🇺🇸Peggy Yujiri

Hosts: So I'm curious about your upbringing. You said you grew up near Philadelphia in a small college town. What was your family like? Were you in any spiritual tradition? I'm just curious where you come from.

Peggy: Well, I grew up in a Quaker community. It was founded by Quakers, but my family was United Methodist. I grew up with my parents and four brothers. The United Methodist part came from my father. He really liked the United Methodists, partly because they were against drinking, which he also was against. Having grown up with a father that was a heavy drinker, he had decided that wasn't going to be part of his life or his family's life. So we went to church every Sunday. I went to Sunday school every Sunday. When I was 13 or 14, I went to confirmation class and I was confirmed. I really enjoyed that because we got to have one-on-one with the pastor, who was kind of a distant figure until then. But after that, you're supposed to attend the regular service, which was super boring.

Hosts: A sentiment shared by many children, I think.

Peggy: Yes, even today. I kind of drifted away from it and from my Christian faith that I had grown up with. But my family used to spend the summers at the Jersey Shore. We even went to church there and vacation Bible school. So I did have a lot of that background. My older brother became an atheist and he was always trying to tell me I should be an atheist. Anyway, I pretty much drifted away from it. I guess you could say I was searching in a way, up until the time when I was in college. When I was 15, one of my older brothers died in Vietnam. Then when I was 19, my father died. He was quite older than most people's fathers. Those made my life kind of difficult because I was close to both my father and my older brother. So I went through a time when I didn't believe in God, but then I went through a time when I was really quite discouraged and depressed. At that time, I found myself starting to pray and that helped me a lot. It helped me come to feel that God must exist, otherwise praying wouldn't be helping me. If I was praying to just nothing, then I wouldn't be feeling that there was some kind of spiritual guidance. So I did believe in God, but I wouldn't necessarily have considered myself a Christian at that point.

Hosts: And what did you pray for during that time?

Peggy: I guess just to know what to do. At one point I wanted to drop out of college and go back home and just start over. I just didn't know what to do with my life. I felt at loose ends and like everything I tried wasn't working out the way I wanted it to. I grew up in the 60s and 70s and the world was a very conflicted place. There was a lot of protest against the Vietnam War. There was a huge drug culture that was very prevalent on college campuses. The sexual revolution, the whole hippie movement, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and Dr. Martin Luther King, the whole civil rights movement, a lot of student violence. I could see that the world wasn't the way it was supposed to be. And I really was having a hard time finding my place in it.

Hosts: Can I ask what you were studying in college at that time?

Peggy: Well, I started out as a biology major. I thought I wanted to become a marine biologist, but as I was studying biology, I tended to find that you end up researching something extremely small. I had taken a class in ornithology and we spent months talking about whether turkey buzzards could smell or not and all the research on it. At the end of that, the professor was like, well, they never really could figure it out. And I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. What I liked about biology was that it showed how everything's interconnected, how the world is a human organism and everything affects each other. But I found out that if you actually go into the field, you really have to focus in on something very small, and it just didn't interest me. When I was in high school, I had studied French and then German. I really got into German just because I didn't like French. The French method was very auditory and I wasn't good at learning through auditory. So I got into German, and when I went to college, I decided I'd better keep taking it or otherwise I'd forget everything I'd learned. I was in a German Lit class and I had to work really hard just to keep up, but I really enjoyed it. So I finally changed my major to German Lit. And that's why I took a junior year program in Germany, because that fit in with my German Lit major.

Hosts: Oh, wow. So how good was your German at the time?

Peggy: Well, I was good at reading. I could read Goethe and Schiller and everything, but I didn't realize until I went to Germany that my speaking was just abysmal. I got over there and I could understand what people were saying, but I couldn't figure out what to say.

Hosts: That's the thing about active and passive vocabulary. It's one thing to understand words on a page and it's another to know how to express what you want to say.

Peggy: Yeah. But it was a good experience for me.

Hosts: I've experienced that with learning a new language. What inspired you to stay in Germany? Because you only went there for an exchange year and then you decided to finish your studies in Germany. That's not a small thing, to make that kind of choice to stay in a foreign country.

