To Love Is to Give and Forget

The family is the only institution created by God. It is the school
of love where people can learn how to love each other and live
together in peace, and it is the training center where we practice
how to build a palace of peace in the world. It is where we learn how
to become a husband or wife who will live for the sake of our spouse
and how to become a husband and wife who will travel on the eternal
path of love. The family is the base camp for world peace, and it must
be such that the children will say, “We have never seen our mother and
father fight.”
We come up against all sorts of things in life. Even the most loving
couple can have times when they may bicker with each other, become
angry, and raise their voices. When the children come into the room,
however, it all must stop immediately. No matter how angry a spouse
may be, he must relate to his spouse in peace when the children are
present. The children must grow up thinking their family is filled with
joy and their parents always love each other.
Parents are like a second God to their children. If you ask your
young children, “Whom do you like better—God or Mommy and
Daddy?”—and they say they like their mom and dad better, then that
means they also like God. The most precious education takes place in
the family. You won’t find happiness and peace in some other place. The
family is intended to be the Kingdom of Heaven. It would not matter
if a person possesses incredible wealth and fame or even possesses the
whole world. If all is not right with that person’s family, then he cannot
be happy. The Kingdom of Heaven begins in the family. If a husband
and wife are bound together in true love and they build an ideal family,
this will connect directly with the world.
I saw something interesting when I was in Danbury prison. We were
using a bulldozer to level a slope and make a tennis court. When it
rained, we would wait for it to stop, and start up again when the sun
came out. This process of starting and stopping went on for months. We
had a stretch of rain for one period, and we couldn’t work for twenty
consecutive days. When the rain cleared and we went out to start the
work again, we found that some kind of waterfowl had created a nest
where there were some water weeds. It was a place not more than a few
meters from where the prisoners would walk for exercise.
At first, we didn’t even realize that the bird was there. Its camouflage
was so perfect that the bird’s feathers could easily be mistaken for the water
weeds. Once the bird laid its eggs, though, we could see there was a bird in
among the grass. The bird was sitting on some eggs that looked like pieces
of black gravel. Once the chicks hatched, the mother would go find some
food, bring it back to the nest, and put it in the beaks of the chicks. When
the mother was returning to the nest with food, however, she never flew
directly to the nest. She would land a little distance from the nest and then
walk the rest of the way. Each time, she approached the nest from a different
direction. This was her wisdom to make it more difficult for others to
find out the location of the nest where the chicks were.
The chicks ate the food their mother brought them and grew larger.
Sometimes, when a prisoner would walk near the nest, the mother
would fly out and chase him away with her sharp beak. She was afraid
the prisoner might harm her chicks.
The waterbird understood the true love of parents. True love is willing
to give up its own life, and there is no calculation there. The heart
of the bird that was willing to sacrifice its life, if necessary, to protect
its offspring was true love. Parents go the path of love, no matter how
difficult it becomes. A parent is prepared, if needed, to bury his life for
the sake of love, and this is true love.
The essence of love is to cast aside any thought of having others live
for one’s self; it is to live for the sake of others and give for the whole.
Love gives, but then forgets even the fact that it has given and continues
to give without ceasing. This is a love that gives in joy. It is the heart that
a mother feels when she takes her infant in her arms and lets it feed
from her breast.
Parents will suffer for their children until it seems their bones are
going to melt away, yet they never feel that the work is difficult. That
is how much they love their children. True love begins with God
and comes to us from God. So when the parents say to their married
children, “When you like each other, it is because of the grace of your
parents,” the children must be able to respond, “If you had not found
such a spouse for me, I don’t know what I would have done.”
The family is a bundle of love. When we go to the Kingdom of
Heaven and unpack that bundle, a wonderful father and mother will
jump out. Beautiful children will jump out. A benevolent grandfather
and grandmother will jump out. This is the bundle of love. The family
is the space in which God’s ideal is realized and the place where we can
see the completion of God’s work. God’s will is to bring about a world
in which love is made real, and the family is the place where God’s love
overflows.
We only need to hear the word family for us to begin smiling. This is
because the family is overflowing with true love that truly lives for the
sake of all members. True love gives love, then forgets even the fact that
it gave, and then gives again. The love that has parents living for their
children and grandparents for the grandchildren is true love. The love
that lets a person give up his or her life for the country is true love.