🇺🇸Sandra Lowen

Hosts: Thank you so much for joining us. I was really excited to have you on as a guest because last year you gifted me with one of your books and I've been reading it, and I have to say, I love it. The title is Confessions of a Very Bad Girl — Reflections. The writing style is very similar to The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, which I also recently finished. The feel of it, the descriptions, the narrative has that same kind of deep anguish of the struggles that the characters go through, but at the same time there is this love and yearning and a kind of searching happening at the same time. I haven't quite finished it yet, but I'm loving it so far.

Sandra: I'm so happy that you are enjoying it. Actually, I've written several books, and I'm a little slow with publication sometimes. I have three in print. This particular one is, as I describe it, 95% what has happened to me growing up — and of course two generations prior, with the civil rights struggle as the background for the action that's going on. It details my life from infancy to age seventeen. I won't say more, because then I'm giving away the end, which is always awful — a spoiler alert.

Sandra: I have another book that was inspired by my going on the Trail of Tears walk with the Women's Federation for World Peace back in 2013. Part of my ancestry is Native Cherokee, and detailing that Trail of Tears through the eyes of a great-aunt of mine is something that moved me. I felt her presence at every step along the path. It's a little girl's search for her honour song — something that was necessary before a Native person passed into the next world. My husband's family is Jewish, and they grew up in the Holocaust days. So I dealt with how his father survived that Holocaust. He actually gave me permission to write his story, but he said, ‘Wait until I'm dead.' So I waited until he was dead, and then I wrote it. I have several others that are non-biographical. Right now I'm working on one that deals with my reflections as an older person, and some of my experiences having worked with both Reverend and Dr. Moon over the course of the fifty-plus years that I've been involved with the movement.

Hosts: So you're one of our earliest members in the American movement. How did you grow up? Were you raised spiritually or religious? Where did that lead you to meet the Unification Church?

Sandra: When I was five years old, I was out making mud pies one day and I got this revelation. I felt what I believed was the spirit of God, or the presence of God, telling me that I was destined to meet the Messiah during my lifetime. Would I be willing to follow if that occurred? And you're five years old — what are you going to say? No? So I concluded that that was God's ideal for me.

Sandra: A little family background: my father came from the AME church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, but he was not active. My mother was Catholic, and of course that made her very active. For two people of those different religions at that time to marry was a cause for excommunication. My mother therefore lived with my father and went to church all the time — she went to receive Holy Communion all the time — until their marriage became common-law legal, at which point she was excommunicated. So that was my spiritual background. No judgement there, I'm just telling you.

Hosts: It sounds like a very diverse upbringing of beliefs.

Sandra: We knew who God was and how we should live, and I felt a real love for God. It was natural for me with my parents' upbringing, even though they weren't overtly going to church. We read every night from the Bible. Every night we had a seven o'clock prayer meeting — my father, my mother, my sister and me. We did this until I was seventeen years old. Every night, wherever you were at seven, you were supposed to stop and read the Bible — a particular verse, a particular chapter.

Sandra: But what really launched my spiritual career, I suppose, is that one day my aunt, who was a Baptist, turned up at the house and announced that we were all going to hell — because we weren't going to church. I guess my parents decided, well, what the heck, we're going to indicate that we're going anyway. I therefore became involved with my aunt's church, the Progressive Baptist Church, and attended church almost every day of the week. We were told you have to go. There was Red Circle, which I don't even remember what it was. There was a charity club, and missionary society, and prayer society, and choir rehearsals. You went every day. There was something to go for — to the point that the minister used to tease us and say, ‘We should give you keys to the church, because you're there more than I am.'

Hosts: You mentioned your aunt and a little bit of Native American lineage. Was your father or your mother of Native American descent? And did that have any bearing on your spiritual upbringing as well?

Sandra: Both sides were. It's an interesting story; I won't go into the whole thing. But they were very much spirit people. We were all somewhat spiritually open. I would say we had spiritual gifts and could walk into situations and understand them pretty much right away. So that was more of an inheritance, I believe, that I got — being able to tell the character of people and the interests of people. And that worked well, and not so well, throughout my life.

Hosts: So you had this really rich religious upbringing — reading the Bible every night, at the Baptist church every day. I grew up with Southern Baptists, so if you're not at church at least three times a week, you're doing something wrong. You said until the age of seventeen — was there a turning point there for you?

