AUTOBIOGRAPHY

PREFACE   by Pastor Juanita Pierre-Louis

When I asked Dr. Sonneborn for information of his life that would help readers know and understand him, he said, “To understand why I joined our family and what I brought to it, one would have to know about my childhood and my careers before I joined, and only I could write about that.” So, here it is in his words.

INTRODUCTION

“My life can be divided into three: My childhood and career in classical music, my years as an organizer in the country’s most prominent faith-based pacifist nonprofit, and my life as a continuingly active member of HSA-UWC. I met my spiritual mother when she was a student in a private school where I was the school pianist, and we got to know each other in a musical group that I had created. So, after (1) writing my childhood and careers, I will (2) detail my musical education. Furthermore, my spiritual mother knew my ideological thinking, which was influenced by things I learned during my musical education,  and witnessed to me partly based upon that; so, I will write (3) the development of what we may call  my ideological thinking, which prepared me to accept and make my own the teachings of Father’s three weapons and to accept his offer to be my true father and to exalt his and Mother’s taking the additional responsibility of standing in  the position of the True Parents of Heaven and Earth and All Humankind. 

All of this leads up to the moment on a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1970, during which I turned 40, when Susan Jacobson successfully invited me "to attend a lecture" and took me to our Center in a tenement across the street from the northern end of the expensive homes on Riverside Drive. The Center was a duplicate of the commune in Acts 2 (except for the religion, of course). No married persons lived there then,  and there were no children. The lecture consisted of Introduction read by Wesley Samuels from Ms. Young Oon Kim's 200-page 1970 book Divine Principle and its Application and the Principle of Creation taught by Susan with diagrams on a blackboard. Susan and I had known each other for four or five years in a group that sang and read through operettas by Gilbert and Sullivan and occasionally other operettas, including those called Broadway musicals, and, less, frequently, operas.  Susan had portrayed leading soprano roles in the G&S works and Susana in Act IV of The Marriage of Figaro, in which, on a dark night, she, disguised as the Countess, sings a seductive area to trap the Count into accusing the Countess of planning adultery, only to find that the real Countess had been hiding in a nearby gazebo. 

I knew that Susan had recently turned 21,  had graduated from Barnard College, attended Riverside Church, and was involved in race relations. I did not know that she had been joined our family. Susan knew me as the charismatic leader of the group, that I had resigned as a leader in the peace and justice nonprofit, and that I had enrolled in Union Theological Seminary 

Finally, I will (4) detail some of my activities in our family.

             

(1)           My childhood and careers            

I was born on July 21, 1930 in Lying-In Hospital in what is now the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. My father, Lawrence Herman Sonneborn (Larry) and my mother, Ruth A Sonneborn (Ruth) took me to their apartment in the Greenwich Village neighborhood. The monies they spent were largely provided as gifts from his merrily-widowed mother. She passed on in 1938, and my father used inheritance from her to purchase and renovate a small three-story townhouse in the same neighborhood and to invest prudently in the stock market. My sister, Eve, was born on April 23, 1933. She and I each had a bedroom and shared a bathroom on the top floor.

Ours was a secular German-Jewish cosmopolitan socialist family. Through my mother’s father, a leading New York State politician, I inherited a Spanish aesthetic. I proved to be, like my father, intuitive, methodical, and analytical and, like my mother, musical and clever.

Eve and I attended three progressive-education schools: The Harriet Johnson Nursery School in the Bank Street College of Education and the City and Country School, both in our neighborhood, followed by the Horace Mann-Lincoln School, across a street from Harlem, through which I walked and in which I often shopped between the A train and the school. My 9th grade class signicantly contributed to the renovation of an all-African American Presbyerian Church across a streeet from the school, though few inn the class were Christians and only one was African-American ( there were also a Cuban and two Orientals). None of the three schools had any African Americans on their faculty and staff.

City and Country was a small school (my graduating class numbered 13) owned and staffed by a a teachers’ collective. With the exception of one or possibly two, the teachers were Marxists of one kind or another, and the Social Studies curricula reflected that, stimulating sympathy for the economically oppressed, where possible, (although the Roman Catholic Church escaped the criticism typical of such curricula.) Although my high school (graduating class of 84) was created and owned by The Teachers College of Columbia University, by the time I arrived there, the social studies curricula (which also determined the English curricula) was firmly in the hands of Marxists.

At age 5, trauma struck. My dog, Pal, was put to death for urinary incontinence. Then, a year later, my newly-made best friend, J. C.  McMullen died of inability to urinate. I then made friends with two boys, classmates, who remained close to me through the rest of their lives. That Spring, I was very skinny and, during playtime on the school’s roof, I hovered near the doorway for warmth. Otherwise, I was very peppy. Our pediatrician, very conservative, suspected hyperthyroidism and prescribed weeks of bed rest. (Tests then showed that my metabolism was actually too low, and I was given thyroid pills for a few years: for the rest of my life, I have had all the symptoms of low metabolism, as did my first son beginning when he was three; tests, however, cannot reveal this and only rule out thyroid deficiency.) I was given a windup phonograph and two sets of shellac records: a scary Peter Rabbit story, and Iolanthe, a  Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. As I loved the latter, I was given each year a set of another of their operettas, and my love for these turned out to have an important influence on my life, as will be shown below.

Karl, Pierre, and I very often played together after school or on weekends in my parents’ home or in the paved yard owned in common by owners of houses along one city block and a couple of buildings around each corner. In my home, because I was the host, I began by determining what to play about. When the others got around to objecting to this, I displayed my organizing ability (my mother also had that): I declared that we would take turns being the “Head”, but that I would remain the “Head Head”, announcing who would be the head for each occasion.

In the third grade, in school, I formed another lasting friendship. During the school year, a boy arrived fresh from China knowing little English: because I always talked so much during lunch that I didn’t even finish  food, they sat him with me. Chao Chu and Pierre were among those who moved with me into high school. Chao Chu and his parents were Communists, and at his urging we went many times to each of two great films: Alexander Nevsky and Grand IIlusion.

During the summer before we entered the 12^th grade, Karl and Pierre were visiting in the house that my parents rented (having leased our home to visiting NYU faculty members). As was our wont on rainy days, we listened to the Gilbert and Sullivan recordings, sometimes organizing them according to a certain singer who appeared in several operettas, etc. Somehow, I imagined gathering enough of our friends to sing and read through The Pirates of Penzance. Our imagined casting was by character type, not regarding singing ability. In January, I organized an actual meeting for this, with casting based upon talent available – myself as pianist, Karl, the strong baritone, and Pierre, already showing the ability that would launch his professional acting career, in the patter-song role. We enjoyed it despite the other roles being very poorly filled, and talked about it in school, prompting talented sopranos, contralto, and bass to ask for another such meeting, with a different operetta. This was held and we began a bi-weekly meeting group that continues even until this day, with a daughter group in Chappaqua, New York. It was in this group, that my spiritual mother got to know me.

