Young Soon Kim the reporter's preface

Preface from Young Soon Kim, the reporter

My mother was a Presbyterian, She started going to church with her mother, and lived her whole life in prayer. From my childhood to my maturity, and even when I was working as a school teacher, my mother guided my faith, sometimes singing a hymn that goes, "My soul is withered like a dry grass in the wilderness," and I followed her guidance in meek obedience. I think that this sewed as a basis upon which God could come to me. Upon my mother's religious conversion, however, my faith underwent a great change.

While going to the Presbyterian Church, she desperately prayed to see God, and during such a prayer she experienced Jesus, who came with a pillar of fire, and through this experience she joined the Unification Church, which was being persecuted as heretic, and received the Blessing of marriage. She also led me to join this church and receive Blessing. Supporting my husband, who chose the path of ministry, I strove to keep to the straight way of faith.

One day, God's voice came to me during a prayer: God wanted to put me into a burning furnace to melt away my old self and remold me in the form of His daughter. Many people who pursue religious faith hear "God's voice," and yet my case is quite different from other people's experiences in that the voice I hear is concrete and directly from God. During the three-year witnessing period after my Blessing in 1968, I was preparing a special workshop.

I was very tired and so lay on the bed to rest for a while, at which time a big hand suddenly appeared in vision. Turning music sheets one by one, that hand and told me to write down the message. I took down some of the message, but afterwards, without understanding its significance, I did not pay much attention to it. After a while, however, when our couple were asleep, a voice came like a thunder and said, "You faithless child," which greatly surprised us to wake up on our knees. The voice from heaven then shouted, "Write down the new songs." For forty days from then, I took down about a hundred songs, working day and night in tears and in exhaustion.

Thereafter, God told me many new things. Since many of these divine messages were abstruse and susceptible to misunderstanding by people, I agonized intensely over whether I should publicly reveal them. The hundred children's songs I had received from God were published only in 1992 under the title Yaho God, and the heaven's messages in December 1996 under the title God, Who Came to Me.

As I remember, it was in April 1997 that I started reporting correspondences from the spiritual world on a full scale. That is when Dr. Lee, who was a director of the Unification Thought Institute and had a close personal relationship with me, suddenly passed on to the spiritual world. I was participating in his funeral ceremony, when he appeared to me in spirit and said, "I will visit you at home tonight." From that time on, he appeared to me at regular times and conveyed what he had personally seen and felt in the spiritual world.

As he had had burning curiosity about the spiritual world while on earth, in the spiritual world he met many historic and providential figures and had many different conversations. He met about thirty figures including such saints religious giants as Jesus, Confucius, Sakyamuni Buddha, Mohammed, Socrates, Swedenborg, and Sunda Sing; such providential figures in the Bible as Adam, Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Judas Iscariot, and John the Baptist; and Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Dojo, Kishi, Eisenhower, Rhee Shing Man, Park Jung Hee, Kim Hwal Lan, and Maria Park. The contents of Dr. Lee's conversation with them have been published in the book The Reality of the Spiritual World and Our Life on Earth.

The present book, St. Augustine's Confessions from the Spiritual World, contains an account of St. Augustine, who is one of the most prominent Christian theologians and has met with Dr. Lee. What is revealed in this volume will surely be shocking to the Protestants and Catholics, and I deeply anguished over whether to expose to the public such a controversial content. I believe, however, that this message will find its way to conscientious people of faith in accordance with God's Will.

The Holy Spirit of God, which irresistibly and infinitely overwhelms us, and the power of the new truth, which presses on towards us from the spiritual world, transcend human reason and judgment. The most essential of what God has said to me when he came to me are: First, help people know about the living God; second, help people know about the spiritual world; and third, help people understand the law of indemnity, by which when we sin, we are punished and judged.

The God whom I know loves the world, and after the creation of human beings, He is present in history and carrying out the tearful providence, sometimes in glow and sometimes in tribulation, in order to restore the fallen people to the original state. I sincerely wish that just as St. Augustine became the most ardent lover and most faithful instrument of God through his mother Monica's tearful prayer and love, so will all the readers of this book realize God's boundless love towards us and live a great life on earth.

Here, I would like to introduce Dr. Sang Hun Lee, who sewed as a bridge to channel the messages for the present volume, and President Eu, who systematized and wrote the Divine Principle. 