Sandra: Well, yes and no. I went away to college. I was no longer doing the seven o'clock prayer meeting, but I still maintained a very rich spiritual life. I went to chapel whenever it was open. I prayed independently. When I returned home, I resumed, but my parents had lost something of the religious part, so they were not doing the seven o'clock prayer meetings any more. They had abandoned that. I continued my spiritual life, because amazing things were happening spiritually. I was feeling pulled back into the Catholic Church, and I actually felt that my mother, who had lost her Catholic rite, had missed something — and I wanted to get that something. I had aspirations of becoming a nun.

Hosts: That's very interesting. What were you studying in college at the time?

Sandra: I started off studying pre-med, and the first day you walk in, you have to kill a frog. Animus — why should I kill this thing so I can look at its insides? It didn't make sense. It was murder to me, and I spent the whole day crying. Somehow I graduated to earthworms, and midway through, they told me to drop it into acid, or some substance, that would knock it out and it would be okay. I put mine in, and it started having unhappiness. So I took it into the water and I washed it off, and then I took it to the window — we were on the first floor — and I said, ‘Be free, go.' It came to me and said, ‘You are so in the wrong field.' Too soft of a heart. So I went into education. I graduated in secondary ed with English and history and psychology, and I enjoyed psychology and wound up eventually doing social work, and then studying to become a therapist. And then, just for fun, I decided to start writing books, and there we are. I got a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing.

Hosts: So throughout college, you said you felt this calling to regain what your mother had lost in the Catholic Church. What were your prayers like at the time?

Sandra: I just told God, ‘I really want to know you well. I want to be a part of whatever is building up in life for me. I want to be able to find it. I want to know, as Jesus said, my time of visitation.' At one point, I really started to receive parts of this teaching — this Divine Principle teaching. Being that excited about God, being excited about love, being excited about a spirit world that I was very aware of, I began to search for God actively, looking to see where the Messiah might be. That took me on an exploration through a lot of New Age teachings. Someone was trying to get me to be involved in Baha'i; somebody in the more charismatic movements; somebody to go back to Judaism and study the roots of Christianity. But I knew it wasn't where God was working at that time, and I was looking for God's work being done on earth.

Hosts: That's very interesting. I think a lot of Christians — very active, very deeply devout Christians — they're not always seeking for the Messiah to appear. It's a little bit of like, ‘It'll happen, but probably not when I'm alive.' So to have that, and from such a young age, that's really fascinating. When did you actually meet the movement?

Sandra: Well, the church part wasn't established actually until 1972. I'll go more with the movement, because that was what I was so excited about — the Holy Spirit Association. What a name. That really knocked me out when I heard about it.

Sandra: The first time I heard about it, I would see people on the street talking to other people. You're on a college campus — you know what happens there. They would walk and talk to different people, but no one ever spoke to me. If there were five people sitting in one row, they would talk to the first four people but not to me. So they would walk away. I thought, ‘Okay, fine. But what is going on? What are they talking about?'

Sandra: I had a series of spiritual experiences, because I believe in the spirit. I believe that we are spirit-led. After a series of experiences, I started to recognise some things that, if you will, came from spirit — teachings from spirit. Like, I knew I did not need to get married and participate in that active romantic life, because I had to wait until the Messiah came. Several people received that, including one woman that I was very close to. She had received that, and she was much older than I. She went out and she dated, and her great gift from God was her voice — and she lost it completely. She said, ‘You know, it's because I didn't listen to what God said.' She also was of Native heritage. These kinds of things were going on around me.

Sandra: I had a series of experiences that had me questioning whether or not God really blessed true marriage at this point in our lives. I was very interested in the course of human history, and why it was that we kept making the same mistakes over and over again, and why were some chapters included in the Bible and not others, and why did it all stop after Jesus? Why had nobody sat down since the Council of Nicaea and really figured out what human history was all about? Those were the kinds of questions I had.