As a child during the school years, I was reasonably happy. My life was otherwise uneventful save for the following. When I was five years old, my father, having unsuccessfully tried to teach me cribbage and dominoes, began learning chess and teaching me as he learned. During the school years, I spent many hours after school playing chess with him, and, during the last two years in high school, I was on the school chess team (as the second-best player in the school and in the league in which we competed). I was also the eighth player on the school tennis team because anybody else they could have recruited as a doubles player would have been more erratic than I.

An important principle of progressive education is that each child should be given as much responsibility as is thought that he or she can successfully manage. (Other important principles are that everyone is naturally altruistic, that people learn from doing things, that the dignity of each child must be respected at all times, and that the studies of various academic disciplines should all be related, centering on the social studies topic.) Accordingly, in the eighth-grade social studies course (which could have been appropriately titled History of American Imperialism), the card-carrying Socialist Party teacher divided the class into three and asked each member of each section to contribute to a plan for the curriculum and for overseeing it with the teacher. (Each child could choose which section to belong to, and all the most left-leaning children chose the section headed by Chao Chu, who organized it so that it met every day, whoever was there could vote, thus assuring his proposals.)  I stood up in my section and proposed the following, which was accepted: the school year would be divided into three periods with each of the 15 children on the curriculum committee of one period, and with an overall year-long Steering Committee led by myself and with two representatives of the committees of each period. (In this way, I applied the organizing principle I had devised in first grade with my two friends). (This principle has been called the Presbyterian principle and is the organizing principle enshrined in the Constitution of the Soviet Union, with Bolsheviks – village councils – leading up in concentric circles, the difference being that the central government has the final say, no matter what recommendations they have received.)

I had exercised my organizational ability while in the ninth grade, this time in creating a program. I took a great short story by the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock and created a script for a performance of it, with all the dialogue spoken by performers and all the other words spoken as narrative by myself standing offstage and to the right. I recruited Pierre, Karl, Chao Chu, and two others of our circle of friends who had acting talent, and we performed this under the following circumstances. City and Country elementary school had long had an annual Spring Fair in which children of all ages came in late afternoon and into the evening and had all kinds of fun. My mother conceived of, organized, and marketed a fundraising add-on to the Fair, featuring a hard-drink saloon, a gambling room with slot machines, and a late evening performance by a popular folksinger. We performed upstairs in the school’s small gym at 8, and the great enjoyment the small audience of parents received was manifested in that when we repeated the performance two hours later, a significantly greater audience appeared.

During all the school years, and even while in college, I was a total nerd. When in the eighth grade, hormones impelled some of my classmates to go and hang out after school on a pier in the Hudson River, I found someone to go home with me and play board games. I never had a date until I was 25, save for the obligatory final ballroom dance and the obligatory nighttime ride on the Staten island Ferry, and I was completely clueless as to how I was expected to behave on those dates.

Once having graduated from college, I embarked on a career as a professional musician: a piano accompanist of singers and – my having become a Christian in college - organist, choirmaster, music director, and/or liturgist in Christian and Jewish congregations. This career lasted until I was 43, having moved into a Unification Church commune and being told by True Father through Rev. Kamiyama to spend all Sundays with our church. How I attained the skills and interest for this career follows in the history of my musical education.

   (2) My musical education

Among my earliest memories is my mother sitting at the baby grand piano and singing and accompanying herself from a book of children’s songs, including a setting of Christina Rosetti’s “Who Has Seen The Wind?” and “The Last Rose of Summer”. I, four years old, of course memorized many of the songs, and by singing along while looking at the printed words, I naturally learned to read.

From 1937 (when I was seven), 78-rpms were played by my mother: Marian Anderson's, My Lord What a Morning (when the stars begin to fall); Were You There?; Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child (her favorite – she was an asthmatic): Paul Robeson's, Get On Board Little Children (the Gospel train’s a-coming, no rich and poor, no strangers); I Want To Be Ready (to walk in Jerusalem, just like John).

From 1938 on I took piano lessons from time to time. My mother’s sister, her elder, professionally taught children piano. She, who lived in Princeton, insisted that I learn to read the notes in the G-clef before approaching the piano.

In 1942, the school’s music teacher had been gathering together children who had been learning to play an instrument or willing to learn to, and formed small ensembles: there were two levels, the orchestra and the advanced orchestra, even the latter not featuring any instrumentalist who had studied for more than two years. I tried to learn to play the cello, since I loved its warm tones. I played in the ‘advanced’ orchestra. However, not only because I inherited from my mother’s father a Sephardic body with thin bones, but also because, having been somewhat bullied in nursery school and, being very adverse to pain, I had abstained from the kind of friendly wrestling and tussling typical of young boys, I was not muscular enough to develop more control over the bowing, and so gave it up.

 From 1942 for decades. Christmas carols were sung in our living room (with myself at the piano), printed in The Fireside Book of Folk Songs, compiled and arranged  by Margaret Bradford Boni, a Marxist, including these highlighted by strong soprano Wilhelmina Kraber, a Communist and close friend of my parents; “Masters of This Hall” (God the poor hath holpen and hath cast a-down the proud); “O Holy Night”, sung solo by her (chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother, His word is truth and His gospel is peace);  “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear”  (For, lo! the days are hastening on, by prophets long foretold,… when peace shall cover all the earth , and the whole world send back the song which now the angels sing), and the many others adoring and exalting Jesus the baby and king.

In 1948, In my Marxist-led high school, I sang in Chorus led by Helen Baker of the Riverside Church: Martin Luther's “Now Let All the Earth Adore Thee” (angels around Thy throne, no mortal eye hath seen, no mortal ear hath heard such wondrous things); and  “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” (Word of God our flesh that fashioned with the fire of love impassioned, Thou dost ever seek thine own, sighing, soaring, round Thy throne).

For the first two months of the summer of 1943, our family, unable to again rent a home in Northwestern Connecticut, rented one in Chocorua, New Hampshire. It had an upright piano and a piano bench full of music scores. My mother and I each could play music at sight, and we played through symphonies of Mozart and Haydn transcribed for two performers at one piano. As my technique was not yet as good as hers, she played the higher notes. My parents’ friends, the Krabers, came to visit us. Tony had volunteered in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting against Gen. Franco’s takeover of the democratic republic in Spain. He then had become an opera star, singing Valentin in Gounod’s Faust in the American Opera Company at Hammerstein’s opera house (later called the Manhattan Center). Because opera is a bourgeois form, he gave up the career and went on to act in the off-Broadway company Group Theater: however, his voice was still world-class. When he saw in the piano bench classical-music songs that he had studied and loved, he pulled one out and asked me to play the accompaniment while he sang. After we had done this for several songs, he said, “Johnny, you have a great talent as a piano accompanist.”

During my years in high school, I took private lessons in music theory, including counterpoint and harmonic rhythm. I also took some organ lessons.

