Cambodia countryside

By Rev. Sun Myung Moon, tparents.org

Why is parental love precious? Parental love is vertical, but it doesn’t conclude as just vertical. Vertical love embraces horizontal love and helps it settle down. Parents play the role of beacon to dissuade children from wrong habits in life.

Vertical love exists surely to create the horizontal love. In this principle, parental love is established by the intensive integration of vertical and horizontal love centering upon God’s love. Because parental love is responsible for both the vertical and horizontal elements, parents naturally want to give their precious things to their children. By letting the children receive these gifts in their purity, parents want them to expand horizontally. This is the essence of love.

Parental love is the greatest love in the world. Even people in the top rank of the world are nothing in front of their children. Parental love is unconditional and unlimited in the presence of children. Parental love is the origin of love. That’s why orphans who never received parental love long for it most of all. Even if orphans have something to eat and a house in which to sleep, their hearts always hunger and are full of longing because they lack parental love. Even if they lead a joyful life in an orphanage, their time is not truly happy. The little orphans always long for parents even while they sing and dance, are awake or asleep. That’s because every human being is supposed to grow up in the bosom of love.
Parental love of a thousand years ago and that of the present time is identical. In the fluctuating course of history, parental love never changes.

Parental love is the primary love. A sound man who grew up with parental love understands what love is. Because children love their parents, they come to learn love from their experience of loving parents. That is the highest joy for children. Without having parents, we never experience love.

One son can receive both man’s love and woman’s love through the parents. The father represents all the men in the world and the mother represents all the women in the world. In the historical view, the parents are an historical man and woman.

When children want to praise a woman, they compare her with their mother, and when there is a handsome man, children compare him with their father.

Is there a limit to parental love? Parents want to love their children not only for their childhood but for their entire lifetime and for eternity. If a father- and son-relationship is established centering on absolute love, through it will come infinite power, infinite stimulation and something infinitely new. If a father- and son-relationship lacks such a bond, their relationship will surely stop at certain time.