Sandra: I think God got tired of my questioning, and therefore one day I'm walking down the street and I just get this inspiration to go up and knock on this particular door. I knocked on the door, and out came a gentleman, and I said to him, ‘Here I am. Where am I?' He told me that this was the Unified Family, and he's looking at me like, ‘What are you doing here? Are you selling something?' Ultimately I came to the lectures, and I heard Divine Principle. When I walked in, it's just like my spirit world said, ‘Don't question this, just listen.' So I sat and I listened all the way through, to the point that they were always asking me, ‘Are you understanding what we're saying?' ‘Yes, I understand you.' When I got to the crowning point of human history, I was electrified. I just felt like, ‘My life starts now.' I was determined that this was the way I was going to live.

Hosts: That is such an opposite experience to a lot of the stories that we hear of the older generation who met the movement. Typically it's, ‘Oh, somebody bumped into me on the street.' But the spirit just led you right to the front door. You sought them out.

Sandra: Right. What comes up for me is that most theories, or most religions or philosophies or spiritual movements, have three aspects. There's the theories or teachings, there's the lifestyle, and there's the social system. The teachings — absolutely, I was so amazed at what I was hearing. The lifestyle: they were living in a rented house that they were renting from Scientology, and people slept on the floor on sleeping bags. I thought, ‘Ooh — a bit primitive.' The first meal I went to that I stayed for lunch, there was a promise it was supposed to be a big celebration. I went in and they had white rice and canned mixed vegetables, and they're really trying to convince me this is chicken stew. I don't think there's been a chicken anywhere near that pot. There was not very much food, and everybody's kind of looking at it with longing — ‘Oh, I hope it's enough by the time I get there.' I'm looking at these people thinking, ‘You poor souls, I can go home.' I really thought I would take the minimum. One woman walked up to me and said, ‘Oh, would you like some of mine?' because I had so little on my plate. What a beautiful heart she had. It really moved me.

Sandra: But I will tell you, to be honest, I was not moved by the people. They were not my kind of guys. I had come from doing all of this soul-searching and world-searching. I had been involved with the Red Cross. I had been involved with the Urban League. I had been involved with some levels of government. I had done a lot of things like that. So I was extremely disappointed that we did not do social action at that time. I would say, ‘Do we want to go sing at Christmas for old people? Can we start somewhere?' No. It was just not happening. Everybody was kind of bent on this thing. And the social system — I don't think I ever got it. Somehow it never got to me how this all works and makes sense. But absolutely, the Principle knocked me out.

Hosts: Can you describe the cultural make-up of the movement that you met? It's my understanding that you were one of the first, if not the first, African-American members to join our movement in the United States, possibly even globally.

Sandra: Not globally. Globally, an outspoken person is Mrs. Barbara Van Praagh. I think she's in her nineties now. She lives, I'm going to say, around the Amsterdam area. She was an opera singer; she was witnessed to in Italy where she was studying opera. She has quite a legacy, and I hope someone somewhere is getting her story, because last I heard she was alive and well.

Sandra: So not globally — but certainly I was one of the first, if not the first, in the United States. As I said, I was used to an international culture. However, a lot of the movement was not. If you think of what the world was like in the 1960s, mid-sixties, many of our members had never met an African-American. Many of them didn't know what to do with African-Americans. Dr. Young-oon Kim said when she first came, she went to what I guess was an evangelical church, because it sounds like it was quite conservative and quite spiritual. It frightened her to the point that she was afraid to go to that kind of church again. So many of the religious people we might have met didn't work.

Sandra: We also witnessed to a lot of people that were not educated intellectually, so they could enjoy the spirit. But if people didn't reach out to them spiritually, it became very difficult for them. As the Principle teaches us, there's intellect, there's emotion, and there's will. While everybody has some of everything, we usually think of European people, white people, as the intellects — they do all the creating. Emotion, we think of African people and people that live below the equator, who deal with a lot of vibrance and colour and music. And then the willed people as the Asian, South Asian people, that will do anything with a will that you ask them — they will go forward, they will accomplish. Duty-bound.

Sandra: So that is the culture into which I came. Everybody in the centre, with a few notable exceptions like Dr. Edwin Ong who was not living in D.C., pretty much everybody was a white person. There were no people of any colour living in the centre. So it was easy, for people who didn't feel the excitement and the love and the joy of community, to just drift away. They found other things to do that might not have been as satisfying, but still they were good and lived their lives. Sadly, we lost those people.