In 1950, at The Highlander Folk School, in Monteagle, Tennessee, I, for a wrong reason, participated in a Unitarian summer work camp at this grassroots union leadership training institute, where we cleared the ground for a lake that would be open for interracial swimming. There was no mention of religion. {By the way, “We Shall Overcome”, which we sang often, was set in its final form there by Pete Seeger and Guy Carawan, with harmony by pianist Zilphia Horton, wife of the school’s director, --it was originally a Christian song].

By the spring of 1948, I had decided that I wanted a career in music. So, I sought a small college with an advanced music curriculum. Unable to gain admission to Oberlin College, as neither my grades nor my playing was good enough, I settled on BucknelI College. There I accompanied some singers during their voice lessons, and played the piano in one performance of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. I studied the book Music In History showing the development of Western classical music in the context of its political and social circumstances.

 Having exhausted Bucknell’s music curriculum, I transferred the next year to the University of Redlands in Southern California’s Valley of Paradise. There, I continued accompanying singers and also played a transcription of the orchestral score for Menotti’s opera The Medium. (I had found a way to make the piano suggest different orchestral instruments or combinations thereof, and my performance was truly masterful). A transcript of my graduation shows that half of my course credits were in music; I had a minor formed of Religion and of English (practical, not literature).

From autumn 1953 for a few years, I sang in the choir of  the Unitarian Church on Pierpont Street in Brooklyn Heights (they had a substitute for the second and third persons of the Trinity in the Doxology); the slight, elderly conductor/organist has been an inspiration for me with his amazing mental and physical energy and rehearsal technique (I quit when he retired). It was an amateur chorus with a professional soprano soloist, first Marnie Nixon (who went on to be the voice of Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and voice-over in other productions), later Arabella Hong (who also went on to become well-known).

Meanwhile, I picked up whatever work I could find as an accompanist, whether in a singer’s home or in mine (a studio apartment I rented not far from my parents’ home, with an upright piano that I bought with an interest- free loan from a Jewish charitable organization).  At some point, a singer suggested that I could make additional money as organist in churches, and so began this aspect of my musical career. As organist, I barely got by, using the foot pedals sparsely. For the prelude and postlude, I found pieces that I could manage and were appropriately effective. It was as a choir director that I truly excelled. Through an agency that had been placing me in churches, I became also organist and/or choir director in Reform or Conservative Jewish congregations, and I came to know and love all music of the diaspora, both traditional and modern, and Israeli music. A setting that I composed of the Psalm “Out the Depth Have I Called Thee”  was performed regularly in a suburban New Jersey Temple.

During one summer in the late 1950s, I was music director at a Roman Catholic camp for young adults; I gave music appreciation classes and conducted worship in plainchant a capella. Some years later, I was organist/choirmaster in an Episcopal Church in Saint Albans, Queens, where everything was sung unison in plainchant.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, I sang in a large all-amateur chorus, The Interracial Fellowship Chorus conducted by Harold Aks. Had I been endowed with a good singing voice, I undoubtedly would have become a singer of concert and real folk songs; however, my singing is so bad that I was kicked out of college glee clubs. A huge chorus was the place for me. We sang Haydn masses in Carnegie Hall accompanied by professional pickup-orchestras and hired soloists. On the programs were usually also a piece commissioned by Mr. Aks. One memorable concert was the performance of Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabeus in an Episcopalian church on Amsterdam Avenue. The oratorio traces the ups and downs and then ups again of the Israeli people of Judas’ time. The audience was forbidden to applaud in the church, so tremendous emotional tension built up, and during the second act, the period-piece trumpeter was so excited that he improvised additional flourishes.

 Mr. Aks hired me as the pianist for his classes and productions in the small progressive-education Walden School. It was there that I first met my spiritual mother and invited her to join my Gilbert and Sullivan living room group.

    (3)  The formation of my ideological thinking until the time when I first heard the Divine Principle.

 As I have shown, during my childhood I was repeatedly exposed to secular forms of socialism, particularly to historical materialism. It became obvious to me that capitalism is a terrible system: there is tremendous pressure on good people to do bad things (the history of the British colony of Georgia being a good case in point), with evil existing even at the level of the competition of small entrepreneurial businesses. Nonetheless, I concluded that the alternative of socialism was even worse because power was concentrated in fewer people, and these would be prone to be corrupt. My mother never talked in my presence about the Fabian socialism in which she believed, formulated by the very prominent British economists Sydney and Beatrice Webb.  I found out that it tries to solve the problem of corruption by means of eugenics. My mother mentioned to me when she had read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, that it virtually destroyed eugenics; nevertheless, she soldiered on supporting democratic socialism. Having been orphaned at the age of 21 and inherited an apartment and enough money to enjoy a life of leisure, she hung out during the prohibition years in Greenwich Village speakeasies with avant-garde artists, feminists, and radical thinkers and visited Harlem during its Renaissance. She naïvely admired the Soviet Union’s claims of equality; however, she did not have to wait until Gorbachev unveiled its sordid history: Stalin’s pact with the Holocaust-creating Germany was enough. After all, blood is the thickest. She never joined the Socialist Party USA, whose platform called for government ownership of all major industries and agricultural businesses, but helped reform the Democratic Party, ending the Tammany Hall patronage machine that had promoted her father’s political career up to the point where he served for two years as President of the State Senate. (He  later came out as a covert socialist and began co-sponsoring legislation to reform New York City agencies: Tammany Hall found a way to remove him from state office.) Once we had moved into the townhouse and she had hired a full-time live-in maid, she spent some time as editor of the in-house journal of a Communist-led dockworkers union, but otherwise limited herself to giving donations to leftist and labor union organizations.

The parenting that I received was so good that I could not help wanting it to be even better, even perfect. On religion, the best my mother could say about it was to paraphrase Marx’s famous faint praise of it as the opium for the poor; otherwise it was condemned as conformist. Nevertheless, although a dedicated atheist, she loved the Bible as literature (as shown in her choice, above, of the recordings), giving us biblical names, and hanging in the most prominent place of the living room, a framed photograph of a section of Exodus in old German with pictures on one side of God burning in a bush and on the other side of Moses and other children being thrown into the river. It was not until I was in college, having also sung the Christian hymns mentioned above, that I became a believer. Meanwhile, in  City and Country, where children spent time in the library for two periods each day, I read all the mythologies that I could find, including a wonderful prose  translation of The Iliad and the entirety of both Hindu epics, along with Norse mythology (the reportage of  which had been tinkered with and tempered by Christians) and some others. Also, somehow, as an eight-year-old, I dictated a description of Satan. Perhaps this was the work of a babysitter who, unbeknownst to my parents, preached salvation and damnation to me while I was taking a bath.

