🇺🇸Douglas Paul Moriarty

Sitting on my bunk bed in 1971, inside the USS John F. Kennedy Aircraft Carrier, reading a TIME magazine, I was amazed when I read a short story about 777 couples who had a large wedding in South Korea, in 1970.

At the time I had been a recent convert to an Evangelical Christian group called "The Navigators," and was being told things that raised fear inside me — fear that things were all known, and even pre-destined by God. When I would explain to the Christian people I knew the difficulties of there being absolute pre-destination, I was shown several Biblical verses that said it was true, and that God knows everything… King James Bible: "Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?"

My Edgar Cayce "reincarnation" influenced view of life, that made me so happy after having returned from my belief that there was no God, was having a conflict with scripture that I knew little of. I left the Catholic Church at 14 years of age, because by 1965 the church had no sense to it. More or less a Bingo club, and a place where people cursed and yelled at each other in the parking lot after Mass. Latin?… forget about it.

That time with "The Navigators" was the beginning of a crisis for me about PREDESTINATION, that pulled me into a hell of fear and imagination that lasted for 2 years. The series of answers to my questions followed with more fearful Bible quotes and interpretation. More and more alone on an aircraft carrier, I imagined numerous things, and "lost the plot."

I was too afraid to even commit suicide, which is what I wanted the most. I just did not want to live. It was not only in my thought — I felt powers working on me that were driving me into despair, and the pain was very intense. I just decided to stay alive, and try to continue to be "the good person" I used to think I was, regardless of the nightmarish thoughts that were attacking me.

After 2 years where I was emotionally frozen, could feel little, and could not even cry over anything. Before that frozen time, I was moved to tears very often over things on the news, in the headlines, when I was feeling love and hope in believing in a Universal God — that I called Ralph. I called God Ralph, because I saw God as a friend, and not the way the church of my youth taught me. The frozen period was the opposite of hope and love. I was "frozen," slow of thought, unhappy to an extreme that I was so obviously for almost two years. Then something dawned on me… A question appeared to me saying, "do you remember trying to help that homeless woman, and after 3 attempts to do so, she hissed and spat at you? Now you see, she had no hope, and now you have no hope also. Do you remember praying and asking TO UNDERSTAND THE MOST BROKEN-HEARTED PERSON IN THE WORLD?… That if you could understand that and find hope yourself, THEN YOU COULD HAVE HOPE FOR ALL PEOPLE."

Yes, I remembered making a very fervent prayer about that, AND ABOUT FOUR OTHER MAJOR PRAYER-POINTS, All of which would come about and answered in years to come.

Then I remember a vision — more like a mental impression that came to me, when I had collapsed in a despair of hell and fear, two year earlier. The vision was of a pine tree that was uprooted and flew into the air, turning upside down, and smashing down and into my head completely, from the highest point of the tree to its upside-down roots. I was from that moment "frozen"… a polite way of saying mentally ill.

In the last few months of that two year long stretch, I began to assess that I had my prayer answered. I had experienced a severely broken heart. Over time, I began to understand that I was actually feeling the weight of my own ancestor's evil, brokenness, and fears from the lower realms.

Two years later, I learned from Divine Principle the pine tree symbolically represented 4 kinds of sin — from the original sin, to inherited sin, collective sin, and personal sin. Today, I think it likely that my ancestors used to teach others that all was pre-destined, and they may have been responsible for creating theological misunderstandings that hurt many people.

With this weight upon my soul for 2 years, by the time of 1973 I returned home from the Navy, and went to live in my older brother's house, who wanted to get me "on track." After helping out there rebuilding, and making money which I drank away, I heard a "thought-voice." That is how I describe Heavenly guidance.

The "thought-voice" said, "YOU will see the Elijah!

Now leave your brother's home (Buffalo, New York) and go to Philadelphia, PA.

Find out with what motivation America was created.

Then go to Washington and see what has become of that motivation.

Then go to Miami and become an electrical tradesman for a means of living." (I had been an aviation electricians mate in the Navy, and it was where and when I began to think more about God.)

My oldest brother Bobby would not understand that I was told, that I would see the Elijah — so I left his home the following day with 40 cents, and hitch-hiked toward Philadelphia. Soon I was in Niagara Falls in the evening, and got temporary work at an open Bakery, where the women owner kept giving me pastries, sandwiches, and I worked a few hours to make about 50 dollars. I slept in their work van. They were very kind to me.

Young people find it easy to meet and greet — soon I was in Scranton PA., and I met another 2 young people, a couple who let me stay with them in their rented house overnight.