Sandra: Most people came from the Midwest. If there were students, they were people that were in town from somewhere else, not native to D.C. Of course, Dr. Young-oon Kim was there. Colonel Park, or Dr. Park as he became, lived out in Virginia, so we rarely saw him. David Kim lived on the West Coast. And Sang-Ik Choi, or Papa Choi as he was known, lived in the Bay Area out on the West Coast.

Hosts: So the Korean leaders, it sounds like, were the ones leading the movement at the time?

Sandra: There were Korean leaders, but their influence was not as big as it is now. We had only Young-oon Kim on the East Coast. One of her major disadvantages was that she was a woman. That made it difficult. There's a whole lot of church history I'm not going to get into unless you ask me. But there was a lot going on. The leaders could not get together. It was more of a competition than a cooperation. Dr. Park was very much deflected by the fact that he was involved still with the Korean embassy, and he was running the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation, which sponsored the Little Angels and some other things. But our main influence was, of course, Young-oon Kim, because she was the one that was working on the East Coast all the time.

Hosts: Given that the make-up of the centre was so homogenous, how do you view where we're at culturally as a movement now?

Sandra: I think we're still struggling as a movement that understands its place. We have become hierarchical. If you look at our make-up just from a cultural point of view, the people at the top are Koreans. The good of that, of course, is that True Parents are Korean. The bad of that is that the Koreans don't always know the culture and don't always try to get involved with the culture. But I'll leave it alone. Then, if we drop down a level, we have the Japanese. The Japanese are beautiful, beautiful people who gave so much, especially financially, to this country — again, not necessarily knowing the culture.

Sandra: I'll never forget at Yankee Stadium, we had a brother who went out and bought a truckload of watermelons. He was asked, ‘Why did you buy these watermelons?' He says, ‘Well, I'm going to take them down to the black community and give them out, because black people like watermelons.' The area he wanted to give them out in was an area in which doctors and lawyers and people like that lived. And all you want is for someone to come to your door and say, ‘Hi, I have a watermelon for you.' The racial implications are very lost. What I mean is that without studying a culture thoroughly, it is almost impossible to know it. Sometimes we got the idea that we knew our culture better than anybody else — we knew Unification culture, therefore we knew all cultures better than anybody else. That made us a bit snobby. People often were nice to us, but not necessarily.

Sandra: In the early days, Dr. Young-oon Kim told us, ‘Don't witness to Asians.' And we're like, ‘Why?' But we never got an answer to that question, which was unfortunate. I wish she could have been more clear about that. It was only much later that we started to bring in people that were Spanish-speaking and other folks. But basically, people were witnessing to people that looked like them in the mirror. That made our culture difficult. Father, on the other hand — Reverend Moon — was pushing for internationalism, interculturalism. That was something that sometimes we overlooked.

Hosts: I wonder if there's a little bit of geographical influence in how the hierarchy crystallised. Historically, our movement started out of South Korea, so it makes sense that the earliest members would be Korean, and then it gradually spread to Japan and other nations around there. I'm definitely seeing a lot more diversity personally than even when I was growing up. I think it was predominantly white and Asian, and of course a lot of mixed-race kids because of our international intercultural marriages. But lately, I've been seeing a lot of families from the African continent, from all different countries, and from the Philippines and other Southwest Asian countries. I wonder if the timeline of it geographically also kind of solidifies, in a sense, what we see in the leadership — because it's not always conscious on their part to elect leaders who represent a more diverse array of our membership.

Sandra: Certainly we are evolving, and that is the good thing — that we are learning how to do things. But I still remember, shortly after Reverend Moon's death, when his youngest son was travelling around in town-hall meetings, one brother stood up and asked when there would come a time when more African-American and African peoples took leadership in our movement. He said, ‘Oh no, that's not happening for another three generations,' at which point everybody kind of went, ‘Yikes.' That was quite a shock to us. I am not involved with what is going on with his movement at this point, but it was very disappointing for many African-Americans that were present at that moment.

Sandra: There were also other divisions that came about — even one leader saying, ‘I trust African people, but not African-American people,' which was not good to be said in public spaces. Whatever his personal feelings are, his personal feelings are his — but it's not something you put out in your public meeting. So we sometimes were very insensitive, and did not understand the impact of what we were saying, or the feelings of the people that were sometimes in leadership positions.