At Bucknell, in addition to studying journalism, I took a course in debate. The college chose another boy and me to represent it in the debate league. We traveled to other campuses, where the host team was assigned to debate favoring socialism, i.e.,.nationalization. We were given the option of either defending the status quo or suggesting reformation of the capitalist system. We chose the latter. The host’s criticism of capitalism centered on the terrible treatment of coal miners by the mine owners. We suggested that this could be remedied by government regulation. I then joined the Republican Party, whose chief reformist was Sen. Robert Taft.

Bucknell is technically a liberal Baptist college (ABC) but had a larger population of Methodists. Students were required to attend worship services every Tuesday morning with the option of attending also on Thursday mornings. I chose that because I was singing in the choir and loving the Christian hymns and anthems. In mid-winter came Religious Emphasis Week. The speaker was the pastor of the Riverside Church, to my mind the number one Protestant church in America and in whose building my class had graduated. His opening sermon was “The Perils of Conformity”. This contradicted my mother’s description of Christianity. From then on I paid more attention to the words of Jesus on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I found myself agreeing with everything that he said except that which I could not understand, and I eventually concluded that since he was so much smarter than I, I would agree with those, hoping to understand them better bye-and-bye

Throughout the year I spent at Bucknell I was lonely and mostly miserable, even though intellectually stimulated. I still had no idea what other people thought about me, and maybe did not want to know, and I was a rather extreme nonconformist. One day the leaders of the Reform Jewish campus society Hillel came to me and told me to shape up, as I was giving Jews a bad name. This was my first experience with the existence of anti-Semitism. I attended a weekend workshop of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship because it promised to talk about sex. I was favorably impressed by the shiny faces of the fellowship members. Somehow, in the late spring, I ended up frequenting a house on campus inhabited by the Methodist Youth Fellowship. They just received me cordially and gave me chamomile tea. That fellowship’s national leadership was always imprisoned for committing civil disobedience for one cause or another.

During the next summer, I began attending a Unitarian church, where they accorded with Jesus’ humanistic teachings, including his centering on love, but ignored any references to the supernatural. This appealed to me, and I gathered a great deal of Unitarian literature. When I transferred in the fall to Redlands, I found a Unitarian church there; however, the members were rational with no emotion. So, I joined the on-campus Methodist Church. The reason for doing that was an unusual conversation with the local pacifist leader, the Methodist George Smiley, the black sheep of the family for whom the town’s library and other institutions were named. He had sought me out and took me for a drive around town. I told him that my only hope was for the realization of a world government so that all nations would put down their armaments. (The cause of world government had gained a lot of popularity in America in those years, and even Wendell Willkie, candidate for the presidency in Republican Party primaries, promoted it.)  He said that I was wrong: first nations must put away their armaments; only then could a world government be formed. I was instantly converted. 

The campus Methodist Church had a pacifist pastor with long yellow hair: after a couple months, he was transferred by his hawkish Bishop to a town featuring an Air Force base. This soured me on Methodism, and from then on I attended Quaker meetings on Sundays. They were very suitable for my intuitive nature.

To understand Jesus’ teachings better, I had enrolled in a course whose textbook was A Guide to Understanding the Bible, written decades earlier by Harry Emerson Fosdick, longtime pastor of the Riverside Church. The book’s chapters were God, Sin, etc. He showed the Israelites’ developing understanding of the chapter’s topic over the course of their religion from primitive times to the teachings of Jesus. For example, God, first seen as a distant mountain God of thunder and war, became increasingly intimate with human beings, through the still, small voice heard by Elijah and the Second Temple’s high priest’s ability to see God face-to-face for one moment each year, culminating in God’s incarnation in Jesus. This manner of God’s self-realization is, of course, also taught in Divine Principle, with explanation. I also read a book given to me by Rev. Smiley, showing clearly that Jesus taught and practiced pacifism. I understood, from the songs that I had heard and sung as a child, mentioned above, that he had had no substantial kingdom to defend:  I knew that Jesus was adored as an infant and as a king, but also that he had been crucified and entombed;  furthermore, some of the songs conveyed the social Gospel.

By the time I became organist in mainstream Christian churches, my Christian theology had significantly developed through reading and interaction with other Christians. I participated fully and wholeheartedly in the hymns and anthems that I conducted, even though if I had reflected on them intellectually, I might not have believed them to be completely true. Even now when I sing a hymn in my mind or to my wife (who grew up as a Presbyterian) I cherish many of their ideas, such as Jesus living in my heart, but have had difficulty believing that God, who created the physical and spiritual laws of the cosmos, would at any time abrogate any of these as Providence. From my conversion on, I followed Jesus as a friend and imagined the two of us standing on a raft in a lake, and that if I slipped and fell under the surface, he would strongly lift me up. However, recently, one day coming home from the Harlem Family Church on a late Spring afternoon, a sudden surge of summer air from the south enchanted the streets, and I imagined Jesus on the throne way up in the air and impulsively sent waves of him. I recognized that I followed him as my father and was sending him the love my father had become unwilling to receive after our relationship had soured.

At Redlands, I joined The Fellowship of Reconciliation, the local chapter being led by Rev. Smiley. We heard speakers from Kingsley Hall in London, from the wonderful singer and youth leader Bayard Rustin, who later organized, for the Pullman’s Union, the March on Washington at which Dr. King gave his famous “I have a dream” speech. We attended a meeting of pacifist groups in Los Angeles, where the meeting’s organizer effectively kicked out Communists who had infiltrated the meeting by forcing a vote on a resolution condemning the Soviet Union as well as America: Communists could not criticize the Soviet Union and left the hall in twos and threes. A small pacifist group formed on campus including members of FOR and others committed to the Fellowship’s commitment to nonviolent speech as well as nonviolent action. I was given the number two position, in which I could throw out ideas but was not responsible for the practicality of executing them.

When I was called to Los Angeles to be examined for fitness to serve in the US military, I expected to be drafted, refuse to serve and be jailed. My mother had had a psychotherapist whom I had been seeing during high school write a letter fraudulently claiming that I was a homosexual and so should not serve. The examining psychologist read the letter, interviewed me, and rejected me for service on the correct grounds that if I were to be sent to a very cold climate, I would not be able to function duo to a sinus condition: the military needed only one of every eight men in a certain age group. The psychologist bade me goodbye and said I could come and visit him anytime I wanted to.

Many colleges each sent a contingent to the University of California at Berkeley to participate in a mock United Nations event. Our team was to represent Yugoslavia, which had been invaded by the Soviet Union. The team leader was James Q Wilson, who later became famous as a sociologist for creating the broken windows theory of criminal activity. He assigned me to allege in the Security Council the invasion  I did my habitual exhaustive research only to find out that I was given far from enough time to present it all.

In the summer of 1951, I took two 6- week courses mornings at Uppsala College in South Orange, New Jersey: History of Christian Doctrine (learn factoids and pass factoid exam) and Issues in Christian Doctrine (all open discussion), both excellently taught by the same teacher; the rest of the summer I volunteered in FOR headquarters on Audubon Avenue in Washington Heights. I sat outside the legendary A. J. Muste’s door, sorting pamphlets and small books amassed by him, many of them religious, and, of course, listening to him and his guests.