Dr. Lee was born in September 5, 1914 in Hwadong-lee Shinsang-myeon Jeongpyeon-gun, Hamgyeongnam-do as the third son of a Confucian scholar Soo Young Lee, and joined the Unification Church in 1956 and received the thirty-six couple's Blessing from Rev. Moon. He systematized and wrote the Unification Thought and VOC (Victory over Communism) Theory out of the teaching of Rev. Moon. He passed away at the age of eighty-four, while he was preparing for the ninth International Symposium on the Unification Thought as a professor of the Sun Moon University. 

Dr. Lee's father, an ardent patriot who had once been in prison for joining the 3.1 Independence Movement, gave Dr. Lee a nationalist spirit and education from his childhood. When Dr. Lee was a high school student, out of his burning opposition against Japan, he participated in a nationalist movement led by communists, which led him to prison and severe tortures by the Japanese police. 

After graduating from Do Seong High School, he entered the Severance Medical School. Meantime, he started having doubts about communist materialism and thinking seriously about what true love for the nation and humanity is. Such philosophical wondering led him to inquire about religion and eventually join the Unification Church. 

After graduating from the Severance Medical School and before joining the church, he single minded walked the course of the medical doctor, for instance, working at the Severance Medical School Hospital, Won San Salvation Army Hospital, Young Dong Salvation Army Hospital, Young Dong State Hospital of Chungbuk, and Korea Police Hospital, and opening the Gae Jeong Central Hospital and Yee Seong Clinic of Internal Medicine.

Dr. Lee marveled whenever he found a great insight from Rev. Moon's speech, and he was able to ask Rev. Moon philosophical questions and receive much personal teaching from him; finally, his such efforts culminated in the systematization of the Unification Thought and VOC Theory. 

For many professors and leaders of various fields, home and abroad, he led seminars on the Unification Thought up to the forty-third session, seminars on the VOC Theory up to the seventh session, and about five hundred scholarly lectures, thereby leading a movement for new spirit and value. On the other hand, as an honorary chair of the Unification Thought section of the ICUS (International Conference on the Unity of Science), he exerted his utmost in establishing the present academic knowledge on the foundation of the Unification Thought.

Next, I would like to turn to the late President Eu. He was one of the three couples who were eldest of all members and Blessed first by Rev. Moon. His character was compassionate, and his life exemplary. He was born on September 25, 1914 as the second son of Jeong Han Eu, the father, and Shin Shil Lee, the mother. 

In April 1933, he graduated from the Osan High School in Jeongju-gun, Pyeonganbuk-do, and in April 1939, while he was a student in the medical school of the Kyeong Seong Imperial University, he was attacked by a sudden disease and had to quit school. In 1948, he served the society as an educator by establishing the Yeon Bok Middle School in the Yeong Pyeong Island and becoming the first president of the school. When the HAS-UWC (Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of the World Christianity), commonly called the Unification Church, was founded on May 1, 1954, President Eu was one of the founding members. He was appointed as the first president of the church on October 14, 1960 and served in the position until July 24, 1970, then he passed away at the age of fifty-seven.

In early November of 1935, President Eu first encountered Rev. Moon's Divine Principle manuscript. It is said that after the day of the encounter, he read and hand copied the content numerous times, unceasingly exclaiming with inspiration and joy. Thereafter, he took an overall charge of the education of the Unification Church members and gave lectures for fifteen hours every day despite his crippled leg. 

When he started on a Divine Principle discussion, he would be totally involved in it without remembering meal or sleeping times and would never end the discussion and explanation until he made sure that the conversing parties understood the points at issue. He always maintained a heavy and tense schedule, giving consultation to church members, taking care of administrative affairs, and systematizing and compiling the Explanation of the Divine Principle. In this intense situation, the first edition of the Explanation was published. 

A few years after this, the Divine Principle came out, which can be regarded as the most remarkable of his life's work under the guidance of Rev. Moon. We cannot neglect the merits of the two elders in systematizing and writing the Unification Principle and Unification Thought. I have introduced the life, thought, and faith of the two elders because I thought that it may help you understand the messages of St. Augustine. I pray for your victory under God's protection.

Young Soon Kim, The reporter, June 20, 2000