Introduction to the Marriage Blessing by Dr David Hanna

I'd like to give an introduction to the Unification Movement blessing or marriage ceremony, which is taking place in many locations all around the world to bring God's blessing to people's marriages and to marry people of all faiths. This is an interfaith, interdenominational marriage blessing ceremony and rededication ceremony. I also want to point out the connection made between good marriages, good families, and world peace, which is surely the goal of all of us to see in our world. The world level of religious traditions has sustained our cultures to now, and even now, a whole marriage emphasizes purity before marriage and fidelity in marriage, upholding the value of marriage in our society and supporting a young couple in coming together as a joining of families. These marriage ceremonies, which are often very beautiful and meaningful, allow the young couple to make their vows and eternal promises in front of God, but also with the support of family and friends. Therefore, they know that they are really on the right track and have the support of others in making this a success, because marriage is not necessarily an easy thing, as we will talk about later.

Here's one tradition, the Jewish tradition. I have some photos here to illustrate how this is treated in the different traditions around the world. Here, it's happening outside; it could happen in different places, and then it's happening under a canopy or chuppah, which is symbolic of the marital home. Here's a Muslim couple in Indonesia, looking as happy as any bride and groom. Here's an Orthodox church wedding; you see the bride and groom represented as king and queen in their own family, like a royal family. It's a very beautiful concept, and they're sharing a cup of wine together. Here are Hindu weddings, which can last two to three days and are very elaborate affairs, but they really emphasize the coming together of families and this new start of married life for the couples. Here, you see that bride and groom tied together by their scarves, which is where we get the English expression 'to tie the knot' to get married. In another part of the ceremony, the bride takes seven steps representing stages in her life, beautifully attended by her friends and family.

Here is a Sikh wedding taking place in the boudoir, treated as a very holy and beautiful event, with the usual large meal that everybody shares afterwards. Here's what a typical Christian wedding looks like; it can take different shapes and forms, but here we have a bride in a white wedding dress. This is her special day; probably her mother-in-law is in tears, and her father is bringing the bride down the aisle to give her away. She's going to join another family and start a new stage of life, marked out this way as such an important point of transition and journey in life. All of these traditions offer ongoing support in this way. Within the Unification Movement, this started with the founders, Reverend and Mrs. Moon, who were married in 1960. Their holy wedding or blessing at that time also blessed 36 couples of faithful followers. Here's one group of 12 in this picture, which started the tradition of large weddings for which the Unification Movement is very well known. I think it's something that catches the attention of the media, but that's intentional; it says that marriage is connected to world peace, and we want to make a statement that it's not just for ourselves or just for the couple, but for a greater purpose to contribute to society, our nation, and indeed the world.

Here's one of the largest ceremonies that took place in 1992, with 30,000 couples using the Seoul Olympic Stadium built for the 1988 Olympics. For many couples, this will be their wedding day for which they've been preparing, and for many couples, it's a rededication of their marriage, renewing their vows and seeking God's blessing on a new stage of their life and love together. Here's an interesting blessing ceremony that took place in the United Nations, where everybody came together, the couples in their national costumes, showing the international quality and far-reaching nature of this blessing. In 2001, 210 couples featured in the larger blessings, with religious leaders from different faiths joining the ceremony to add blessings and prayers from their own traditions. Here are representatives from Sikh, Muslim, Native American, Hindu, and Christian backgrounds. It's a beautiful thing that they can demonstrate this way; this is not the wedding ceremony of one religious group, but actually universal, bringing people together across traditional boundaries and barriers.

Here are the founders, Reverend and Mrs. Moon, conducting a wedding ceremony in the open air. You can see many couples lined up behind, giving the essential prayer and blessing of this time. For some of those people, they will be having this marriage rededication. Here's a typical couple, ambassadors for peace from Sweden, enjoying and celebrating this moment to rededicate their marriage and their love for each other. We're using the word blessing, and what are the blessings of life? What are the things that are the source of our happiness and bring us meaning and value? These things don't come from ourselves; our life doesn't come from ourselves. The religious mind and heart will always look back to the Creator, the sustainer of life, which is God. Even if we're not a believer, we have to think that these aspects of happiness and opportunities in life are not of our own making; they're really given to us, and we need to make the most of this opportunity.