Back in New York City after graduating, I let local FOR members, usually 10 to 15 of them, meet in my parents’ living room. I attended events in the Fellowship’s national headquarters in Nyack, New York and attended a national convention in Ohio. However, when I finally began dating, that took priority, and I stopped participating in the Fellowship even though one of my two main romances was with a pacifist woman.

In the mid-60s, I decided to try my hand as a solo pianist and prepared for and gave a public concert. I began masterfully the first piece, a Brahms Rhapsody, then came a passage whose mastery was beyond my technique. I was a purist when it came to musical interpretation, wanting to perform the way I thought the composer would want; so, instead of doing as most soloists would do – stretching out the tempo enough to play the passage clearly – I just stumbled through it. This, however, upset me, and I never regained my original power. There were other problems with the concert, and the conclusion, evident to all of us, including the critic from the New York Times, was that I was not ready for a career as a soloist. I then stopped taking jobs as an accompanist in order to have more time to practice as a soloist, supporting myself with my two positions as organist.

 Early in the summer of 1967, I went to a meeting of FOR’s metropolitan region Council. Rev. Muste had resigned as the organization’s leader in order to make way for the next generation, and the Council members sat at his feet when he reported on his worldwide tours and also gave an annual fundraising dinner at a hotel. Now that Dr. Muste had died in Hanoi, the Council was considering what to do. Drawing upon my experience and ability as an organizer, I began suggesting various programs. I went to the bathroom, and when I came out the Council had hired me to be the region’s executive director, giving me a stipend and an office free of rent in a Methodist Church in Greenwich Village but with no staff – only volunteers to assist with mailings or an occasional volunteer to help in the office, sometimes a spy, sometimes a woman seeking a lover.

The first program that I created, in a beautiful old Quaker meeting house, was called The Legacy of A. J. Muste. I had assembled a small chamber ensemble and, with myself as pianist, set the tone of the meeting with a musical offering by Bach. That autumn marked the beginning of the Black Power movement in New York, consequent on black parents having withdrawn their children from an impoverished neighborhood’s public schools in protest against the all- white teachers, members of the teachers’ union. I knew that some of the FOR members who would attend would be Jewish socialists strongly supporting the labor movement. So, to give a rounded view of justice in New York City, I had the second speaker be an FOR-member African-American professor of sociology who explained the importance of the movement for black power.

 During my three years as Executive Director, I organized two major events as well as various forums, education on boys’ responsibilities and rights under the Selective Service Act, small rallies protesting America’s involvement in the Vietnamese Civil War, and, with the Council’s help, writing and mailing annual fundraising letters. The first event was an all-day conference on prison reform, held in the NYU Law School building on a corner of Washington Square (the very spot where had stood the building in which my family lived when I was ages two through five). I single-handedly secured the venue, visited each of the major players in the movement for prison reform, enlisted them as sponsors for the event, and invited them to speak at it. They all agreed. I had enlisted two Fellowship members as volunteer receptionists, and I served as the event’s master of ceremonies. I marketed the event, sending press releases to free weekly newspapers and to radio stations.

The other major event, suggested by members of the Council, was a Peace Festival in Central Park.  I received a great deal of guidance for this from members of the Council and of the affiliated Catholic Peace Fellowship; still, I alone had to secure the necessary permits, recruit Sammy Davis to perform a set without remuneration, and invite other organizations to set up tables along the streets near the bandshell at which the main events would take place. I again marketed it and, during the event, gave a speech. It was not one of my best; I have the ability to argue both sides of any question until I can determine which side represents the viewpoint of Jesus; however, such a sectarian viewpoint was taboo, as the Fellowship represented persons of many different faith perspectives.

At my suggestion, the New York City chapter of the Teacher’s Union arranged for me to give a presentation using an overhead projector at two public high school auditoriums before groups of some 20 Social Studies teachers on boys’ responsibilities and rights under the Selective Service Act. I prepared packets for the teachers to take with them containing the relevant regulations. On that foundation, I created, on a leftist radio channel, a 15-minute call-in show in which I answered questions on that topic. I had with me a member of the Board of Education, Murray Polner, and a lawyer, Harry Miles, both members of the Fellowship. (They were there just to give me authenticity, and did not need to say anything on any of the topics.)

In early 1970, two members of the American Friends Service Committee, Quakers who lobby Congresspersons on Capitol Hill, toured the Soviet Union. Stating that the Soviet Union was even worse than America and that while we were protesting a war a new war was already starting, they said that the most that we could do would be to speak truth to power, (and that was the name of the book and the origination of that phrase). I read that this had led the Fellowship’s Chicago director to resign and resume work as a Christian pastor. I considered the following: Christians throughout the church’s history have been ambiguous about war and peace, however, they have consistently denounced greed. Here we are in a very greedy society, therefore it is the church’s responsibility to promote peace and justice. I determined to become a pastor and encourage my congregants to emotionally drop out of militarism. A problem was that Quakers in the eastern states do not have pastors. I was a music director in the small Congregational church in Rockaway Park, Queens with a pacifist minister. Then the Black Manifesto was posted on the door of the National Council of Churches. In often horrible language, the manifesto called for reparations. (Reparations for past offenses is part of Korean culture and is stated in Unificationism as a condition for forgiveness (indemnity condition). My pastor read a letter from the Congregational Church headquarters stating that, “We will not evade the challenge of the Black manifesto”, and then gave five paragraphs doing just that. To the contrary, the Presbyterian Church said, “We are stumped. We will study it.” “That’s for me,” I thought. I had been organist for a new-agey Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn Heights. The pastor there welcomed me back. I then enrolled in Union Theological Seminary under the care of the Session of that church.

Three months before my first class, I heard my first Divine Principle lecture.                                                                                                           ..                 

(4)  My life as a continuingly active member of HSA-UWC.

Susan Jacobson (who became my spiritual mother) and I had known each other as members of a music group+ (as detailed above). I knew that Susan was a pure Christian attending the Riverside Church and that she was interested in the relationships between the races. She knew that I was a pacifist and a professional pianist (both detailed in my Autobiography), that I was 17 years older than she, and that I had had romances.  In the summer of 1970, Susan had turned 21 and, for the first time, I asked her out for a date, to attend with me a ballet performance. Unbeknownst to me, Susan had joined our family after graduating from Barnard College. She knew members do not fornicate, but did not know that they do not date and hold hands with a member of the opposite sex. So, knowing my interests, she accepted the date with the intention of witnessing to me. It was on our date that she invited me to a lecture at our family’s center in a railroad flat in a tenement building on West 161^st Street, on the edge of what was then Spanish Harlem. After Wesley Samuel lectured Introduction, Susan gave the Principle of Creation.

