6. Seeking the Center of Love

Human beings are born in love, raised in parental love, and grow up as they extend their love horizontally to relatives and friends. A stage in the development of horizontal love is completed when they meet a partner of the opposite sex and grow together as a couple. In their conjugal union, the couple represents the love of heaven and earth. The fruit of that love is the children they bear. Children are the result of love, born from the core of the heart.
Those children, born from a man and woman who share love based on deep heart, create a path for the parents that will take them to the central point of love. When they follow this path to the center, they will meet God. By having children as fruits of love, human beings come to deeply experience the love by which God created human beings and all things. By loving their children with the same love that they had received as they grew up, they can have a deep experience of the parental heart of God. The love that parents pour out to their children is not materialistic love. It is an intrinsic love.
Though everything in heaven and earth may change, the love that parents give their children will never change. In every time and place parental love is the same. By becoming a parent and loving your children, you will understand and deeply experience how God has been loving human beings, His children. Through the experience of being a parent and loving your children, you will feel to your bone how much your parents have loved you.
This is why people revere their parents even more in their old age and fulfill the duties of filial piety to lovingly care for them. If you do not have the heart to do this, you are not qualified to be parents, and your love towards your children can only be considered hypocritical.
We need to feel and understand how much God has loved us. We can do this by becoming parents ourselves and loving our children. This will enable us to love God with greater sincerity. In this way, it is natural that we should love our elderly parents more than we love our children, and love God more than we love our parents. This is the order and law of love.
As was stated, human beings are born in love and grow through their childhood years receiving parental love. But once we grow to a certain level, our parents’ love alone is not enough for us, and we begin to expand our love horizontally to include love among siblings and relatives. This is because as we mature, we want to receive all the love that exists in heaven and earth.
In particular, as we enter the years of adolescence, we begin to crave the love of the opposite sex. By giving and receiving love with someone of the opposite sex, we are able to enter a new and comprehensive realm of love. It is here that for the first time we are able to set out in search of the center of love.
The cosmos has a spherical shape. By the give-and-take of horizontal love with our partner, we begin to revolve together. The relationship traces a circular shape, the first step in forming a sphere. Next, having chosen a partner of the opposite sex and shared love, we bear the fruit of children. By the give-and-take of love with our children, we begin to revolve on a vertical axis. This vertical love when combined with the horizontal love creates a three- dimensional spherical realm. At the same time it establishes a center – the center of love.
The center of love that emerges out of this spherical motion created by these love relationships is the core of existence of the entire world of creation. It can be likened to the Sun, around which the Earth continually revolves and which provides for its existence. The center of love possesses infinite force, which enables the motion of love around it to continue forever. This center, which arises within a sphere of love, is the dwelling place of God.
All created beings that exist in the world are given birth and exist by virtue of God’s love. They all seek the center of God’s love. God is the furnace of love. (126-245, 04/24/1983)