I want to look at the blessings of life and our basis for happiness, encapsulated in a verse common to the three main faiths that share literature in common: the Jewish faith, the Christian faith, and the Islamic faith. If you go back to Genesis 1:28, it says, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.' It's God's blessing, pouring out His love and grace to humankind as a gift to us, which is not something that we deserve or that we ask for; this is coming for the sake of our happiness. If we look at this a little more deeply, we can see there's a lot behind these three words: be fruitful, multiply, and have dominion. The first, to be fruitful, we call the first blessing. To be fruitful as an individual, our body must learn to obey our mind, and our mind must be kind of an object to the source of goodness and the good purpose of life, which we can identify as God. It's that purposeful heart behind the universe that gives us meaning and value.

Our journey as individuals, from birth until the time when we are ready to marry, is really a time of developing ourselves, our personality, our character. It's learning to love, to value, and to practice unconditional love. To be able to receive it and to give it is developing our relationship with God. Our spiritual life is developing, and our heart is developing in this way. We are striving to become a person of integrity, unique, not like anybody else, but a person with integrity. A person who has integrity is a person whose deeds match their words. Words are associated with our mind and should be inspired from the highest place, and our deeds should match that and not contradict it. If we can become such a person who embodies this quality of love we associate with God, unconditional love, then we can say we're now ready to go on to the next stage of life. As a perfect individual, a person who's reached this kind of fruitfulness and is ready to bear fruit, God dwells in the individual whose mind and body unite in a life of love for other people. That's a worthy goal and a wonderful opportunity to develop oneself this way, to become independent, to become a kind of person in one's own right.

What most people will feel is that now that I've done that, I want to find a partner, settle down, pass this on to the next generation, and raise children. This leads into the multiply, which has much more behind it than just a simple word might indicate. This is about building a family, first of all, relationships centred on these values that come from our Creator. At the core of the universe, this is bringing husband and wife together in a relationship of true love. When that love is there, the husband and wife united represent God in what then becomes the family as children come along. A family is there for the sake of children, raising them and developing each position in this family, which we call four positions, including God. This makes a beautiful foundation for expansion and development, creating something much more than individuals separately. We could say when God dwells in the family, that's where husband and wife really live for God, for each other, and for their children. It's where the family lives for society, for the nation, and the world, contributing beyond their family unions. The family, this four-position foundation, is a basic building block of what we could call an ideal world or, in religious terms, a kingdom of heaven on earth. This is what it's about; the family is very connected to creating a world of peace, happiness, and a world where we all can live well under God.

The third blessing is having dominion, which involves human beings interacting with their environment in the proper way, having good stewardship and creating an ideal environment. It's also about developing one's creativity and putting one's qualities to service in serving society and the community. It's finding your career, your position, and your sense of ownership of the world, building that up as something that you can pass on to your children in the future. There's much contained in that as well. If we put these together, we can say that this is the way to inherit God's love, life, and lineage. The first blessing brings us to spiritual maturity to become a person of true love, and on that basis, really on that basis only, we can enter the next stage. We can find a partner who's similarly ready to move on, and through the marriage and the family created, that brings love in the family, which can be extended even beyond the family to the world. The third blessing relates a person to the rest of creation and the environment around us, having responsible mastery and dominion over the natural world.

We can look at it this way: to be fruitful is to grow to maturity as an individual; to multiply is to marry, have children, and raise a loving family; and to have dominion over creation is to exercise loving stewardship over the material world. My feeling is this is not religious doctrine; it's life itself. This is actually where we find our happiness within this scheme given to us. Everything we can find for our happiness is there, and there's nothing we would find for our happiness that is not there, at least things that are constructive, positive, and good. Everything is there for our eventual happiness; hence the term blessing. A blessing is the source of happiness, meaning, and fulfillment, initiated not from ourselves but from our Creator. To summarise, everything we could wish for our happiness is contained within these three blessings. In realizing these three blessings, we fulfil the purpose for which we were created originally. This encapsulates the purpose of life, which for many people is a very elusive thing. They spend their whole life wondering what the purpose of life is; it's here. This is how we can find our happiness and pass on everything good that we build up in our life to the next generation. The family at the centre of this maintains and develops love and life, and a lineage is passed on from generation to generation.