Before giving my response to the lecture, because I Intend later to give my current understandings of the Principles, I am inserting now a summary of my activities in our family: Conveying the Principle to educated clergy; Center life with street witnessing and door-to-door fundraising, housecleaning the center, front desk reception, giving a few lectures, being woken up; doing research for Ms. Kim; attending part of 100-day training and then becoming a lecturer there; transforming rough translations into good translations; campaigning for Carnegie Hall while living in a small Carp center, meals with very little meat in them prepared differently by members from different nations; being the CARP IW for centers in New York City; presenting the Principle to educated clergy; organizing conferences on  the critique and counter proposal to Marxist theory;ber of the team of physically-older members visiting mainstream Christian clergy and urging their participation in Yankee Stadium; witnessing to professors and others at Union Theological Seminary; teaching courses at our seminary in Religion and Society, Unification Thought, Victory over Communism, and Divine Principle; bringing to our seminary religious speakers on peace and justice; copyediting books published by our seminary; head of Interfaith Department, ncluding organizing weekend conferences for interfaith clergy; giving editing suggestions to the team translating Level Four and later the team translating Exposition of the Divine Principle; helping Rev. Kwak complete Level Five by working on translation, offering suggestions including on content, and preparing the initial drafts of some chapters or sections; writing the draft of the official statement on The Unification Church Position on Human Rights and World Peace; Tribal Messiah activities; attending lectures by Dr. Lee on Unification Thought, helping reorganize the chapter on aesthetics; helping edit the translation of later Unification Thought books, translations of True Father’s speeches; attending matchings and being blessed; fathering two sons and raising helping to raise them; home church activities.

What next follows is largely copied from my comment on a post by Dr. Noda in our seminary’s blog Applied Unificationism (what is copied is surrounded by single quotes).

‘My first encounter with the teachings of the True Parents was in a lecture in the summer of 1970: “The Principle of Creation”. Certain points in the lecture were transformative as they gave me new hope. In 1969, I had abandoned  my hope for the conversion  to pacifism of individuals in democratic nations, decided  to become a rural minister, and enrolled in Union Theological Seminary to begin my studies in the fall of 1970. 

          

In the lecture, the first point that stimulated some hope was that individuals exist in families that protect and help them, and that their decisions concerning matters beyond the family are influenced by their participation in it. The lecturer pointed out that, further, families exist in communities that protect and help… etc. The next transformative insight was the principle of dual purpose. I immediately felt that, armed with these insights, I should resume my efforts for conversions to pacifism. This was one factor in my deciding, in September 1971, to commit myself to discipleship in Master’ project to help God realize the peaceful world (based on my understanding of the project’s regulations as they existed).  My stance in interpreting the points was transformativist, experiencing them immediately in the context of my ongoing life.

My next encounter with the Principle was the studying of Young Oon Kim’s Divine Principle and its Applications. (The book does not identify the Divine Principle as distinguished from its applications.)’ Ms. Kim’s book included Mark 4:26’s description of the stages in the growth of a plant. Again, I considered this description to be widely comfortably acceptable, and labels of the stages, such as, ’forming’,‘growing’, and ‘completing’ apt.  I have been spending a considerable amount of thinking about applications of this theory, both within Principle texts and outside of them, including in Euclidean geometry and in theory of narrative, the structuralist theory – especially as codified by A-J Greimas with 3 stages – becoming an important part of the framework of my thinking. Already in September197i, I applied the three-stage theory in developing my curricula for the second and third years of my M.Div. studies, and found each year’s curriculum internally coherent.

I was not particularly interested in the discussion of dual characteristics, but understood the nature of the subject-object relationship’ (which I have come to view as most importantly centered on the subject’s greater responsibility and the process of the formation of which I have detailed in a post “The Most Important Principles” on  johnnysonneborn.blogspot.com, along with the narration for my PowerPoint parenting workshop and other writings). ‘The principle/insight of the four-position foundation and its formation I understood as a description of how everyone thinks. For example, if one feels a slight penetration in one’s arm, one intuitively knows that it was caused by a force, that the force had direction, and that it originated as an impulse. The principle/theory of the three objects purpose I found realistic in its recognition that a child often takes the subject position, initiating a giving and responding.  Especially when the principle of dual purpose is applied to an individual in the family, it would appear to almost anyone as an ethical principle. It may be that family members universally are at least unconsciously aware of this principle. Nevertheless, I have recently been seeking to apply this as more fundamental, considering the purpose of the individual of any entity to be repairing, maintaining, or fortifying the entity’s foundation for realizing the purpose of the greater entity in which it participates. ‘

I told Susan of my favorable response to her lecture and my interest in studying it further. During the weeks before she departed for Berkeley to begin her Masters in French, I came to the center two times and we went for long walks in Central Park, during which we sang Holy Songs which she was teaching me, and I rambled on about matters that intellectually interested me at the time. I was also very impressed with the way the members lived as a Platonic commune similar to that mentioned in Acts 2, contributing to the center all the monies that they earned on jobs and sharing goods bought with the monies. I was especially impressed that they consciously prevented their gaze from looking at anyone below the neck, lest they might become prurient and, as Jesus put it, commit adultery in their hearts.

When Susan was to depart, I selected Gil Roschuni to teach me more about the Principle. It was his first time teaching it, and during weekly visits, he read to me every word of Young Oon Kim’s 1970 book. I argued all the way, but he provided answers, returning always to the father - son relationship. When I strongly doubted communication from departed persons, he, who composed songs accompanied by his guitar, said that he had been conversing with Brahms. I knew Brahms’ music and life quite thoroughly, and the things that he reportedly said to Gil fit well with those.

‘Of great importance to me, second only to the theory of dual purpose, were the theories of the three stages of the growing process and of indirect and direct dominion. The concept of God’s indirect dominion of a person (which can be metaphorically extracted from the verse in Mark) resonated well with my Quaker inclinations, and the concept of God’s direct dominion supported my hope for the end of religion as prophesied by Jeremiah. I am considering that the Principle texts’ theories exemplified in the above Bible verse may be descriptions of the way all human beings think.

By the time Gil finished reading the book to me, I had peeked at the last chapter and realized who Master was. As reported above, it was not until September 1971 that I was ready to join Pioneers of the New Age, as the centers centered on the Ms. Kim were called.  When I then expressed to the center director  Barbara Mikesell my desire to join, she handed me a form from HSA-UWC asking did  I “believe the Divine Principle” and soliciting a donation of $10 as an affirmation of interest. I agreed with the Principle’s overall teachings but not with every detail, and took the form home.

Since I had found myself planning my life based upon the principle of three stages, I realized that I should in good faith state that I “believed the principle”, went to the center, and signed the membership form. Barbara pointed out that in view of my full-time studies and that I was not earning enough money to contribute to the center, I would have to be an “outside member”.

