Special to CosmicTribune.com, June 21, 2023

Following is the first in a series of excerpts from a new book, What I Saw at the Second Coming: The Big Story by R.J. Morton.

| PROLOGUE |

He who speaks does not know.
He who knows does not speak.
— Lao Zi

*  *  *

“But concerning that day and hour no one knows,
not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father
only.”
— Matthew 24:36

The world had no idea the “First Coming” had happened until long after the brief life and revolution of Jesus Christ.

The accounts of ordinary people who shared life experiences with the son of God are largely unrecorded. The ripple from his life’s impact went all but unnoticed in the sea of humanity during his time on Earth.

Likewise, the “Second Coming” which has already happened according to adherents to Sun Myung Moon’s teachings was a mere blip or three in the news. If he was “the one,” he came indeed as a “thief in the night.” [Revelations 16:15]

But his worldwide ministry in the last four decades of the twentieth century took place in the “information age” with explosive advances in modern communications technology.

What happened?

Why the effective silence of his followers said to believe they represent a new lineage; That their bloodlines had been engrafted to the “Tree of Life” as the lineal descendants of “True Parents”; That such is the goal of God’s providential messianic dispensation?

Surely this would be news to shout from the rooftops. Did they lack the courage of their convictions? Did their words fall on deaf ears?

Did Sun Myung Moon get a fair trial in the worldwide court of public opinion?

What follows is a record of one eyewitness to the birth, growth and internal debates and wars in the media foundation established by Sun Myung Moon that within years of his death had fallen largely silent.

That foundation could have established the cognitive landscape for a worldwide audience to receive his message, still largely unreported.

Such is conceivably a far greater and deeper truth than the mere chronicling of current events by newspapers and digital-electronic media.

So, this is not the story that some believe will transform the world. That story has already been written by Sun Myung Moon himself, including his “Divine Principle” [https://christkingdomgospel.org/archives/divine-principle/] and his spoken words in “Cheon Seong Gyeong” [http://www.unification.net/csg/CheonSeongGyeong.pdf]

“So Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.”
— Hebrews 9:28

The ‘Second Coming’ of Christ, often associated with the apocalyptic “end times” is no laughing matter. Or is it?

Based on my own rare “mystical” experiences (noted briefly in Chapter 2), I would suggest that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has a finely tuned sense of humor. Dullards and ideologues are often humorless unlike more spirited and inquisitive lovers of freedom. Surely the Creator of the Universe does not have taciturnity as His defining characteristic.

Sun Myung Moon himself was often in high spirits when he spoke extemporaneously. But it was sometimes as if he were trying to cheer up not only his followers but also God Himself. After all, as Sun Myung Moon exclusively taught, the Creator as a Parent had suffered far more heartbreak than any of His children.

The monumental struggles between Good and Evil, as recorded in the Holy Bible from the beginning of history to the First Coming of Christ, and then through the bitter and bloody wars of the twentieth century have not ended. But Sun Myung Moon said his “Divine Principle”, the Cheong Seong Gyeong and selected speeches were the “Completed Testament”, connecting the dots of the “Old” and “New Testaments” of the Bible.

He often expressed frustration that those closest to him did not grasp the significance of his “Words of Life” from God and the “True Love” he freely gave and lived. That testament culminating in the eternal marriage “blessing” of the innumerable couples who were transformed by them were what mattered most, he said, not the many organizations he set up only to frequently change or erase them.

Among such organizations that no longer exist was the Unification Church.

We are left to wonder how that “Kingdom of God on Earth” would have looked had Sun Myung Moon been welcomed and attended in the “Fatherland”, his native Korea.

His spoken and written record reveals how he prepared for that Kingdom and what Jesus envisioned at the First Coming. He taught that the Kingdom would not come in an ethereal flash of light but as a concrete concept that required a nation. Israel had been prepared as the chosen nation to receive the Messiah but had not recognized him.

Likewise, he said, Korea had been prepared as the chosen nation to receive the Lord of the Second Advent.

“For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.”
— Matthew 24:27

Sun Myung Moon, known by his followers as “True Father” established many international organizations and media, including The Washington Times and the Korean Segye Ilbo. But his goal was the “Kingdom of God on earth.”

Whereas Christianity focused on individual salvation in the realm after death, he taught that the fulfillment of Christianity was foreshadowed by the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

Thus, he conducted mass weddings worldwide as the basis for family-level salvation to eventually establish the lineage of God on Earth. Known as the “Blessing,” this wedding is the sacrament for his followers who believe their union is eternal and not “until death do us part”. Moreover, it is the basis for salvation on earth as well as in heaven. “Blessed families” are considered the building blocks for the Kingdom of God. Again, as Jesus prayed in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy Kingdom come, they will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

He taught hundreds of thousands of Koreans his ideology of unification based on “Godism” as a critical alternative to communism. Such, he said, was a prerequisite and practical necessity for unification with the Marxist Leninist North.

North Korea operates from its presumed ideological purity relative to the former USSR and Communist China. Significantly the Pyongyang regime also insists that it alone represents the true Korean cultural soul. Post-war South Korea, that became a booming Asian Tiger under President Park Chung-Hee and his Stanford-educated economists, has always been dismissed by the Communist North as a corrupt capitalist “puppet” of the American “imperialists”. Despite the benefits of wealth and prestige, many South Koreans in their heart of hearts have had no answer for this claim from the North where the leader has been treated as the fatherly king, a deeply-rooted theme of Korean history and innumerable and always popular classical Korean films.

Of all South Koreans, only Sun Myung Moon claimed an ideology superior to North Korea’s. What’s more, he directly and publicly proclaimed that doctrine during a homecoming visit to North Korea in 1991 at the risk of his life, setting the stage for a historic meeting with his life-long enemy.

Remarkably he embraced and bonded with the dictator Kim Il-Sung in whose death camp he had nearly died within days of the Incheon Landing in September 1950 by U.S. and UN forces led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur in early stages of the Korean War.

Only months before his historic trip to Pyongyang in late 1991, he had sponsored a World Media Conference in Moscow where he met with Mikhail Gorbachev and urged him to embrace freedom of religion and to open diplomatic relations with South Korea. Gorbachev agreed to and followed through on those conditions both of which would have been unthinkable for his predecessors.

Only a hostile and dismissive global establishment and media prevented Sun Myung Moon from being acknowledged for such monumental national and international accomplishments. …

What I Saw at the Second Coming: The Big Story, Part I

  What I saw at the Second Coming: The big story – I