For that reason, we can say the family is really the only institution ordained by God. This is the basic building block for an ideal world or for the world of peace. Our founder, Reverend Moon, said in his own words, 'In order to reach the love of God, we must come together as plus and minus.' This is like man and woman together, these two complementary aspects which have the same value, but nevertheless, they have complementary characters. This is why men need women and women need men, so that together we can create the harmony with which we can reach the love of God. That is the entire purpose of creation. However, we know life is not ideal, so we have to ask the question: what went wrong? This is a very key topic addressed in the world's religions, probably the only place where people are analysing and historically being led to understand the root of the problem. Understanding more about the problem allows us to find a more effective solution, so religion has a very significant role in this respect. The reality of the human condition, compared to the three blessings we looked at earlier, is that we have lost love in its true pure quality. We have lost life as it should really be lived, and we've somehow created a lineage. Of course, we realised these blessings, but not in the original way, and we passed on from generation to generation things that are far from ideal. We have even lost these original love, life, and lineage in their joint producing form, which is still open to us, but somewhere that hasn't characterised humankind's journey. We are still in a position to have to realise our true humanity; we know it's there. Therefore, people pursue it through self-development, religious practice, searching philosophy, and other ways to really find these secrets and how to live life to the full. Maybe this is why in Deuteronomy, God says to Moses, 'I set before you this day a blessing and a curse.' It's a blessing, but how do we realise it? Do we realise it in a good way, or does self-centredness and selfish love come in and spoil that opportunity? If we look at the reality today for so many people and through history since our beginning, we haven't fulfilled the first blessing. We've become or been left as people who are spiritually immature, with self-centred love.

Into our marriages and our families, which is far from ideal. Personal problems unresolved get passed into marriage and family relationships. We have fathers who mistreat children or husbands and wives who can't relate happily together. Many people grow up in homes that are far from ideal. This is the reality for so many throughout history. In terms of our relationship with the environment, greed and self-interest have created an imbalance in the world that we are just waking up to, jeopardising our future and that of future generations. This lack of harmony with the natural world is humankind's doing. In a way, we could say we are the only creatures out of harmony with the rest of creation, and it is our responsibility to put that right and get to the root of the problem.

If we look at the world's religious traditions, it is interesting how they all touch on this problem to different degrees—the misuse or corruption of love. In Jainism, it is said that it is better to die than to indulge in forbidden lustful pleasure. In Buddhism, it states that the man who goes to the wife of another digs up the very roots of life, highlighting the serious consequences of adulterous behaviour. In Islam, it is advised not to come near adultery, as it is a shameful deed and opens the road to other evils. The New Testament of the Christian Bible instructs us to flee from sexual immorality, stating that he who sins sexually sins against his own body. The Jewish Talmud reflects on the wicked serpent contemplating evil in the Garden of Eden, while Hinduism tells a story of how virtuous beings became corrupted by desire and anger. Sikhism describes sexual desire as a window, with pain and pleasure as gatekeepers. All these religious traditions have significant messages to convey, and they correlate in many ways.

The form of human misery, as it is called, is where humankind went off in the wrong direction early in our history, and we have been suffering from that ever since. Human beings have inherited a contradictory nature, a pull towards good desires and evil desires, leading to inner conflict and pangs of conscience. We also have a tendency to indulge our physical desires in a self-centred way, creating a very materialistic society. Additionally, we misuse nature and material things for our own benefit, driven by greed and exploitation. This misdirected love and impure heart stem from ignorance of God and the spiritual dimension. The world's religions seek to reconnect us with that reality and develop ourselves accordingly. Only religion analyses the human condition in this way, identifying what prevents us from expressing our true humanity. Therefore, this viewpoint is essential, but we must understand the problem to bring about a good solution.

