responsibility — The principle that humans must fulfill their own 5% share in God's purpose; prayer is one of the chief means by which a person takes up that share.
Intercessory prayer — Prayer offered on behalf of others rather than for oneself; in Rev. Moon's teaching, the chief and most valuable form of prayer.
The Everyday Picture
Rev. Moon often compared devoted prayer to letting down an anchor rope from Heaven, where none existed before.
Just as a ship with no rope cannot be drawn to port, a person with no prayer has no line by which Heaven can draw near; as prayer grows wider and more consistent, the rope thickens into a ladder, and the ladder into a mountain whose summit finally touches Heaven itself. His point was practical: a single prayer is a thread, but a continuous, sincere prayer builds a structure between the human being and God that can actually bear the weight of a life. This is why, in his teaching, how often and how earnestly one prays matters as much as what one says in any single prayer.
A Practical Method: Rev. Moon's Instructions for Prayer
Across decades of sermons, Rev. Moon returned repeatedly to six concrete instructions on how prayer should be offered. Taken together, they form the practical shape of prayer in the Unification tradition.
1. Pray daily, and pray long
Rev. Moon urged disciples to treat prayer as a tithe — a tenth — of their waking hours, making it an ordinary rather than exceptional practice.
You must pray every day. Your prayer life must also be a tithe of the day. You must pray for two hours and twenty-four minutes — a tenth of the day. In my prime I prayed lying prostrate for seventeen, eighteen hours; ordinarily I prayed twelve hours. I did not eat lunch. And while praying I wept bitterly. Without that, one cannot live. Every direction is sealed off with no way out. Only when you pray does a needle-hole appear.
— Sun Myung Moon (199-190, 1990-02-16)
Cham Bumo Gyeong
This sets prayer not as an ideal for the exceptional but as a daily discipline for anyone serious about spiritual life. The “needle-hole” image names prayer's basic function: it opens a passage where circumstance otherwise admits none.
2. Pray for God and for others — not for yourself
Rev. Moon was sharp on this point. A prayer centered on one's own rescue or advantage cannot reach the dimension where God most wishes to be met.
Even when I went into prison, was beaten and fell vomiting blood, I did not pray worrying about myself before God. I endured, resolving within, "Father, I am not like the prophets of old, nor like Jesus." I did not pray the petty, unmanly, weak prayer "God, rescue me." I prayed nothing except prayers for God alone.
— Sun Myung Moon (016-243, 1966-06-19)
Cham Bumo Gyeong
The instruction is not to suppress personal need but to re-center the prayer: the one praying stands on behalf of God's situation and of others before bringing any private concern.
3. Pray with absolute conviction that the prayer will be answered
Doubt, in this teaching, is not a neutral background state but an active obstacle to the working of prayer.
Do you know the necessity of prayer? Have you seen its effect? You must have that experience. You must hold the conviction that prayer will certainly be fulfilled. Do not pray and then keep doubting, "Will God hear me?" Believe as you have been instructed and say, "It will be done!" Then it is done. Even if ten years or a hundred years pass, if you resolve that you will only rise and never descend, God will always help you.
— Sun Myung Moon (066-213, 1973-05-07)
Cham Bumo Gyeong
4. Pray tearfully and with the whole body, not only with the mind
Rev. Moon's own prayer posture was bodily: on a wooden floor, bent, pressing against the ground with such intensity that he described his knees as developing permanent calluses.
When you pray, your back must bend, and calluses must form on your knees. The calluses that formed in the past from praying are still on my knees. Prayer must be offered on a bare wooden floor. Tears must also flow. I am a man who has crossed the ridge of weeping so much that the tear-stains from prayer did not dry. I am not a man who merely drifts along.
— Sun Myung Moon (025-334, 1969-10-12)
Cham Bumo Gyeong
In this picture, prayer is not posture-neutral. Kneeling on a hard surface, weeping, and physical exhaustion are not incidental but part of how the body helps the heart reach the intensity the content of the prayer requires.
5. Pray intercessorily, especially for those in your charge
Rev. Moon described systematically praying for each of several hundred members in the 1950s, and he taught his disciples to do the same for those they were responsible for — family, fellow members, neighborhoods, and nations.
After you have gone out and worked and witnessed, before you sleep you must pray for that village. If you are responsible for a county, climb the highest mountain and pray for that county; if you cannot climb the highest mountain, go into the deepest valley and pray. Do not stop. Then go to the holiest place, the sanctuary, and pray. Tears must never dry in the sanctuary.
— Sun Myung Moon (172-196, 1988-01-21)
Cham Bumo Gyeong
6. Pray for the long horizon, not only the immediate
Rev. Moon taught that genuine prayer is offered on a scale of time far larger than a single lifetime — that one prays for outcomes a thousand or even ten thousand years forward.
That is why I tell you to pray through a thousand, even ten thousand years. The True Parents are now praying over matters a thousand years from now. They are earnestly praying over how the world should be ten thousand years from now. If the founder and members pray that seriously, so long as that prayer-standard remains in Heaven, the Unification Church will not perish.
— Sun Myung Moon (212-272, 1991-01-06)
Cham Bumo Gyeong
These six practices — daily discipline, God-centered content, absolute conviction, whole-bodied sincerity, intercession, and long horizon — form the practical shape of prayer as Rev. Moon modeled and taught it.
Deeper Context
The theological reason for prayer in the Unification tradition rests on a specific picture of the God-human relationship. Because God created human beings as His substantial object partners — persons through whom His heart can be felt, expressed, and completed — the restoration of that relationship after the Fall requires action from the human side.
