Celebrating God’s Love

Happy Blessing anniversary to all 72 couples and 1,275 couples worldwide! This year marks the 32nd anniversary of the two Holy Marriage Blessing ceremonies held January 11 and January 12, 1989, respectively.

The late Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon and Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, co-founders of Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU) and affectionately known as True Parents, officiated the ceremony for 72 Unificationist-born couples at the Little Angels Performing Arts Center in Seoul and 1,275 international couples at the Il Hwa Company gymnasium in Yongin, Korea.

At the time, Rev. Moon said the 72 couples Blessing represented the complete restoration of the 72 disciples at the time of Jesus. After the ceremony, representatives of the couples separated into groups to publicly share about the Marriage Blessing across Korea and help distribute the Segye Ilbo newspaper.

Meanwhile, brides and grooms from 87 countries participated in the international couples blessing. Rev. and Dr. Moon emphasized the importance of the Marriage Blessing ceremony to transcend societal boundaries and create unity and peace among rival nations and disparate cultures. Receiving the Blessing signifies a couple’s desire to live morally and ethically, pointing the way toward the ideal family, society, nation, and world centered on true love and God.

Below is an excerpt from Rev. Moon’s book The Blessed Family and the Ideal Kingdom (1997), which talks about the meaning and value of the Marriage Blessing.

Excerpt:

“The Unification Church mass wedding ceremony is not just a wedding ceremony of a man and a woman to make a family. Until now, marriage was centered on the individual self, but our wedding ceremony is holy and has the content to make God happy and the condition to indemnify history. Our marriage ceremony is to liberate God’s grief caused by Adam and Eve’s fall and fulfill what Jesus could not, which is to pass through the standard of the bridegroom and bride…

God has been working continuously through a long history in order to recover the moment for fallen people to receive the Blessing… Before you get the Blessing, you must know that you are standing upon the hard work of the historical foundation. All the sacrifices made during God’s thousands of years of history until today were for your salvation. The countless prophets and saints became offerings, and many religions walked the sacrificial way for you, one by one, to be victors in the love of God.

The Blessing is the hope of God and the hope of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. A new history begins when this hope is realized. The Blessing is the work which fulfills the hope of the whole. Therefore, the blessed family must stay as the subject for the realization of this hope… Now is the ultimate time for God’s hope to be realized. It is the time to end God’s agony over the 6,000 years of hard work… 

The Blessing is the place where all the sorrow in the course of history, from the past until now, will be terminated. It is the new starting point for the hope of God, which was never realized in the past. It is the starting point for the new era, the new future… The Blessing is the goal of history and the key to the liberation of all people…” (The Blessed Family and the Ideal Kingdom, Chapter Three)

Many blessings to all of the couples celebrating their anniversary!

You can learn more about the Marriage Blessing on FFWPU’s Blessing and Family Ministry (BFM) website here.

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