Deep Sharing in a 14-Day Workshop in Los Angeles

In Los Angeles we offered a two-week workshop for some new students of the Divine Principle staying at our center in Los Angeles. After breakfast we began the day with what I called a “hashing” session.

We just gathered around the table with a group of young men. Depending on the lecture for the day, I would set the general theme for the lecture and ask them to bring questions, not only about the lecture, but also personal questions which I assumed they would have.

Then after lunch and sports, or some similar activity, we would begin the lecture. Thus they heard the lecture very clearly, because they had already gone through it earlier in the day.

In the evening, we would review the lecture, discuss it, read Reverend Moon’s speeches, and then have a time of deep sharing. I went through the basic order of the Divine Principle. But as we progressed through the second and third cycle, we would expand on various points and try to make them understand how something applies to them, so it wouldn’t become just a rote system of learning.

Once Americans become interested in something, then they want to learn all the points in order, particular!) When they see how it applies to their own lives. The relationships that are formed in a fourteen-day period are phenomenal. Never before in all my seven years in this movement have I experienced Father’s heart as I did in this Los Angeles workshop. Sometimes the young people would cry

because a session would be so concentrated and heavy in spirit. I’ve never seen so many things so purely come together. It is really tremendous.

The group dynamics change in a two-week period. In a very short session sometimes the person who is the most negative will pull the other down, and if they still have a strong negative base they will unite with that person. But as you struggle to solve those problems and build up their faith and their sense of brotherhood with one another, you find that the person who is the most positive will be pulling everybody up, and then the positive base for the whole builds up as well. Then the group as a whole will begin to bolster anyone who is negative and judge each other similarly.

It cakes about a week or ten days for chis to happen. When people can give up the kind of thinking which says: “Well, I’ve done such and such in m) life, and have certain intellectual concepts,” and become children, then the teacher can become a parent, and not just a lecturer. When you establish that parent- child relationship, God’s love just explodes every day.

Once that channel begins to open up, God begins to use it very powerfully. To me it seemed like God was almost waiting for us to do something and then He said, “Okay, now I can begin to use you.”

During the first cycle through the lectures, the first week I was there, I took the boys out after lunch for some kind of recreation or travelling around LA or somewhere else. One day I decided that because a lot of them were new to LA, I would take them for a drive around the city. I took them right down Sunset Boulevard. I didn’t know what had happened to it. It has become a place like North Beach in San Francisco, with topless bars and other terrible places. And I couldn’t get off the Boulevard. I was surrounded by cars. The fellows began to make off-color comments and odd emotions began to come up in the car.

This was our day for discussing the fall of man. So I gave them a strong talk when we got back to the center and cold them, “See how it works?” Then they understood clearly what that was. Until people can become children it is very difficult. I can’t say, “Okay, I am going to show you how.” We have to become it together. As long as people say “] want to take the Principle,” bur are still holding a lot, you have to get them to drop it before they can receive anything. Usually, when they drop it, there is a great emotional outpouring, and they just break down and cry one night for a long time. Until that can happen they can’t yet become innocent.

I felt that God kept challenging me, “Don’t ask them to drop chose things until you yourself drop what you’ve got.” le was as though God was challenging me all the time saying, “You can’t be a teacher until you are totally sincere and humble.” Each lecture was · almost like Calvary. I realized very acutely the part of me that I was not giving, the places where my heart was not open.

It was such a challenge and such a growing experience. I think that chose who go through that two- or three-week session as a teacher will know exactly what I am talking about. After that time, you don’t want to do anything else. You don’t care about your position. All I want to do is just to share the Principle for the rest of my life.