Putting things right is not an easy task, which is one reason why mankind has been on such a long journey to solve this problem. World religions have been instituted by God, not created by man, as a means of finding our way through this quagmire and discovering real hope for a better future. Our founder, Trevor Moon, posed an interesting question: Is it easier to create a new apple or to take a rotten apple that has fallen off the tree and make it whole again? Both tasks are extremely difficult. Even the best scientist cannot create an apple from scratch, but nature can. Once an apple has fallen off the tree, there is no natural process to restore it to its original state. This analogy reflects the human situation; if our hearts are corrupted, putting that right is not simple. It may even be easier for God to create human beings afresh, but that was never His intention after the time of the flood. This task, even for God, is very difficult and requires the cooperation of fallen human beings every step of the way.

We must take responsibility in the teaching of the Divine Principle, which discusses the history of restoration—the journey for mankind to return from our fallen position to the ideal and reclaim what was lost. It recognises that all world religions have a role inspired by God in this process for their respective cultures, peoples, or times. Therefore, it is very respectful of the world's religious traditions, which is significant. Interfaith work or the interfaith blessing is not an afterthought; it recognises that this is God's original plan and intention. In this diagram, we can see the religious story of Genesis, where our first ancestors, Adam and Eve, were growing towards maturity, completion, and perfection. However, they made a serious mistake that took them outside the realm where natural law operates, introducing hell and opposing God's original qualities and principles. The journey back is long, guided by God's inspiration through prophets and religious figures, leading us to a place where we can meet God as we strive to return to the point where our ancestors fell away.

This journey is referred to as uncharted territory because, as human beings, we have not yet gone through that stage of development. It is a state of spiritual development that we are just on the borders of. We need to go through this to express our true humanity, which we see in individuals we respect for their integrity. However, this should not be limited to a few; it should be for everyone. One advantage of the progress of time is that after a hundred years, a completely new set of people will inhabit this world. How are we educating them? What are we passing on? This is why marriage and family are so important; they are key to solving the problem and creating a good future.

In religious traditions, there is often a figure or guide who helps us along the way. When we have made enough effort, we can meet this person or receive their teachings, whether they are alive or have passed on. This is where we see references to a messiah, an avatar, or a saviour figure across various religions. The language often describes this person as coming down from heaven or earth, which should not be taken literally but metaphorically. It signifies a person of godly heart and character who meets us on our journey. Once we meet that person, this is where God's blessing in marriage should take place, as it never happened for our first human ancestors. In the Divine Principle, we refer to True Parents as what Adam and Eve should have been. They did not become True Parents; instead, they became false parents, passing on false love and corrupted love. Therefore, humanity's journey has been defined by the need for true parents, allowing us to receive the marriage blessing and realise a peaceful and ideal world, guiding us through this last stage of uncharted territory.

Interestingly, many religious traditions have advocated the value of a celibate religious life, where individuals voluntarily choose to reverse humanity's spiritual decline. This is a beautiful commitment, but can we say it is a universal solution? If everyone chose this path, humanity would not continue. Yet, people feel called to pay this price, as seen in various religious traditions where monks and nuns dedicate their lives to serving God. This hints at what we call a principle of indemnity or restitution. Common to these traditions is the vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience. These vows correlate directly with the three blessings and the loss of those blessings. A life of devotion aims to become like God, fulfilling the first blessing through obedience, while choosing a life of chastity means giving up marriage and family, thus not realising the second blessing. Embracing a life of poverty and simplicity also means sacrificing the third blessing. This establishes the most important preparation for marriage, family, and an ideal world by paying that price and devoting oneself in this way.

