Parents' Love

1. Children are the substantial manifestation of their parents' love and investment. They are an extension of their parents' lives and the embodiment of their parents' ideals.

Those who have given birth to children and loved them know this. They say to their beloved children, “You are the embodiment of my love, the extension of my life, and the realization of my ideals. You are a second me.”

Because children are born based on the parents' love, life, and ideals, the more the parents see their children, the more they find them lovable, the more vibrant their lives become and the more they discover in their children their ideal object partners. (69-079, 1973.10.20)

Unchanging parental love

2. The love of a father and mother is vertical. It is the model of love and the basis for tradition. It is vertical love, and that which is vertical is unchanging. Because conjugal love involves the connection of vertical love to the horizontal plane, divorce is possible, but severing the parent-child relationship is impossible.

This is heavenly law, and it is so because it is vertical love. That which is horizontal has four directions and can move throughout 360 degrees, but that which is vertical occupies only one point. It cannot be moved. (168-281, 1987.09.27)

3. The most precious love of all is parental love. This is because true love travels by the most direct route. Parental love is the vertical expression of true love. Vertical love occupies only one point and cannot be divided.

If you change that position, you are turning heaven and earth upside down. No matter how capable you are, no matter how skillful you are, if you shift the position of vertical love, you make heaven and earth grow dark; you turn it into hell.

Since love travels along the shortest route, it intersects the horizontal plane at a perpendicular angle. You cannot damage this love; you can't put it aside. It is only one. It is absolute. Because the parent-child relationship is vertical and perpendicular, no power can sever it. (212-019, 1991.01.01)

4. Parents are unique, unchanging,g and eternal. Who your parents are cannot change. Because of this, parental love is unaffected by social or political revolutions. No matter how many of those come and go, parental love is not affected; it lasts forever.

Parents, as subject partners of love, need their object partners. They require them uniquely, “unchangingly and eternally. (74-019, 1974.11.10)”

5. A mother and father do not keep accounts of their sacrifices for their children, how much they worked at night to feed them and send them to school. They don't calculate their investment or expect a return, saying, “I have spent this amount on you; in ten years it will be worth this much, including interest.” Instead, they invest everything without keeping track of it and forget what they have invested.

The principle of creation tells us that only in sacrifice can you find true love. This is why parents are good. Parental love is the best thing. People without parents are called orphans. Being an orphan is sorrowful. An orphan has no roots and so cannot set his or her direction in place. (242-050, 1992.12.27)

6. When parents raise their children, specifically, while a mother feeds her baby, she does not say, “Later, when you understand things, you'd better remember that I am the one who raised you.”

A parent like that would not be normal. If you want to be that way, I suggest you raise a cow and ask it to help you with your work. No parent would request of his or her child, “I have loved you this much, so you have to repay me more than that amount.” You sacrifice for a person you love.

You give and give and still feel it is not enough; you want to give and give and keep on giving more. This way of love continuously brings us to feel ultimate value and provides constant hope for the future. (60-128, 1972.08.13)

7. Even in this fallen world, a mother who loves her children invests in them, and then repeatedly forgets how much she has given; serves, and sacrifices for their sake, hoping they will do well.

Even though her child fails to attain success, until her dying moment she wants to continue to invest. This is the love of a mother. That is how it is even in this fallen world. When children come to know their mother was like this, they will go to her grave and tearfully ask her to forgive their unfilial behavior.

Even though it is too late, they will repent, resolving to turn around 180 degrees and fulfill their duty to her. This filial piety is not a way of clever strategies or methods. This is the way of love, of truly sacrificing and offering one's flesh and blood. (216-342, 1991.04.25)

8. Parents' love toward their children does not appear just based on routine, everyday interactions. It is a love that springs from the very marrow of the parents' bones. The parents have a heart of love that, beyond their will, they can never forget or cut off.

Therefore, parents love their children as long as they live. When parents feel that their lives are connected with their children, a loving heart toward their children naturally springs up. Parents don't make a conscious choice in saying, “I am going to love that child because he is my son,” as if they could do otherwise. They share heart and connection.

The life force that connects them guarantees they cannot help loving their children. (32-015, 1970.06.14)

9. What is true love? This is love for the sake of others. It gives and gives for a thousand years and wants to forget how much it has given. It does not remember. In the world of love, output is greater than input. Parents will say to their son when he leaves the house, “Son, watch for cars when you cross the road today,” even if he is seventy.

Even at ninety years of age, parents will never tire of this; they will continue to say it every day, even for eternity. This is love. Knowing that parental love is like this even in our fallen world, do you think you would get tired of loving when you are in the original world of God's love?

This is the first step in establishing our life's realm as God's true object partner. When we come to know that God's love is eternal and unchanging, from our experience with human love we can deduce the logic of eternal life. We conclude that by centering on true love, we live for eternity. (143-280, 1986.03.20)

10. In loving their children, parents do not announce, “Parents should be like this,” and love their children according to certain theories. Parents do not assert themselves but deny themselves.

That is, they love their children without regard for position. In other words, parents do not love their children based upon their authority as parents, and always and only from this imposing position.