Hosts: My dad grew up in the southeast of the U.S. in the sixties, and schools were still segregated when he was a kid. The whole point — one big point — of our movement is bringing these culture divides together, kind of grinding two rough rocks against each other until they smooth out. That doesn't always happen easily and usually not smoothly. But it's a testament, I think, that you personally still identify with this movement. Despite all of that, this resonated with you so much — these teachings, the Divine Principle — that you could bear all of that and still contribute so much.

Hosts: I'd like to ask about the Day of Hope tour. You performed some of your original music with a choir. The first tour was from 1972, an eight-city tour that started in New York at Alice Tully Hall, and went through Washington, Baltimore, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other places. The second tour started in October of '73, and that went from Carnegie Hall in New York all the way through the West Coast again, but split into 64 cities instead of eight. Can you tell us about being part of the group that performed your music? Did you ever interact with Reverend and Mrs. Moon during that tour, and what was your part in the production? What was it like singing to thousands of people?

Sandra: I was not along for all of those. There was a training program that I was a part of, and at one point those of us involved with the training program were sent back to New York to finish our work. But those were some amazing, amazing tours. As I say to people, once you've sung for three hundred thousand people, nothing else beats that. Somebody says, ‘Hey, come over here and do this for fifty people' — okay. More people.

Sandra: We started off with a choir. That choir saved my life. We were giving out tickets on the streets of New York. We had maybe seventy people that had left our jobs, and we did everything to go and promote this thing. It happened to be the worst winter in New York to date. The temperatures were way below freezing. I had a professional camera that I carried around, and my focal-plane window cracked — it was that cold outside. And we were going out every day to give out these very expensive tickets. They sold for eighteen dollars for three nights. You couldn't buy a ticket for one night; you had to buy it for three. And no one had ever heard of Reverend Moon. You'd go, ‘Hi, I want to tell you about this wonderful event that's going on, and I have this ticket and I want you to come and attend.' ‘Oh, maybe. Who's this Chinese guy? And you were asking them to pay eighteen dollars for a three-night event?' They're going, ‘Are you out of your mind?' So of course, people didn't want to do it. It wasn't mean rejection — it was just, ‘You people must be nuts. Who's going to come to hear this guy three nights? I have things to do, places to go, people to see.'

Sandra: Reverend Moon knew well that people were not wanting to go out and sell these tickets, because we were getting rejection. One weekend, he's saying to people at our Sunday meetings — we didn't sell on Sundays — ‘Why don't you go out earlier? Why is it so hard for you to go out? Men, is it that it's taking you too long to tie your ties? Then don't wear a tie. Women, is it taking you too long to do your hair? Then cut your hair.' He says this and he walks away — not after that statement, but he gave the whole talk after that. I'm sitting there minding my business, probably reading my Divine Principle book, which I did a lot more then than I do now, sorry to say. And these women come up to me and they say, ‘You've got to cut your hair.' I'm like, ‘Wait — what?' ‘Yes, you have to cut your hair.' I said, ‘I don't want to cut my hair.' They said, ‘But Father said you have to cut your hair.' Nothing ends well when it starts with that sentence.

Sandra: I said to them, ‘Look, let's be logical about this. The longer my hair is, the straighter my hair is. If I cut my hair off short, it's going to turn into a poof, and I'm going to have to maintain it to look human. We're not going to do that, because no one wants to pay for that.' They said, ‘No, but he said cut your hair.' They actually took me by the hair, and I'm dragged up to Reverend Moon's room. We used to all live in the same place most of the time. He had his room, I had mine. So-and-so had their rooms. They pound on his door: ‘She won't cut her hair.' Poor guy. He comes out with his translator, Reverend David Kim, and he says, ‘What's going on?' ‘She won't cut her hair.' At which point he looks at these women, and he just goes — because they are shorn. They took a bowl, put it on their heads, took a pair of scissors, and went around the bowl. None of these women were barbers. He's staring at these tonsured monks in front of him — female monks in front of him. And he says, ‘What did you do?' They said, ‘Well, you said cut your hair.' He said, ‘No, I said, if it is a problem, if it's holding you up from going out, then cut your hair.' And they're kind of like, ‘Oh.' He says, ‘What did you do with the hair? At least, what did you do with the hair?' Now they bring out the trash can that's got blonde straight hair, curly hair, round tangled-up hair, red kind of cool hair. He stares into this bucket and he says, ‘Why didn't you at least sell it? At least some benefit would have come out of this horrible thing you've all done to yourself.'

