The Second Principle: Live for the greater whole

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LESSON 11: Love for the World and God

A. Love for humanity: the way of the saint.

1. Sainthood is expansion of filial piety from loving one's parents to loving the world as God loves the world.

• We received protection, security and sustenance from the world. Therefore, we have a debt to the world.
• We should pay back this debt by serving the world with gratitude and love.
• Paying back the debt creates a deeper bond of love with all humankind. This makes the base for an ever-developing relationship, energy, prosperity and happiness.
• As a result, we gain much more, including good fortune in the future.
• The Chinese character for saint depicts the king who hears the voice of God and teaches His word.
• The saint experiences God's love and knows God as a parent who cares for the entire world.
• God calls the saint to live for the sake of the world.
• The saint fights evil and struggles to save individual people and the whole world.

2. A saint is not limited by social convention, race or nation.

• Socrates preached uncompromising goodness in the face of the social conventions of Athens.
• Jesus ministered to social outcasts; so did many saints.
• St. Paul shattered religious barriers by preaching to the Gentiles.
• Martin Luther King broke the color line and brought blacks and whites together.

3. Saints are motivated by love and compassion. They care about the real, physical suffering of the individual and guide the world with that heart (for example, Mother Teresa).

4. As fighters to establish God's will, saints often make substantial, spirit-based developments in society: Martin Luther, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King.

B. Love for the cosmos: the way of a child of God.

1. We receive protection, security and sustenance from God.

2. Therefore, we have a debt to God.

3. We should pay back this debt by serving God with gratitude and love.

4. Paying back the debt creates a deeper bond of love with God. This makes the base for an ever-developing relationship, energy, prosperity and happiness.

5. As a result, we gain much more, including good fortune in the future.

6. Through vertical love, beginning with filial piety, we reach toward God's love.

• Our parents represent God, the origin of our life. Therefore, filial piety teaches the vertical relationship to God: we received everything from God (our parents); therefore we commit everything back to God (our parents).
• Filial piety is the standard for the relationship between God and humankind.
• Religious faith means to show filial piety towards God, who is our Creator and Parent.

7. Most people are partial in their love. They get along with some and can't stand to be around others. To be a holy son or daughter means to be able to harmonize with all personality types.

• There are twelve personality types. Note that there are twelve signs of the zodiac, and a cycle of twelve years in the Chinese calendar. This amounts to twelve types of men and twelve types of women, a total of twenty-four types.
• We are naturally compatible with some personalities and have difficulty with others. We naturally relate with the personality of people like our parents. We may find a few close friends and expand our inventory of compatible types. But if we fight with a brother or sister, he represents a whole class of people, 1/12 of the human race with that personality type. When we shun a schoolmate because he is "weird," we are shunning 1/12 of the human race with that personality type.
• For such immature people, when it comes to their spouse, personality conflicts are likely to develop, once the heat of passion has cooled.
• In preparation for marriage, children should grow their hearts to be able to encompass all twelve types of people. Education in love means lessons in learning to love all different types of people. As a child, we must be educated in love to grow our hearts to this extent.
• There are twelve gates to the Kingdom of Heaven. True people should be able to enter through any of them. They fit in everywhere on earth and in heaven.

8. Filial piety means having absolute faith and practicing absolute love and absolute obedience, centering on our parents. Thereby we naturally come to know God's heart, which prepares us to be God's children.

• God is our Parent, and God's heart is revealed in parental heart.
• By filial piety, God will reveal to us our parents' heart. We learn this by practicing absolute faith, love and obedience.
• God at the time of Creation had absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience.
  • Faith in the future of His children.
  • Love for His children: total investment of Himself to make us in His image (male and female).
  • Obedience to the Principle of Creation: God never violates the laws and principles which He established.
• We are children of God, created out of His own body, as parents create children, not as artists create works of art.
• We respond with filial piety: absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience, because this is the essential common base we share with God and all people of conscience.
• Then we inherit true love from our parents and God.
• Then God dwells within the parent-child relationship.

9. Holiness means set apart from everything else for God's service.

• In ancient Israel, the Temple had a Holy Place where only the priests could enter, and only if they removed everything profane, put on special clothing and purified themselves. But the Most Holy Place was even more sacred; only the high priest could enter, and only once a year. They took care to maintain the holiness of the Temple as a home fit for God to dwell, lest God's blessing leave them.
• A holy person does not let himself be contaminated by sin.
  • He makes his physical body and spirit a place of purity, where God alone can enter in.
  • He does not allow his home to be compromised.
  • He understands that God has nothing to do with evil.

10. The holy person lives in the world so that he can transform it.

• We are not called to separate from the world.
• At the same time we overcome the temptation to compromise with evil, especially when it is rationalized as necessary in order to "get along" and get "practical results" in the world. Ultimately, such compromise can invalidate whatever fruits may come.

11. Holiness upholds heaven and earth.

• The cosmos (heaven and earth) is to become the kingdom of God, without evil.
  • Heaven is a spiritual realm without evil.
  • To live for heaven is to see beyond worldly affairs and to consider how one's deeds will be recorded in terms of their eternal significance.
• On earth as well we should be concerned for the long-term impact of our deeds.
  • Words, spoken and written, will influence people beyond one's immediate intentions.
  • Writers and thinkers who promote false theories do long-term damage are ultimately responsible for all the suffering which results (e.g. Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, Kinsey, Hefner).
  • The way of holiness is to speak and act as if my words carry the weight of the entire world. Then I will always be responsible to be upright.
• Righteousness and holiness set the standard by which the world can live.
  • "The earth is upheld by the veracity of those who have subdued their passions, and, following righteous practices, are never contaminated by desire, covetousness, and wrath." (Vishnu Purana 3.12)
  • The 7,000 who did not bow to Baal: only because of this remnant could God continue to work with the chosen people. They are the unsung heroes of Israel (I Kings 19:18).
  • Holy sons and daughters provide eternal stimulation to the hearts of people of the entire world. They are the internal leaders of the world
  • "The myriad objects owe their existence to the mutual stimulation subsisting between Heaven and earth. Similarly, the holy sage stimulates men's hearts and the whole world is thenceforth at peace." (I Ching 31)

12. The individual is fully qualified to participate in true family life on the basis of practicing the vertical ethic, through filial piety, civic virtue and patriotism, sainthood and holy sonship. We all ultimately are to be holy sons and daughters of God.

This vertical standard of true love is the background for the horizontal standard of true love, which is the subject of the Third Principle: "Learn true love in the school of the family."

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