Instead, they take a higher stance by loving their children without a bit of concern for their status of authority. This is the heart with which parents love their children. (059-298, 1972.07.30)

11. In the parent-child relationship, a baby pushes his way to his mother's breast to nurse. Would this be possible without love? No, it would not. A mother feels a mother's love toward her baby.

When she holds her baby, rather than identifying her happiness with herself, she feels as if heaven and earth have entered a state of peace, and in that holistic atmosphere, goodness is growing. No matter how hard the baby pushes its way to its mother's breast, an embracing heart wells up within her.

She forgives the baby's pushing and says, “Go ahead, little one!” This is because parents love their children immeasurably. (49-053, 1971.10.03)

Parental love is the paradigm of true love

12. There is no limit to the love parents feel for their children. In one sense a baby is like an enemy to the mother. The infant is an enemy who takes a siphon and sucks out its mother's flesh and blood.

However, through her baby, a woman gains new hope as a mother and finds new stimulus in her husband.

In that place,e there is an unspoken understanding. That place is not a result of regulations. It is connected to absolute love. So, by the power of true love, parents have the strongest standard of love, absolute love, not for them, but for God and the whole.

So you pledge to God that you will serve for the sake of the entire. If you are not standing on that standard, your speaking and listening and looking and promising count for nothing; all those things can change at any time. (49-053, 1971.10.03)

13. Parents cannot discard their children. They are the community of love. It is because the children are the fruit of love. Everything bears fruit. Everything seeks fruit. There is nothing that can deny fruit. No tree will deny its fruit. Fruit sustains eternity.

The parents' fruit draws all the elements of love from a father and mother. It mobilizes everything. That is why when they look at it, they say it's good. Within me there is an eternal me, there is a history of me, and there is a developing me. Love in the present and future is connected to me.

There is no principle allowing attacks on the love between parents and children. It cannot be struck. The universe naturally protects it. The law of the universe does not permit an attack on the place where loving parents embrace their loving children; rather, it gives natural protection. (130-152, 1984.01.08)

14. To satisfy a baby's hunger, its mother's breasts swell with milk. When the milk accumulates, the breasts begin to hurt and the mother's entire body feels pressure. The feeling of a mother as she embraces and breastfeeds her child is beyond expression.

When the swollen breasts empty, the mother feels relieved and happy. Only mothers can understand this feeling. Moreover, as a mother watches her baby nurse at her breast and caress it, love springs up in her heart. At that time, joy and sadness intertwine in a mother's heart in a way that only a mother can comprehend. (187-100, 1989.01.06)

15. Original love is the love that enables parents to sacrifice their lives for their children. Their love goes beyond their life. The origin of the universe was not for the sake of life. It was created for the sake of love, and therefore love comes first.

Thus, it is life that appears from love, not love that appears from life. Thus, genuine love can sacrifice life and go beyond life. This is the love of Heaven, a love that can connect with the universe. In the universe, parents who sacrifice their lives for their children are unmatched true parents. (132-153, 1984.05.31)

16. We can observe that parents who have raised many children have wide hearts, deep and large. People who have raised many children cannot strike even their enemies. It is because they stand on a mysterious, broad foundation and live according to the broad law. (51-318, 1971.12.05)

17. When a baby is born, it follows the electric current of love and automatically seeks its mother's nipple. Whether its mother is ugly or beautiful by worldly standards doesn't matter.

This is truly an image of supreme harmony and holiness. People are born in love and grow up by receiving love. Each of us is the fruit of our parents' love. We are the visible, real fruit of our mother and father's love. Because I am the fruit of my parents' love, they cannot help but love me.

Through this fruit, infinite love will bear fruit yet again. This is the path whereby we can connect to individual love, family love, tribal love, national love, global love, universal love, and even the fundamental love of God. (298-305, 1999.01.17)

18. The love between parents and children comes from the parents. We receive our parents' love from the moment of birth. As long as our parents are alive, we receive our parents' love, regardless of what age we reach.

This is true when we are children, through our youth, and into the prime of our lives. We receive our parents' love and grow up, and it is a matter of course that each of us then engages in the horizontal love between husband and wife. For the love of a husband and wife to continue, they must have children. If a husband and wife have no children, they don't know love in its fullness.

We can feel true love only when there is an object partner to love. Brothers and sisters grow up not understanding what parental love is, but when they reach maturity, marry, and have children, they begin to understand parental love.

In other words, we come to know parental love only when we experience the cycle that is started by our parents and is completed when we become parents ourselves. Therefore, we can say that only after we have children do we become truly mature people. (066-119, 1973.04.18)

19. Children, after becoming mature and experiencing conjugal love, attain the power to create, like God. God gave us a loving heart with which to love our children so we could experience His happiness when He created human beings as His children.

God poured the best of everything into us. God created human beings with the expectation that we would live in the Garden of Eden, in happiness and contentment, one with His eternal love.

In this way, the original state meant for humankind was for all people to live happily as the eternal object partners of the absolute God. Centered on that love, it is impossible to be separated from Him. (52-321, 1972.02.03)