Peggy: I really liked it there. I really liked the fact that the culture — I could go to opera concerts. Everything was almost free for students. And I was also not anxious to go back to Maine because there was a lot of snow there most of the year. It was a very small campus and it was a beautiful campus and a very good school. But at that time, there was just so much pressure to take drugs and to have sex. That was the main focus. I just wasn't having a good experience at college in the U.S., and in Germany it was a whole different thing, a whole different culture. I just felt more at home there. So I decided to stay.

Hosts: So it was there that you're finding a little bit more of your place, and then you meet the unification movement in your second year. Who did you meet? Were you approached? Did you go to some kind of meeting? How were you introduced?

Peggy: Well, interestingly, it was my older brother that joined the unification movement in the U.S. in Philadelphia.

Hosts: Interesting. The one who was atheist?

Peggy: Yes. I got a letter from my mom. She said, your brother joined a movement that thinks the man from Korea is the messiah. And I was like, what? How is that possible?

Hosts: Talk about straight out of left field, right? You needed some dots connected.

Peggy: Yeah. So I came back for the summer break. And that was just at the time that Father Moon was having a speech at Madison Square Garden in New York. We lived close to Philadelphia, which is only about 90 miles from New York. So we took the train up and attended the speech with my mom, and I think maybe my younger brother, but I'm not sure. I know my mom was there. It was this huge speech — Madison Square Garden was just packed. And people were outside with signs, protesting. I remember thinking, wow, I can't believe people are getting so excited about a Christian minister speaking that they're going to come out here and protest. You wouldn't think people in New York would even think twice about it. But we went in and we saw the speech. I couldn't say I was really inspired by Reverend Moon's speech, because it seemed to me that he was shouting — it was kind of like he was proclaiming something. And he was speaking in Korean with a translator. So it seemed very harsh and kind of scary in a way. But after the speech, my brother asked us to come back to their center, which was like this old hotel that was just derelict. They just ate peanut butter sandwiches. They were staying up all night taking down the posters they had put up all over the city. But I was very moved by the young people, because I felt, wow, these people have really dedicated themselves to this and they're very sincere. It was really very beautiful to see that. And my brother told me, did you hear what Reverend Moon said about John the Baptist? And I remember thinking, how is this my brother talking about John the Baptist? You've got to see that my brother was kind of a nihilist in a way. He was into drugs, he had long hair. He was just a person who questioned every kind of authority and was not about to do anything anybody told him unless he darn well wanted to. So to see this transformation in my brother was quite remarkable. I think my mother also was grateful to Reverend Moon and the movement for making this change happen in my brother, because she had been very worried about him.

Peggy: A couple of weeks later, Reverend Moon came to Philadelphia. There was a speech — I think it was called Day of Hope, or God's Hope for a Miracle, something like that. We also attended that together with my grandparents. At the table, I was sitting next to a brother from Germany. He gave me the address of the center in Munich, and I promised him I would go there. And that was the end of it. I went back, and then I could never find the center. It wasn't on any map because it was on this extremely back street that was only like a block long. I could never figure out where that street was. It took me about a month. But then one day, I was walking in the pedestrian zone — the downtown area where there's no cars. And I ran into a young lady that had a unification symbol button on her coat. I went up to her and said, oh, there you are, I've been looking for you.

Hosts: I'm sure she wasn't freaked out at all. This was a bolt from the blue.

Peggy: Yeah. So I went to the center. And it was a whole different story from New York. It was just a few people. They had wood floors and it was very cold. They gave me a lecture — the first lecture was the chapter two lecture. They told me about Satan and angels and Adam and Eve. And I was like, wow. I didn't really believe in Satan, angels, or Adam and Eve, because the United Methodists don't really — I mean, maybe some of them believe in that, but they more think of it as metaphorical. So I told the brother — his name was Hannes Turner — I said, how do you know this is true? And he said, this is the truth of God. And I'm like, okay, the German conviction, right? Then they invited me to stay for dinner. The dinner was a bowl of mashed potatoes. There were no chefs in that house. Then after dinner they said, now we're going to read the Divine Principle. So we sat in a circle, each reading a page or so. Then I asked a question. And the sister in charge said, we don't ask questions. And I was like, okay. After that, I just said, I don't think I could do that.