Sandra: But this continued to become a trend. Sometimes we have that saying — and I've heard people actually say this — ‘Well, yeah, I know, Pastor So-and-so said don't do this, but I like it, don't you?' So I heard of many people after that who had their hair cut. In fact, when I was in the rock band, one of the things that happened was people chased the other lead singer and me around because we had the longer hair, and they're like, ‘You need to cut your hair, you need to cut your hair. Father said cut your hair.' I am not living through this again. These are the kinds of interactions we had, where we had to learn ourselves what it was that was being said. It's one thing to have a great teaching. But look at the number of Christian backgrounds, the number of different churches, all coming out of the same book, because we've interpreted things so differently that we haven't gotten the teaching that we were supposed to get.

Sandra: I had some direct interactions with Reverend Moon. I got very sick at one point, and he had said, ‘You should be able to go out, even if you are dying, go out on the streets and sell these tickets.' Again, there's speaking in metaphors, and there's speaking literally. I was, what — twenty-three, twenty-four, no older than that. So I decided one day, when I'm really sick, that I have to go out no matter what. ‘If I die in the streets, I've got to go out.' I'm getting ready to go out. It's dark outside and the snow is going sideways — it's that cold. I've got my coat on, and the person that figured very big in my life, Lady Dr. Kim, whose full name I sometimes forget — we all knew her as the Lady Doctor; she had been an obstetrician in Korea — she came to my rescue, basically stripped me out of my coat. Reverend Moon saw me, beckoned for me to come in and sit down next to him, which I did. He has all of these guys — they're like the suits of the movement, as I call them. The guys, the hair goes like this, and they've got the ties — they were not selling tickets on the street. They're all sitting there at the table.

Sandra: He's talking to them while he's talking to me. He's eating his snack, whatever it was, but he had a big bowl of fruit over there. Now I'm running a fever, I'm really sick. He starts peeling this orange — I sometimes wonder, was it a tangerine? I can't remember. But he's peeling this thing, and I'm watching his hands as he peels it, because I'm sitting right next to him. I'm thinking, ‘What a fortunate piece of fruit, that it's being peeled by this person who is showing it so much love.' He takes out a segment, looks at it very carefully, pulls off the extra strings, and he turns around and puts it in my mouth. He fed me that entire piece of fruit. It was the only thing I had eaten that day. It was like erythromycin — I felt so much better.

Sandra: He's talking to these people and asking the suits, ‘Tell me — if God had to sacrifice one or the other, would he sacrifice the Messiah for America, or America for the Messiah?' This was his question. They all went, ‘Oh, he definitely sacrificed the Messiah for America.' At which point I'm choking on my orange juice. In my squeaky little voice, I say, ‘No — he sacrificed America for the Messiah. There are many other places in the world. This is one place.' Father looks at me and he looks at them, and he says, ‘You know, your members shouldn't know more than you do.' This was something that I think they had not thought about — what really was the role of the Messiah in the world: that it was a worldwide movement, not just for one country.

Sandra: I had a lot of experiences like that. It was a very fortunate position to be in. Being kind of an old member, and standing out so much as a person of colour, I was easy to identify. So he knew me quite well, and I think Mother — Mrs. Moon, Dr. Moon — knew me quite well as well. She took me shopping at one point, just me, by my little self, and her daughter to translate, and a driver. We went shopping and she bought me a whole bunch of clothes. It was a really exciting experience for me to have that closeness, because I think a lot of people didn't have that. They were experiences that I wanted to duplicate with other people. So with some people I know, when I would find them, I would take people shopping when I was able to have that kind of finance, because I felt like, somebody needs to pass on this blessing. We shouldn't get a blessing that we don't pass on.

Hosts: That sounds so special — to have these very intimate moments with the founders of this global movement. Today, going to see Dr. Moon speak, she's this two-inch figure on a stage and you're at the back of the stadium. You just see her from so far away that it's hard to get a sense of who this person is and what they must be like behind closed doors. I hope you do publish that memoir.