Prayer is the primary form of that action in inner life: by offering one's time, tears, and attention to God, the person fulfills a portion of the responsibility that Heaven will not bypass.
This reframes why one prays at all. Prayer is not necessary because God lacks information; it is necessary because the relationship severed at the Fall is restored only through an active human movement toward Heaven. Rev. Moon pushed this further: the one praying is not merely seeking personal reconciliation but standing in for a broken humanity before a grieving God. This is why he held for decades to three content-standards for his own prayer — faith, wisdom, and love — aimed not at personal refinement but at equipping himself to serve God's will in history.
Up to now I have held up three slogans and prayed by them. One is prayer concerning faith — that when I stand before God, I will believe what the people of the world cannot believe. There is nothing I cannot believe when God is at the center. The next was prayer for wisdom — without a clear subjectivity of judgment one cannot be a leader: "Grant me wisdom of the ideal, like Solomon's!" The third is love — so that when I move among many peoples, transcending race, no one will fail to long for me. These three have been the content of my prayers, and as I kept praying, all of them came to pass.
— Sun Myung Moon (077-063, 1975-03-30)
Cham Bumo Gyeong
The further theological claim is that answered prayer is a rule rather than an exception. A prayer that meets three conditions — it is offered for God's purpose rather than one's own, it is offered with absolute conviction, and it is sustained long enough for a spiritual foundation to be established — cannot, in the Principle's logic, fail to be answered. It may be answered on a timescale foreign to the one praying.
Rev. Moon described his own prayers as sometimes reaching fulfillment decades after he had stopped watching for them, and taught that prayers offered now may bear fruit in one's children or later generations — which is why the “long horizon” practice matters even for short lives.
Rev. Moon also gave an architectural image for this cumulative effect: devotion gradually lowers an anchor rope from Heaven, which thickens over time into a ladder and finally into a mountain high enough to meet God (Cham Bumo Gyeong, 169-223, 1987-10-31).
Comparative Religion
Christianity — The Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13) is the central Christian model, and its structure moves from God's name, kingdom, and will before reaching human needs.
Augustine's Letter 130 to Proba treats prayer as the ongoing shaping of the heart's desire toward God rather than the communication of information to a God who already knows everything.
Paul's injunction to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) closely parallels Rev. Moon's teaching that prayer should extend into every ordinary moment, including eating and breathing.
Judaism — Maimonides codifies the laws of prayer in the Mishneh Torah (Sefer Ahavah, Hilkhot Tefillah), setting fixed times (morning, afternoon, evening) and fixed content (the Amidah) alongside space for spontaneous personal prayer.
Jewish prayer is communal and covenantal, oriented to Israel's ongoing relationship with God, and the emphasis on set times and persistent repetition resonates with Rev. Moon's call to a daily discipline.
Islam — Al-Ghazali devotes a major section of Ihya Ulum al-Din to prayer (Kitab al-Salat), treating the five daily prayers as the foundational structure of a Muslim life. Islam places prayer at fixed times, facing Mecca, with prescribed postures (standing, bowing, prostration) that parallel the bodily seriousness Rev. Moon taught.
Islam also distinguishes salat (formal prayer) from du'a (personal supplication) — a distinction that roughly maps onto the difference between liturgical and intercessory prayer in the Unification tradition.
Buddhism — Traditional Buddhism does not pray to a creator God, so the category of “prayer” is not fully parallel. The closest practices are contemplative: the recollections (anussati) in the early Pali tradition, and the recitation of Amitabha Buddha's name (nembutsu) in East Asian Pure Land traditions, which functions devotionally and transformatively.
Across these traditions, the shared conviction is that sustained, disciplined prayer transforms the one who prays. The distinctive Unification emphasis is the insistence that prayer is for God's liberation first and for human need second — a reversal of the ordinary instinct, and one Rev. Moon regarded as the test of whether a prayer has matured.
Key Takeaway
- The essence of prayer in Rev. Moon's teaching is this: to speak with God daily, tearfully, and with conviction, putting His will and the needs of others before your own.
- Prayer is a response to the Fall: it restores the severed give-and-receive relationship between God and the human being by an active offering of heart, time, and attention.
- Rev. Moon taught that prayer should occupy roughly a tithe of the day — about 2 hours 24 minutes — as an ordinary standard for serious spiritual life.
- A prayer offered for God's purpose, with absolute conviction, and sustained long enough to form a foundation, is in the Principle's logic always answered — though the timescale may exceed a single lifetime.
- Intercessory prayer for those in one's care — family, community, nation — is the chief form of prayer in Rev. Moon's instruction to disciples.
Related Questions
Why does God answer some prayers but not others?
The Divine Principle teaches that prayer is answered when it aligns with God's purpose and when the conditions established by the one praying are sufficient. Unanswered prayers are not denials but indications that the timing, content, or foundation of the prayer has not yet reached the threshold Heaven requires.
What did Rev. Moon mean by “prayer must be a tithe of the day”?
He taught that just as a tenth of one's income should be offered to God, so a tenth of one's waking hours — roughly 2 hours 24 minutes — should be offered in prayer. The principle is that prayer is not a leftover activity but a structural part of a properly ordered day.
What is the difference between prayer and jeongseong (devotion)?
Jeongseong is the broader category — the wholehearted investment of heart, time, and effort across every domain of life — and prayer is its primary spoken form. Rev. Moon taught that prayer without supporting jeongseong in action is hollow, and jeongseong without prayer lacks direction.