Peggy: But then they kept calling me, and they kept calling me. Another time I went back because they kept calling me. I said, I'd better go back, because they're trying so hard, I should go back. When I got there, one sister was talking to me. What they did was they said, here's this person who went to the speech in Madison Square Garden — she already knows everything, and yet she's not taking responsibility for what she knows. So they felt I was kind of a superficial person. This sister was trying to tell me that they weren't going to be spending that much more time with me if I wasn't really going to take responsibility. But while she was talking to me — she was one of the national leaders at the time, because Paul and Crystal Werner were in the US — she was nodding off while she was talking to me, kind of scolding me. And I felt, oh my God, she worked so hard. She was exhausted. And here she is taking time to talk to me, who is not really serious about this. So I really felt, what can I say, these people are just so sincere. And I felt like in comparison, I'm a very selfish person. But I still didn't believe any of it. So I didn't see how I could join.

Peggy: After that, I thought, well, they try so hard, I should do something back for them. So I said, I'm going to go to one of these weekend workshops. I called them — it was a few weeks later — and I said, I'm going to go to the weekend workshop, because they had always invited me. That was on a Thursday or something, and I was supposed to go up there on a Friday. I had to cancel everything I had planned. I didn't even go to classes — I said, I'm not going to go to classes today, I'm going to sit here and read this book they gave me. I was just trying to compensate for the fact that they were putting so much effort into it. I only actually had a small book that was chapter one. I was reading this book, I was on page 40 or so. And for some reason — I have no idea why — all of a sudden, I was in my room there, it was in the Olympic Village near the BMW factory. And somehow I just connected it to something I learned when I was in my confirmation class, which was that if all the 12 tribes of Israel come together, the Lord will come again. I remember when I was in my confirmation class, I asked the pastor, well, why don't we just get all those tribes together? Then the Lord can come, we can have a better world.

Hosts: Interesting.

Peggy: It seemed so simple to me. I'm like, why didn't anybody think of this until now?

Hosts: Brilliant.

Peggy: And the pastor said, oh, well, that's just symbolic. But somehow I connected those two things — it's like two wires put together. And for some reason, all of a sudden I realized that Reverend Moon was the second coming of Christ. That just became crystal clear for me. It was not something I was expecting, looking for. I didn't think Christ was coming again. I didn't really think any of that, but all of a sudden, a light bulb went off in my head. It was so clear to me that I got all my stuff together, went right down to meet those people in that pedestrian area and said, why didn't you tell me? I just said, why didn't you tell me that Reverend Moon was the second coming? And they were like, what? Well, you went to the speech in Madison Square Garden, hello, duh. But I didn't listen, or I didn't understand any of that. I can't really explain it. Even though I had honored their effort — I felt like, if you could do something with your life, you should dedicate your life to making the world a better place — somehow in my own life I couldn't do that, because I felt it would just be a waste of time, because you'd never get anywhere. You really couldn't have an impact. But somehow this understanding that I had now — that God was actively working in the world, that God wasn't just some benevolent being up in the sky, but that God actually could work in this world — it made me feel like, yeah, you could do it. With God working with you, you could make a difference. So I actually went to the workshop near Frankfurt — it's called Camberg, they still have that in Weinmuda. I went up there, and I actually never came back. I had to come back and pick up my stuff. I was just like, this is it. I'm in.

Hosts: Wow. That's really incredible to me, because just hearing your interactions with them, they did not make it easy for you to want to be a part of it. It's amazing that somehow it just connected for you. It feels like divine intervention in a sense, that it wasn't through some kind of simple logical explanation, but really this internal connection that sparked a lightbulb for you.

Peggy: Yeah, because actually nobody ever could have persuaded me. I'm not really an easy person to persuade about anything.