Sandra: I really wanted to have that kind of experience for my children, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren. But I look even now at my grandchildren and I think they will never know who Reverend Moon is. We were national messiahs to the Republic of Argentina, and Reverend Moon was coming through. I was there, and I was so excited that these younger members were going to get to meet them. Afterward, I went to one of the girls and I said, ‘So, how was that for you?' And she's like, ‘They're so old.' I thought, ‘Oh, man, you missed the vibrant times. You missed the beautiful times.' And of course, now altogether they are not here to bring the real power behind the words of the Principle, that those of us that were there were able to feel and to interact with — and maybe not to take as much advantage of as we could have, which is something that I do regret: that I didn't just sit down and say, ‘Tell me everything,' as a younger member. We were in a position — we didn't have the internet, but we could walk into a room if the Moons were at our house or at our centre, and we could sit down. As soon as a person that spoke Korean showed up, we could ask anything.

Hosts: What a privilege — to have that direct contact. You're now a licensed therapist; you and your husband have your own private practice. I'm curious if that's part of what drives you to help other people, and if these teachings translate into your support of other marriages and families that maybe have no one else to go to.

Sandra: We work with people both inside the church and outside the church. Our idea is to make things better. We used to talk about leaving a plus — you don't do anything without making it better when you're gone. There was the idea in the theatre that you leave them laughing — you never do too much. With us, it's leave them wanting more from you. When we meet people — even when we're travelling on a bus, or on a train — we want people to feel that we have something great.

Sandra: When we are talking with couples or with individuals who are going through struggles, as many people are, we think it's important that our marriage reflects, as well as the fact that we have this external training, that our marriage reflects something that everybody wants. Our son told us, when he was sixteen years old — at one point he's driving, new driver, we're in the back because we don't want to die — the sentiment of every parent with a teenage driver. We're sitting in the back, but he's driving. That's when they had toll booths; we're waiting in the toll-booth line. He turns to us suddenly, and he says, ‘Dad, I've decided I want to be blessed.' We said, ‘Well, really? Why?' He says, ‘Because I want what you have.' Isn't that every parent's desire? Every child's desire? That ‘I see so much excitement, so much love, so much understanding and communication in my parents, that I could not dream of not having that in my own life.' That is a really significant thing. So when we meet somebody — we went to the Apple Store yesterday, as I mentioned, blessed three people, went out to lunch, blessed somebody — people come to us, and they feel that idealism. It's not what we say, it's what they see.

Hosts: I love that. There is truth, but the embodiment of the truth is such a crucial step that maybe some people forget to take.

Sandra: The very sad story of a woman who told this story: she and her husband lived in a neighbourhood where they were always arguing with each other. So they decided to go bless their neighbours next door to them, and the wife said, ‘Honestly, we have a better marriage than you do.' Talk about instant judgement. But we have to exemplify — this Divine Principle teaching is nothing if we don't somehow reflect it in our lifestyle. That is so important.

Hosts: I'm really curious — when you met the movement, you were still studying and getting your degrees. Eventually you went into psychology and developed your own clinical practice. How has that influenced or shaped your views of your spiritual journey, of what you see in our movement? Some of the stories you were talking about — people chasing you, telling you you have to cut your hair — I hear a lot of maybe over-enthusiasm and maybe a little fear, trying to control the situation. In religious practice, sometimes people get so wrapped up in it that it becomes a tool to try to control others rather than to work on themselves. That's a very psychological, analytical perspective. How has that shaped your views as someone who's deeply spiritual, has had spiritual experiences, but now is a licensed psychologist and therapist to so many?

Sandra: Well, it keeps me out of psych hospitals, because I'm stable. But on the other hand, yes, I have seen things that have concerned me often, and they are things that I do my best to try to help with. I've seen hyper-religiosity, which unfortunately is what a lot of people see — that manifests itself externally. There are probably millions of Unificationists walking around doing things — serving you coffee, driving your train, doing whatever — that you never know are Unificationists, but they're living good lives. Perhaps because they don't want it known, because we have the fringe, like every other movement has. We see it in government, we see it in business; we know that there is the fringe element there.