The three blessings still need to be realised, and knowledge of that ideal provides a model for us to become not just good individuals in God's eyes but to create true families that embody unconditional love. This is how we can create a world where families live in harmony, care for creation, and ensure humankind's survival while passing on the best of our traditions. Marriage is the key, and this is a historical moment when we can move from focusing on the establishment of the first blessing to establishing God-centred marriages and families. This is where the cosmic peace blessing of our True Parents, Reverend and Mrs Moon, comes in, reaching people of all faiths, denominations, and even those of no faith, as they seek to create good marriages and families and contribute to world peace.

The purpose of marriage is a place for conjugal love, mutual support between husband and wife, comfort, and friendship. It is the proper and only place for sexual relations, creating new life and raising children in a family that respects and values these purposeful aspects of goodness. One of the Church Fathers in Christianity, John Chrysostom, stated that when husband and wife are united in marriage, they are no longer seen as merely earthly but as the image of God Himself. This is how a husband and wife, united in the right way and in the right love, should stand as a more complete and perfect image of God than any individual can. I now want to introduce the blessing ceremony we have discussed, likening it to a grafting process. If you want to quickly create a good fruit-producing tree, you can take a well-established tree with a strong trunk and good roots but lacking in taste. A grower can cut off the crown of the tree, make a split, and graft a new shoot onto it.

Taking cuttings from a good fruit-producing tree is known to produce good fruit, and these cuttings won't make the tree suffer at all. This process can be likened to self-denial in our religious lives, where we need to rid ourselves of aspects we are not proud of and receive something new. Different traditions approach this in various ways, often through the teachings of their founder or the example of their prophet or religious leader. The blessing in this context can be compared to the grafting process, which is a fundamental aspect of religion. While we cannot change our ancestors or our roots, we can inherit something new that has its origins in God, allowing us to produce good fruit in the future.

Reverend Moon speaks about this process, stating that at the deepest part of ourselves lies our original mind, just below which is the fertile ground of God. The engrafting process involves cutting off all branches while leaving the root intact, allowing true branches to be engrafted onto the old root. This transformation results in a new tree, even though the root remains the same. When preparing for the interfaith marriage blessing, certain basic conditions must be met. Firstly, there must be a determination to respect one’s spouse and maintain pure love. Secondly, there is a commitment to be faithful to one another as a lifelong internal promise. Additionally, one must have the heart to become a true parent and continue developing spiritually, along with a desire to live for the sake of others.

The marriage ceremony includes various components, whether for new couples or for marriage rededication. One significant aspect is the holy wine or holy nectar ceremony, which typically involves non-alcoholic wine symbolising a change of lineage. In this simple yet beautiful ceremony, the husband and wife share a cup together, representing a new bond and life coming from above. The blessing ceremony resembles a wedding, being both solemn and joyful, often involving many couples at once. This joyous occasion is a regular event, celebrating the union of couples in a communal setting.

An interesting part of the ceremony is the chastening ceremony, which symbolically ends any history of violence in the couple's ancestry. Regardless of our views on our lineage, we can be sure that there are instances of mistreatment in our family histories. This ceremony serves as a commitment to stop such cycles and to teach future generations to do the same. The blessing ceremony also includes a sprinkling of holy water, a tradition borrowed from various world religions, symbolising a new start. Wedding vows are recited, renewing promises and expanding upon them, while the exchange of rings serves as an external sign of inward grace and eternal love.

Additionally, there is a blessing prayer invoking God's forgiving grace and the blessing of marriage. The rededication of parents is also part of this process, which includes a 40-day period where the husband and wife are encouraged to live as brother and sister, putting God first in their relationship. This waiting period ensures that the love shared is the purest and most precious. It is about cleansing and purifying love that may have been misused in the past, allowing for a new beginning. This culminates in a beautiful three-day ceremony or heavenly honeymoon, which can be further explored later.

I have provided a brief overview of the Unification Movement's interfaith cosmic peace blessings, which occur globally across different cultures and nations. This movement represents a beautiful expression of commitment to marriage and family, which is greatly needed in our world today. Our founder, Reverend Moon, expressed a desire to bless all people, encompassing many beautiful traditions and stages of life. Ultimately, this movement aims to contribute positively towards a better future and a peaceful world, where we can live together as one family under God.