Hosts: That's so significant. I think a lot of people think we are a movement of people who are kind of duped or persuaded into something. So I find that very reassuring to hear. Even in my own family, when I decided to receive the Blessing, my aunts and uncles were like, are you sure about this? And I was like, come on, you guys have known me since I was a baby — since when do I ever do anything just because someone tells me to do it? And they're like, yeah, that's true. The people you met, you could have run in the opposite direction pretty easily. But also there's a credit to you for doing your own research — you sat down, you read it, and you gave it an opportunity to be open-minded, to receive some kind of revelation or inspiration from God, from whatever force made those wires connect in yourself. That's incredible.

Peggy: Yeah. And within a week, I was back on the street in Frankfurt, approaching people on the street, asking if they believed in God, if they wanted to hear some teaching. And I'm like, I really cannot believe I'm doing this. This is the last thing I would ever do in my life — trying to convince people about believing in something. I always felt everybody had their own responsibility to decide what they believed in. I remember when I was a kid on the beach, one day these two girls came up to me and they said, do you believe in Jesus? They said, if you just say the words, I believe Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, and I invite Jesus into my heart, then you'll be saved and you'll go to heaven. And it offended me so much that I never forgot it. Because I felt, that is impossible, that God works through magic fairy dust or something — you just say some words and then you go to heaven. No, that can't be right. The fact that they believed that — I felt, how can people believe that? It just kept with me. I think that's part of what appeals to me about the unification movement: we don't say that God is going to save you through some kind of magic power. The only way the world is going to get better is if people actually get out there and make it better. Each one of us has to invest ourselves. Each one of us has to live in a way that serves others, in a way that we create that new paradigm.

Hosts: Yeah, like the words have to have some substance behind it, right?

Peggy: Exactly. It has to be something you live, not something you just say. I think that's one of the things that's kept me going all these years: no matter what somebody else does, or even how successful our church is, or the visible impacts of the efforts that we've made are, it doesn't change the fact that the way you're supposed to live your life is to live for the sake of others, to build a better world, to sacrifice and serve others. All of that doesn't change. I never thought that this is something I'm going to do for a few years, and then after the world is saved and the kingdom of heaven is on earth, I'm going to go do something else. I always anticipated that this is a long-term deal. But anyway, I've never regretted it. I've never regretted my choice on that day. I've never thought, oh, maybe I should have done something different. I'm extremely grateful that I've had the chance to have this kind of life, and to learn the point of view that Reverend and Mrs. Moon taught. It's made a huge impact on my life.

Hosts: What would you say about your experience that helped you not to regret that decision? Because for a lot of people, even on their journey of faith — and not to say that it's wrong to struggle or question your choices in the past — that is a part of the faith journey. I'm curious, what was it for you that really reaffirmed, even in those moments of great struggle or adversity, that this is the right decision for me?

Peggy: Well, that's a hard question to answer, but my guess is that I've always done everything because I wanted to. I've never done anything in this movement because somebody just told me to, because somebody else said I should do it and therefore I should do it. I always felt like it's what I wanted to do. And I don't mean wanted to do it in an external way, because I didn't really want to do any of the things. I didn't want to go out and talk to people, I didn't want to go out and fundraise, I didn't want to go out and organize conferences and invite people to them. I didn't want to have people tell me that I was brainwashed and an idiot and misled. I didn't want any of that. But what I did want was to help God in building a better world. And I did trust that Reverend and Mrs. Moon were sincere in their efforts to do it. Would they have done anything different? Maybe. Some things didn't have the result that we wanted. A lot of things that I've done, the results were pretty paltry. But that's still what I wanted to do. I didn't think there was anything more important than that. So what kept me going was the fact that I felt I was doing what I had committed myself to and what I desired to do, and that if I just kept trying, eventually that would lead to some good result, that it would be making a contribution.

Hosts: That's a very level-headed approach. If you were just saying, oh, that person made me do this, then I think you might have been resentful sometimes. Some members of our community have come to that conclusion — resentment versus personal responsibility or ownership of their decisions. That's an incredibly healthy way to look at it. What I hear when you describe that is very much not basing your choices on the results, on an expectation of results. Because I think sometimes we get fixated that, this is the answer, it's going to solve everything. And when it doesn't, or this is going to make a huge difference, and then it doesn't, we're so disappointed. That disappointment often is what causes us to question, well, did I make the right choice? And the regret starts to surface, because it's hard to sit with those emotions. So it's very inspiring to hear that you have a very grounded approach to it, and that the decision itself stands because of the effort that you want to make, rather than just the end result.

