ARLINGTON, Va, February 8, 2012 – Twice arrested and tortured by North Korean police in the late 1940s, Sun Myung Moon, leader of the Unification Church, survivor of the Heungnam prison-labor camp, was the recipient of unbearable cruelty.
What is noteworthy is not the cruelty of others, or his ability to survive, but the forgiveness of Sun Myung Moon's heart.
Towards the end of World War II Korea was struggling under the harsh rule of Japan, which had taken over the country in the early 1900s. Japanese colonial authorities did their best to force Koreans to abandon their own religions and language in favor of speaking Japanese and worshipping at Shinto shrines.
After their land was confiscated, many families were forced to suffer from hunger and poverty. Those who resisted the Japanese were often imprisoned or killed.
A number of patriotic young Korean students were joining underground independence groups hoping to find a way to win Korean liberation from Japanese colonial rule. Studying in Tokyo, Sun Myung Moon participated one such group doing what he could to promote the cause of freedom for his country.
In the autumn of 1943, Moon graduated from college in Japan and returned to Korea working for the Kashimi Gumi Construction Company to support himself and his young wife.
One day in October of that year, Japanese colonial police burst into the boarding house and dragged Moon to the local police station. They intended to force him to give them information concerning other young men who had worked with him in the independence movement in Japan.
Knowing that telling the police about his association with these friends would lead to their being hunted down, tortured and even killed, he said nothing. The police were determined to inflict any amount of pain in order to make him reveal their names and activities.
A young Sun Myung Moon was determined to bear any amount of pain in order to protect them.
In his autobiography, As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen, Reverend Moon recounts how the police beat him with the four wooden legs of a table, to the point of breaking each one of them over his body. They stamped on him with their spiked boots and then hung him from the ceiling, “like a slab of meat,” swinging him back and forth, pushing him with a stick until blood was dripping from his mouth.
When he would pass out from the pain, the police would douse him with a bucket of water to bring him back to consciousness, and begin torturing him again.
Sun Myung Moon never gave evidence against the other young men; perhaps his courage and determination helped save some lives. Finally, four months after arresting him, the police released him in February 1945.
He was free again, to pursue his dream of finding a way to teach people of the world how to live in peace, and how to find God’s presence in their own lives.
There is a postscript to this experience, an incident not mentioned in the autobiography that is telling of reverand Moon's ability to forgive. In the mid-1970s I heard Reverend Moon relate this experience in a public speech.
Following Japan’s defeat and surrender at the end of World War II, Korea was liberated from decades of bitter colonial rule. In the days just after the war’s end, nearly every Korean man, woman, and child celebrated his or her newfound freedom from Japan.
Sadly, many Koreans who had suffered under Japan’s rule took the opportunity to take revenge on Japanese officials and personnel.
Reverend Moon knew the dwelling place of a certain police official who had supervised or otherwise taken part in his torture. He also knew that this man’s life was in a great deal of danger from other Koreans who were seeking out and attacking Japanese officers and personnel.
Moon went to the Japanese police officer’s home. After some difficulty convincing the man that he hadn’t come to kill him, he helped him to safely reach the docks, where he was able to embark on a ship back to Japan.
Reverend Moon takes quite literally Jesus’ admonition that one must forgive enemies and care about them, in spite of what they have done in the past.
Imagine if today’s national leaders and politicians -- in fact if all of us -- could embody the kind of courage and forgiveness by which Reverend Moon tries to live. This is a huge, daunting challenge!
However, as we members of the human family learn to put such ideals into practice, the world and our own lives as well, can become increasingly better.
“Sometimes the pain would be so great I would bend over at the waist. Without thinking, I would find myself praying, ‘God, save me.’ In the next moment, though, I caught myself and prayed with confidence, ‘God, don’t worry about me. Sun Myung Moon is not dead yet. I won’t let myself die in such a miserable way as this.’ … There was a mountain of tasks before me that I had to accomplish. I had a mission.” – Reverend Moon, describing survival of torture by Communist police in Pyeongyang, North Korea in 1948
Read more of Clark Eberly's Stories of Faith in the Communities at the Washington Times.
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