Sandra: You can sit down with a DSM-5 and you can look at a lot of people and go, ‘Yeah, that's you. That's you.' But I would rather not do that. I would rather see people as requiring, desiring, and hoping for help in some way, or looking into how they can change themselves to find a better way of life. That's what I want to do. I don't want to sit down and say to somebody, ‘Well, you have a major depressive disorder, which is exacerbated by your post-traumatic stress disorder.' I know those people — let's keep them off this call. But I want to be able to say to somebody, ‘Wow, your life must have been so disappointing and so difficult. Let's see what we can apply here.' I can talk to somebody about how to grow without having to whip out a pad and a pencil. Making that clear to them, talking them through — well, look, the Divine Principle itself is essentially three stages of growth, and four-position foundation, and understanding there's a spirit world. Once you understand that, then how do you grow? Let's go on a journey to growth. Let's go on a journey to perfection. We can add in all of the Myers-Briggs stuff, and the love languages, and all of that on top. But let's look at that simple way.

Sandra: Fundamentally, when I see control, I'm thinking about the fact that someone is trying to bring their own sense of lack of understanding to the front. I'm thinking of a particular situation. I was on one of the fundraising teams down in someplace in Georgia somewhere, and we were giving out sandwiches to the IOWC that was there. This woman who had been in the church for about six weeks came up to me. As I'm giving out these sandwiches, I hand her a sandwich, and she screams at me, ‘How dare you?' I'm thinking, ‘What did I do?' She says, ‘You gave me a sandwich with the left hand. I'm never going to put sandwiches out with this hand' — because she's got my left hand — ‘that is your satanic hand.' Well, it's been with me all my life. But she said, ‘You don't give me anything with the left hand, you horrible person.' Of course, I did what anybody else would do — I said, ‘Here's the box. Go for it.' And I left her with it. That was sometime in the early seventies.

Sandra: I'm walking through one of these toll plazas, maybe about ten years ago. I'm just walking through, on my way somewhere. This woman is behind one of these sunglasses kiosks. She steps out from behind the kiosk when she sees me walking past her, and she falls to the ground in front of me. I thought she fainted. She bows, and she's sobbing, sobbing. I'm thinking, ‘You're having a psychotic break. Let's get up here.' I said, ‘What's going on?' She says, ‘You don't remember me?' I went, ‘No.' I'm thinking to myself, ‘Is she one of my old patients? Who is she?' She says, ‘I was in Georgia, and I yelled at you for giving me a sandwich with the left hand. I'm so sorry. I've been looking for you all my spiritual life, and now I found you, and I'm so grateful and I'm so sorry. Please forgive me.' That was something that had bothered her all her life. I hugged her and I said, ‘Look, not only have I forgotten that, I just wrote you off as somebody that didn't understand enough Principle to know that God gave us both two hands.'

Sandra: This is the way a lot of people are. They start going through the scriptures, and they find something, and it hooks onto something that bothers them. We can go back into what it was, or we can just see — is this a person that needs to feel better than someone else? Why do you need to make someone else wrong in order to be right? That's a big question.

Hosts: That's very interesting. I recently started reading a book called Spiritual Bypassing, and the whole book is essentially describing what you just described — how some people find truth, and it could be any religion, any kind of truth, but they use it as a sword to wield judgement on others and to keep people at bay, rather than doing the real work on themselves. Really looking at: where is that feeling coming from? Why is that coming up? And turning it around on us. When you delve into religion, one of the most famous sayings that Jesus said was to look at the log in your own eye rather than the speck in your neighbour's. That's the essence of it. It sounds like your clinical background has really helped ground your spirituality in that empathy. I really admire that, because even in psychology, I think sometimes people can get into that practice and kind of do the same thing as religious people — use that as judging others: ‘Well, you need to fix that.'

Hosts: Thank you, Sandra, for giving us a master class in how to practically apply our teachings to help others and to help ourselves — to look into, ‘Why do I react that way? Maybe this person is just having a bad day,' and not taking it so personally and deeply, and to have a level-headed approach to a very big and all-encompassing worldview. We're so grateful that you took the time to share your journey. It's a treat, and just so insightful to hear about the early movement in America. I don't think there are many members who can remember that far back, or who were directly involved that far back.

Sandra: I'd better tell you, before I wake up and remember why my keys are in the refrigerator.