Peggy: Well, I don't want to finish my life and feel like I should have done more, although I probably will. I've been disappointed and hurt. I've felt unappreciated at times and undervalued, but I think that's just normal for anybody trying to do anything. The more difficult the thing you're trying to do, the more you're letting yourself out there to be disappointed. But I feel like the way to overcome disappointment is not to become resentful and angry, but to find other ways to give. There's always another way you can give.

Hosts: That's beautiful. So Peggy, what would you say has been your most impactful time in the church? You've been in various leadership positions. I know you were a leader in the Colorado community at one point and dealt with some very interesting characters.

Peggy: Well, there's interesting characters everywhere.

Hosts: Yes, that's true.

Peggy: I don't know exactly what you mean by impactful.

Hosts: Like, when you look back on maybe the different campaigns or positions that you held — what time period or what project were you involved in, or what people you were working with had a deep impact on you? What stands out to you in all your time?

Peggy: Well, one thing that made an impact on my relationship with God was a few months — maybe five or six months — after I joined the church. I was in a small center in Lübeck up on the North Sea. I was with another sister. At that time, Germany was asked to send out missionaries to, I think, 95 nations. There weren't that many members, so I'd say probably more than half the members went out as missionaries. The young lady I was in the center with went to South Africa. So I was by myself, from morning till night, from maybe nine in the morning till five at night, walking around in the pedestrian area, approaching people, inviting them to lectures, literally day and night. At that time, we had a rule that you didn't sit down at lunchtime — you just drank a coffee standing up and ate your little sandwich. Of course, everybody rejected me. First of all, here I was an American. I was in northern Germany, and I think northern Germany is probably even less religious than southern Germany. People's religion there is working hard and taking care of your family. So obviously, I had a tremendous amount of rejection. I used to go to this church and pray. They had these carved stone figures of all these knights in armor around the front of the church. There was one little knight — he was called the Little Knight, I think — and he was kneeling. I used to feel, that's me. Everybody else is this big, scary knight, and I'm just this little person trying to break through. Then one day, I sat down on a bench and I was closing my eyes and I heard these little children playing around me. I just felt the innocence of their voices really touched my heart. And I felt, this must be how God feels when he sees people. It's like he can't find that kind of innocence anywhere, except maybe in children. Innocence is what God is really looking for — not to be people always rejecting and persecuting and shutting God out. So I really felt that that time, even though it was difficult, helped me to feel closer to God, because I wasn't really a person who had grown up praying a lot.

Peggy: Another time — when I was here in Colorado — one thing that I really loved doing that our movement had was the Middle East Peace Initiative. We brought a lot of ministers to the Middle East, and we were working for Middle East peace. I felt that was personally so meaningful to me. I felt it was really such an important effort. When we stopped doing it, I was so disappointed. I just felt, well, now what am I doing? It had been something that I really felt invested a lot of effort in. We did have a lot of really good results. It was something that really touched people's hearts. So I'd say those two things have made a lot of impact on me.

Hosts: No, that's exactly what we were hoping to hear — what impacted you in your spiritual life, what nourished you from being part of this movement. What I hear in both of those stories is a humility to want to give. In the first one, you could connect with God's heart — thinking from your heavenly parent's perspective. And in the second story, you really had this heart to serve, to give. You saw how you serving other people with this faith perspective could bring real change in the world. I see that as only a positive impact on the world, to have more people who think that way, who are living for the sake of others and for a greater vision. And that little effort matters. Even if it just matters to one other person, or just to me, or just to God, it matters.

Peggy: Right. Yeah, that's certainly true. There's always something you can give. When you're not thinking of what you can give, but centering on yourself, that's where you get sidetracked and can get depressed and discouraged. It's very easy to do. We all have that tendency at times.