While attending the first lecture, I had accepted the discussion of the original mind, conscience, and the fallen mind as descriptive of my everyday experiences and was pleased that it affirms my long-held assumption (and the assumption of progressive education) that everyone is fundamentally altruistic. This had prepared me, finally, for some discussion of discordant human society; however, I doubted the existence of angels, thinking that that was likely a mythologizing of a tendency within persons to promote the purpose of the individual over the purpose of a whole, fearing that pursuit of the latter might lead to total loss. (Some years later, I proved to myself that if there were no angels, the entire Principle of Creation would unravel.) The discussion of Jesus’ role in the attempt to dispel the “fallen mind” was familiar as a description of my ongoing religious practices.

I have found True Father’s persistent use of numerology, which at first bothered me, to be a tool for understanding the Bible, assuming that final redactors used the numbers to signify the nature or meaning of that to which they refer. When asked about the actual historicity of the Bible’s 10 generations before Noah, True Father said that they did not need to be generations but could be the number of providential figures. If my view that, owing to the human portion of responsibility, the only thing predetermined is the fulfillment of the steps of the scenario (in the ever- continuing activities of creation)  leading to the realization of the world according to God’s ideal is true, then any of the biblical and post-biblical periods that are neatly matched up could have been shorter, perhaps divisible by 10 or 4: however, the pattern of initial exemplification, through establishment of a communicable standard, to attempts to realize the standard, would remain.’

^{My general response to the story of the Fall, its consequences, and the analysis of freedom, expressed best in Exposition of the Divine Principle, is that which Alison Wakelin reported in her comment on Dr. Noda’s post, that it is plausible that all subsequent human ills have stemmed from the spiritual invasion of a couple who are the ancestors of all subsequent human beings.  I find Eve’s growing admiration and love for the Archangel,  past the point where her conscience warned of its inappropriateness, to the point where she could not stop but agreed to its consummation, to be typical of the process of yielding to a temptation. Absent in the story is any mention of Adam, Eve’s sibling relationship with whom constituted the immediate whole of her existence, as she sought the further realization of her individual purpose by sensual gratification, new knowledge, and becoming “like God”.  Of significance to me greater than the story is the assertion that the immediate consequence of the Fall was undue fearfulness. I find that to be a crucial factor in many rational but regrettable decisions.}

The chapter on the Fall in Exposition of the Divine Principle contains two further important principles. The first is the four-step process of the fallen original nature. Having read that, I readily began to consciously always seek to perform its converse. (Nonetheless, on three important occasions I realized that I had failed to do so.) Wholly eye-opening to me was the chapter’s principle of freedom: that internal freedom consists of acting according to the Principle and that freedom is complete only with the intended result. I understand the former to be willing and acting to fulfill one’s fundamental desire, which is to give love aiming for the greatest imagined result. It is in the process of forming my will that “evil forces” intervene. Internal alienation is from one’s fundamental desire.

‘Finally, regarding the interpretation of church rituals and key events: Such, if participated in wholeheartedly, are by their very nature transformative at least temporarily. I have been wholehearted in the ones in which I have chosen to participate. My natural intellectual search for their deeper or more precise meaning has not greatly influenced their effect.’

**

Now, I chronologically give details of some of my life in our family.

      Even before I moved into a Center, the center director Philip Burley had me witnessing to mainstream clergy, taking me to a radio program in which information about our family was given to a panel of a rabbi, a Protestant minister, and a Catholic priest. He had me present our doctrine. Unfortunately, there was a call in by a woman who complained about True Father’s careless description in Lincoln Center of the European persecution of Jews as punishment for their rejection of Jesus, and from then the whole program focused on Christian-Jewish relationships.

Before Father’s Lincoln Center talks, he gathered members in the center, now having been moved by Barbara to a beautiful building in Riverdale. I was there. Father, sitting on a hassock, asked us where he should give the talk. We all replied, “The Riverside Church. Everyone will want to attend. It’s in Harlem.” It would of course be free. History shows that Father instead chose Avery Fisher Hall, with expensive tickets having to be purchased for all three evenings. He wanted to reach the powerful first, as the quickest possible way.

In January 1973, facing the final semester at Union, with a lower course load, i moved into the church center, at that time a five-story former institution building on East 71^st St. It was there that I first experienced the typical life of a center member with activities mentioned above. At first, I slept on a sleeping bag on the floor of a room just large enough to hold two rows of bunkbeds and enough space to walk between. I slept at the window end next to the radiator with my head under one bunkbed and my feet under the other. Later, I slept in a larger room, with men spread out on the floor and with the group leader treating us as a drill Sgt. treats raw recruits, so that we would learn discipline. During that spring, Father sent in first a sizable contingent of Dutch members and then a large contingent of Japanese. One day, when I was feeling unhappy, I decided to clean all the cabinets where tableware was stored, as a condition for indemnification. While I was doing that, Barbara came and said, “Would you like to meet Father?” Of course, I did, and she took me up to the second-floor servants’ quarter where Father and Dr. Lee were sitting on cushions on the floor. Barbara, introducing me said, “Father, this is Johnny Sonneborn. He goes to Union Theological Seminary where all the Communists are.” Father looked at me, and asked, “You never married?” I replied, “Something always stopped me.” Dr. Lee explained that Father had just given him the mission of solving evolution theory.

At Union, I received two A+ evaluations. One was for a paper on the Lucan infancy narrative: I showed that it compared the growth of Jesus and John the Baptist, establishing Jesus’ superiority at every step. The professor who gave me the evaluation was the leading Catholic scholar on the New Testament. The second was an assignment by a Woodstock College professor of a book by Ernst Bloch. I didn’t read the book, but read many book reviews and was able to cite pages. The book was about antinomies, such as here – there, now – then. I posed, instead, the sequence now – next, arguing that only this was of importance in a scenario. I had gained this understanding from the study of Father’s teaching on how God conducted the Providence for Re-creation, and from some remarks by Hyo Jin Nim.

I offered a copy of Miss Kim’s book to Walter Burghardt of Woodstock College, the greatest expert on early church doctrine. As a humble priest, he took the time to read it carefully and, on returning it to me, said our doctrine was closest to that of Emil Brunner. Cyril Richardson, the greatest Protestant expert on the New Testament and early church, read it with avidity. Within a few days, he gave a sermon in the main sanctuary. After finishing, when he saw me standing in the narthex, he came rushing down the aisle and exclaimed, “Sonneborn!”, throwing his arms around me, “It’s all about love! The second part is all nonsense of course.” Dr. Richardson had, decades earlier, written a book (which was published) proving that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity had no basis in the New Testament. The Church of England had forced the withdrawal of the book. Now he found support in Divine Principle. I reported this to Ms. Kim, and she asked me to arrange a meeting of the two. I procrastinated. One evening, I was all alone in the living room of the apartment in which I was living with other members of the interfaith witnessing team. Suddenly, at about 11 PM,  I felt the strong urge to pray, so I knelt down on the wooden floor, but couldn’t think what to pray for. Also, with my Quaker background, I was uncomfortable engaging in lengthy prayer. Nevertheless, I felt compelled to continue praying. I finally gave up after at least one hour and went to bed. Actually, during that night, Dr. Richardson was dying of a heart attack.

