Chambumo Gyeong - 348. Survival through sacrificial love
Even in the worst situation, True Father did not betray heaven but rather comforted heaven. Accordingly, not only did his fellow inmates respect him and follow him, he even earned the respect of the Communist Party members. Another way he practiced true love was by sharing, with his fellow inmates, the clothing and grain powder that his mother Chungmonim brought him. This is how, even though on a course that could have led him to death, True Father restored through indemnity the suffering of Jesus and carried on the mission he had inherited from him. Even in sacrificing himself for his fellow prisoners, he gained strength to survive. 18 During my prison life, whenever I received grain powder from my mother I never ate it by myself. 1 shared it all, sometimes leaving nothing for myself. When I did that, the people with me collected some from others and gave it back to me. Such incidents happened. That was why the people there could say nothing against me.
About 30 people slept together in my cell. I always slept in the worst spot, which was next to the toilet bucket in the corner of the cell. In the middle of the night, anyone who went to use the bucket might step on the people sleeping next to it. The cell was packed with inmates, and people going to use the bucket would first try to push the sleeping bodies aside so they could step between them, but when that did not work they just stepped on them or kicked them. That often happened.
But whenever anyone going to the bucket stepped on me or kicked me, he would come to me the next morning and apologize. If I were like other people, I would have said, "What do you mean doing that last night?" and started a fight. But I was not like that. So even when someone walked on my stomach because he could not help himself in his rush to get to the toilet, when he found out it was me whom he had stepped on, he came to me and apologized, saying, "I'm sorry, I did not know it was you." I lived such a life. (050-312, 1971/11/08) 19 My mother, who was in Jeongju, needed to obtain 18 different letters of authorization to come and visit me in Heungnam Prison. When she finally obtained them, she made mixed grain powder for me and came to give me that powder. Did she have the grain to make that powder? I learned later that she went begging for it all over the village. She even went to ask distant relatives, saying in tears, "My son is in such a miserable situation. Please have sympathy for him." She begged for the grain, made the powder, and came every month to give it to me. Also she made clothes for me, especially in winter when she worried that I might freeze to death.
She made the powder to give to me, but as soon as I was back in my cell I shared it with the others. My conscience would not allow me to keep it and eat it by myself. My mother brought me cotton-padded pants, but I did not wear them; I continued to wear the prison uniform. There were many inmates who had no visitors for years. In front of them my conscience did not allow me to wear those pants proudly. Therefore as soon as I received the pants I immediately gave them away, and I continued to wear the tattered uniform with holes in it. How heart-broken my mother must have felt when she saw me in my prison uniform with its tatters fluttering in the wind. Yet because I was walking the path of God's divine Son and a loyal patriot, I had to go this way. (266-289, 1995/01/01) 20 You cannot imagine how cold it was in Heungnam! There the winter wind was so strong that it blew pebbles around. When my mother visited me in prison in those cold winter months, she saw me wearing only my thin uniform, just one layer without long johns. When my mother saw me not wearing the clothes that she had prepared for me, her blood boiled. She asked me, "What happened to the long johns and cotton-padded clothes I brought to you?" I told her, "I gave them to people whose situation is more difficult than mine. I am willing to shiver in the cold alongside them and to starve together with them. Is that wrong?"
I was confident in what I was doing. In front of anyone in heaven and on earth, I was confident. My mother admonished me, saying, "How could you do this, without knowing what I went through? I prepared those clothes for you. Who told you to give them to others?" So I said to her, "Mother, if you do not care about others as I care about them, then I am not proud of having you as my mother. I wish you had praised me for what I did, and said that if I needed more clothes you would bring them. If you cannot do that, at least do not admonish me or give me that kind of advice." Then my mother sobbed, shedding large drops of tears. I can never forget that. (242-203, 1993/01/01) 21 We were hungry from right after breakfast until noon. You cannot imagine how hungry we were. Our tongues were worn out and our breath smelled bad. In those circumstances I too was hungry, but to comfort my fellow inmates I wove lengthy stories and shared them. Because I did that, before one month had passed they started to bring me food they had received from their visitors, saying, "Teacher, please take this and do whatever you want with it." Thus I experienced something amazing, even awe-inspiring.
The Principle is truly simple: If we invest completely with love to live for the sake of others, whatever we give is bound to return. This is the starting point of the heavenly law. Therefore, as long as we move forward with this principle, no one can destroy us. When we act upon this principle, the output is greater than the input. The output of those days is the group of people I see in front of me today. You have emerged, with a pledge that combines resolute determination and tears, to willingly advance along the path of death on my behalf. When I see you, I know that the path that I have trod is surely the path of truth. (170-181, 1987/11/15) 22 There is one experience during my prison life that I cannot forget. It happened on my birthday. Prison is usually filled with dreariness. Still, there was an inmate from Pyongyang who, I do not know how, learned that it was my birthday, and on the morning of my birthday he left me a bag of powdered grain that he had been eating from. It is something I can never forget in all my life. I still think that I must find a way to pay him back, even thousands of times over.
I really hate being indebted to anyone. When I am in debt to someone, I cannot rest until I repay it. I do not believe that I came into the world to be indebted to others. I rather think that I came to become a creditor. So once I start to do something, I cannot be in last place, a place that would incur debt. (056-047, 1972/05/10) 23 In Heungnam Prison there were some people who followed me. Whenever they had something special to eat, like powder made of mixed grains, they would bring it to me. They would wrap it in paper and hide it inside their smelly pants in order to bring it to me and share it with me. If they had been caught by the guards, they would have been in trouble. Sharing that food impressed me more than any deluxe banquet. After all these years of life, it remains in my memory. Sharing and eating that grain powder, all my senses were totally intermingled and melted together. You need to have that kind of experience before you go to the spirit world. It is such a blessing. You must not live for the sake of yourself but for the sake of the whole. (108-154, 1980/08/18) 24 As an inmate in Heungnam Prison in North Korea, I fought on the front lines to love a wide variety of people, not only my fellow inmates, but also the communist prison guards. Because of that, I experienced that some guards made efforts to protect me in prison. If they saw me doing something against the prison rules they covered for me, even though they ran the risk of losing their own lives. The system inside the prison intensified the atrocities of communism, yet even in that world I found ways to protect myself. The one and only path was the path of loving and sacrificing. It was in prison that I discovered this truth.
There was a former leader of the Communist Party in the prison. When his family sent him powdered grain, he mixed it with water and made balls like rice cakes. Hiding them in his crotch, he walked the four kilometers to the fertilizer factory. If they fell out while he was walking, what he was doing would be discovered and he would get into a lot of trouble. He could even lose his life. Despite this he brought the food, solely for the purpose of sharing that food with me.
Hiding them deep inside his pants, he worked, drenched in sweat, until lunch time. Of course the grain cakes absorbed his sweat and smell, even though he had wrapped them with newspapers. Could I refuse to eat them and throw them away? At the moment when he shared them with me, it was like an explosion of love, big enough to buy even the entire universe. It was like the eruption of an active volcano. I saw clearly with my own eyes that in that worst place, a heavenly comrade had emerged in front of me. I again realized that the only thing that can digest this world is the path of love. (174-353, 1988/03/13) |