Hosts: I know recently, one big way that you're giving back now is you're supporting single members of the unificationist faith to find their life partner. It's a very different kind of mission. You're working with young people to overcome their insecurities and their fears, and open themselves up to this world of being in a relationship. I'm curious to hear what that's been like for you, and how that's informed your spirituality, and how your spirituality has informed these young people.

Peggy: Oh, well, it's something I feel called to do. Sometimes it can be stressful helping young people, because I feel like I have about 30 kids now.

Hosts: Much more than three — ten times more, exactly.

Peggy: If my phone dings at night and I've already gone to bed, I get up because I think, uh-oh, one of the kids needs me.

Hosts: Crisis.

Peggy: Sometimes my husband gets mad because somebody calls me during dinner and I pick it up, because I just think, well, maybe they need something. I try to make myself available and help what I can. It's very rewarding for me if people actually have a successful marriage and family. That's really what I hope for. I think that's also the hope for our movement in the future — that there will be successful families. Without focusing on that, sometimes it might not happen as many times as it does. All of you young people, you're the hope for the future. So I feel that's where the focus should be.

Hosts: What would you say is the hardest thing about supporting young people, besides being available at all hours of the day?

Peggy: I guess the hardest thing is the way we limit ourselves. Sometimes somebody doesn't see the value in the other. Somebody might approach them, but that's not their type. My husband wasn't really my type. My husband is a really great person for me, but he's not the person I would have — if I had seen a hundred men, I don't think I would have chosen my husband out of that group. He was a totally different person than I expected to marry. So I can see the value in having an open mind and coming to learn about the value of that other person. But so many times we're limited by their height, their weight, their education, their looks, so many other things.

Hosts: That resonates for me too. I can totally relate. My husband is not somebody that I necessarily would have picked for myself either. But I think next year is our 20th anniversary.

Peggy: Oh, wow.

Hosts: Looking back, it's like, oh yeah, we actually complement each other so well. And the journey to learning to appreciate each other has been so fulfilling. But he's not the type that I was initially attracted to, or the type that I had crushes on typically as a kid. Do you find that there's a way that you try to encourage people to stay open-minded? Even when maybe they feel like, oh, that's not my type, or there's some expectations on their part that they're unconsciously seeking?

Peggy: Well, like you said, I can encourage people. I can't — everybody, if you're going to get married, you have to take ownership of it. So there's no point in pushing people. It's very hard to know the whole background of a person, why they might have prejudices in certain areas. But I know one candidate — I even got an animated GIF that said, open mind. And I put it up on the screen while we were talking.

Hosts: That's so great. I love it. I hope they got a good laugh. Lighten the mood a little.

Peggy: Well, it was a particular person that had said no to so many people — dozens of people had contacted him that I had suggested, and he said, no, no, no. And I'm kind of like, we're getting to the bottom of the barrel here. Maybe we need to rethink some of this.

Hosts: Maybe your perspective. And our unificationist culture, just for some of the listeners who don't know, we have a matchmaking culture. Now Reverend and Mrs. Moon no longer suggest matches — this comes from your parents or your community, or a supporter like Peggy, who is there to coach you and guide you through the experience, but you make your own decision about who your match is. Peggy was supporting my husband when I met him; they were in the same community. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think he'd made a lot of those open-minded choices, coming to that point. Speaking from experience, it is really necessary to have someone like you who is there to coach and guide and remind people to not make decisions out of fear or out of prejudice. Whatever it means for you to be open-minded means something different for every single person. It's so healthy to have that in your life, because it doesn't always come from your parents. Your parents want the best for you, and they're like, oh yeah, we'll just support you, whatever. But then it's nice to have the other person who's like, no, I think you need to work on some areas here. If you want a successful marriage — which is literally our tagline, we want to create families that are God-centered, God-centered marriages — it doesn't just poof and happen, like you were talking about earlier. There's no magic wand, there's no fairy dust. You can invite inspiration, but you have to receive it, right? I think this is definitely a huge asset to our current community, to start young people off — young and old, there's a whole range of people who come wanting to get married — but to start them off on the right foot, like, you think about this while you're single. Then when you're going into the relationship, you're already in that mindset of, how can I be open-minded to this other person and be curious about them? I think that's a huge piece of that, right? That curiosity — like, I don't know everything, and maybe they have something that God wants to offer to me that I'm not seeing. And your husband's Japanese, Peggy — I'm sure you've had moments where culturally you've had to make some effort to understand one another.

Peggy: Definitely. When I first met my husband, I felt like I had been turned upside down. I was walking around on my hands and on my feet, it was just so unexpected. I made up my mind early on to not criticize — and not just because that's the right thing to do. I knew that if I was going to criticize my own spouse, I was going to torpedo my happiness and my family's happiness. So even though sometimes, because of language, my husband said something that was kind of like, what did you say? I took a step back and just said, well, he's speaking in English and he probably doesn't even know how that sounds from the other side. So I'm not going to take offense. And I'm sure he's had the same experience with me many times. Originally he was hoping to marry somebody from Japan, which his parents would have been much happier with, of course. He is a good son, so he didn't necessarily want to blow his parents totally out of the water by marrying an American, but that's what he ended up doing. But it's been — gee, we first met in 79, so it's been quite a few years.

Hosts: A few decades.

Peggy: Yeah. And I always look at my husband, I think, wow, what would I do without him? He's just always right there by my side all these years, putting up with all my American-ness.

Hosts: All your American-ness. That's incredible. You described first meeting him as like walking on your hands — your life was turned upside down — and then decades later, now he's right by your side, you can't imagine life without him. You talked about your early journey meeting the church and your current work. What keeps you personally inspired to want to still engage with the movement, and engage with this belief system?

Peggy: I guess I still feel like I have something to give. I'm actually just as inspired about it as I was from the very beginning. I feel like our movement is just the only thing out there that's really telling the truth about what's going on with this world and how it's not going to change unless we take a different approach. And not saying that we have to go out and kill the other side, but that we really have to forgive and unite. Those are such important messages now, more than ever. So I wouldn't say I'm any less inspired about it now than I was. I might not be going out on the street from eight in the morning until five at night. But I still see the potential. The potential can only be realized when people actually take responsibility and make effort. There are so many problems out there that there's no shortage of things one could address and try to change. It's not like the world today looks so much better than it did in 1974 — it's a very dangerous place. That's not going to change unless we — we can't expect the government to change it. Obviously a lot of people do expect the government to change it, but it doesn't, it's not effective. Governments are made up of people. If the people are looking out for their own interests, then the government's looking out for its own interests. So it's going to take a change of perspective. And that's something we can all have something to say about. I think that's something our movement has some very important things to say about, that weren't being said enough. I mean, if we had kept up the MEPI, maybe we wouldn't have the same situation right now in Israel that we do, and in Gaza.

Hosts: I wondered that too, even as you mentioned it earlier.

Peggy: I'm not trying to overemphasize how big an impact we had, but even a small group of people working towards something can make a difference, even in small ways.

Hosts: I agree with that for sure. Just creating spaces to have the opportunity to have conversations with people that you disagree with, or to engage with others — it just opens up the possibility of reconciliation. If you're never in a room with someone — this is the issue we see with online culture, right? You're not being confronted with the person that you're attacking. We experience this online; the Unification Church experiences a lot of hate online. It's very easy to speak hatred to someone you're not actually seeing the reaction from. But you can sit down in a room with them — it's a different story. You have to watch your words. You have to think about how it's going to affect them. So there's huge value in creating those spaces. We had our last webinar on that with IMAP, toxic polarization, and we had a guy from Braver Angels that tries to get Republicans and Democrats in the same room to talk things through.

Peggy: Yeah, I'm familiar with that organization.

Hosts: It's so needed. And that's what you're talking about — that change of perspective, and that this has offered you, and the work that you support. I think that's a great takeaway for us: to find those small ways that we can contribute this worldview in our lives and other people's lives to affect real change where we can. Thank you so much, Peggy, for your time, for sharing your story with us.

Peggy: Thank you for inviting me. I really admire the work both of you do, and so I was happy to participate. I hope you'll do a lot more.

Hosts: Well, we admire your work. That's why we invited you on. So thank you for making time for us.