One day, when I was about 30 years old, a young woman in my music group, who knew me well because she was married to my best friend, said to me, “Johnny, you work so hard to establish a foundation, but then you fail to take the culminating step.” A couple of years ago, upon reflection, I realized my experience with Dr. Richardson was an example of just that and, furthermore, that I had had other such  omissions on assignments in our family.

Our interfaith team was gathered there because Mr. Kim wanted the New York Unification Church to become part of the Council of Churches of the City of New York, and the previous application had been rejected. Mr. Kim wanted us to file a legal challenge to our exclusion, and amongst us a Baptist minister found a Harlem lawyer to represent us. The Council included a Mormon and some others with unorthodox doctrines. I holed myself up in a room in Union for two days and did exhaustive research on the doctrines of the various members of the Council, showing that our doctrine was at least as orthodox as some of the Council members. The Council scheduled another vote on the matter. Our members scattered throughout the boroughs visiting each and every one of the members who were representatives of their denominations, finding some who supported us: enthusiastically but not enough to win a majority. The Council again rejected us, (with the Episcopalian Suffragan Bishop explaining, “It’s a plot to take over the world from Korea”.) We went to trial, but the judge ruled against us, claiming that the Council was a private club and so had the right to exclude anyone for any reason.

For my Masters thesis, I first wanted to write about the numerology in the Bible, showing its grounding in reality, for example, the number 10 grounded in the 10 months of gestation. However, since this would have taken too much time away from my participation in center life, I created a worship service. It was performed in the Congregational church where I was the music director, and consisted largely of hymns in which the words had been written by Charles Wesley (brother of the founder of Methodism), The hymns surrounded the sermon. I arranged to have many Methodist hymnals delivered to the church since some of the hymns were not in the Congregational hymnal. I trained the choir to be able to lead unfamiliar hymns, and imported an untrained soloist from my music group to sing Gentle Jesus… Pity my simplicity, Thou was once a child like me. I arranged the sequence of the hymns on one side of the sermon to show God’s Providence leading up to and including Jesus, and on the other side of the sermon the progression of a Christians’ spiritual life, from hopelessness to sanctification. I gave the sermon titled Charles Wesley the Christian Story and the Story of a Christian. Two Union professors came all the way out to Rockaway Park to evaluate my performance. One was the school’s chaplain, an Episcopalian, and the other a Methodist professor who taught subjects such as prayer and liturgy. They were particularly impressed because the adolescents in the balcony at the rear of the sanctuary listened intently to my sermon, rather than fooling around. I then had to write about my organizing the service and my reasons for each step. Amongst other things, I wrote that I chose the hymns to enable people to become excited or to become calm, etc. The two professors, reluctant to approve strongly of anything written by a Unificationist, seized on that, and said that I was manipulating the congregation . So, they gave me only a strong approval of the service but abstained from giving the text the honor that it deserved.

It was my strong intention to go the formula course after graduating, even though that would have been torture, since I wanted to clean my character. However, Ms. Kim ordered me to go directly to Washington to help her research for a book she was writing. I told her I didn’t feel ready and wanted to wait until mid-July, but she had assembled two others and there was a Christian minister who recognized that our teaching is covenant theology. So, I went on down. Right away I came out trying to establish myself superior to one of the brothers. Then, I would do my exhaustive research and present results at length to the group. I never did understand what kind of book Ms. Kim was writing: she was proving that for every idea Father had, some person somewhere at some time had had that idea. When Royal Davis had come aboard replacing all others, he found out that I was not properly contributing. So, Miss Kim gave me back to Father, who sent me to 100-day-training in Belvidere.

When I arrived, there were two great lecturers: Michael Warder and Terry Walton; however, after a few weeks, they both suddenly left. Because we had the best grades on tests, Kem Mylar and I were selected to begin lecturing immediately: he would do the first chapter and I the second, and so on. I was told of this appointment while we were all watching a movie. I went to an older member and asked him how to prepare a lecture. He said that I should recite a paragraph from Divine Principle Study Guide, and then check to see what differences I’d made from the text. That way, I would learn what part of the Principle I did understand.  When the hundred-day program had first started, with Young Whi Kim himself lecturing, students listened to lectures for six hours each day. When they complained that it was too much, Father said, ”Okay, you will listen eight hours a day. Then six hours will seem simple for you.” David Kim was the father figure in the program and Takeshi Furuta, who had arrived with Mitsuko in New York to prepare the way for Father’s settling in America, was the mother figure. I used to pray very quietly or even silently, and Mr. Furuta was determined to change that. He suggested that I practice my lectures to God, who would then give me corrections. Of course, I did that, imagining God hovering in the upper corner of the room. The lecture that I was practicing was The Mission of the Messiah, and I noticed that when I recited Jesus’ words my voice changed. I succeeded in memorizing every word and gave lectures exactly that way, except for one day when I added at the end a paragraph from Father’s speech at Madison Square Garden. After the lecture, an older, spiritually-open sister told me that Jesus himself had come to listen to the lecture, but that when I tacked on the extra words, Jesus left.

The training was interrupted so that we could go to New York City and witness for Father’s speech at Carnegie Hall. I stood outside the building, where about six Christians protested and a very large number of our members surrounded them. Still, they kept up with the protest: I admired them.

Back in Belvidere, Mr. Kim let me read all trainees’ reports on their witnessing, and had me choose 3 to take to New York and witness to mainstream clergy. I chose three sisters. One, British, soon developed a serious personal problem, which I had no understanding of how to solve. So, she left. The two sisters would fan out visiting clergy and bringing them to me to introduce them to our teaching. I tried various ways of teaching the Principle that I thought would satisfy these well-educated Christians. I was also very punctilious about the cleanliness of the desk, etc., doing more cleanups after the sisters had done theirs. Periodically, we reported to Mr. Kim. He would say, “No results, eh? Let’s start all over again”.

Our seminary opened. I had been on a work team painting the dining hall. I imagined that I was doing this for my own child, and was extra careful. I declined the chance to study at the seminary since I already had my Master’s degree and because I wanted to continue with the interfaith mission (or perhaps I was afraid of center life with fundraising trips). I could have been very useful helping the students with their homework. Before the opening, our brother Richard Sapp in North Carolina witnessed to two professors, appealing to the self-interest of each. He sent each to my team, and I gave a weekend workshop to each. I took each to Mr. Kim. He hired each. One was Dr.Matczak, who hoped that we would publish his books. The other was Dr. Lewis, who turned out to be evil, seducing some sisters and composing and putting on a play with some inappropriate dialogue. He finally provoked the administration to the point that they fired him.

Rev. Kwak selected me as one of five Americans to go to Korea and attend Dr. Lee’s first workshop in English. The others were Joe Tully, Lloyd Eby, Tony Guerra, and Andrew Wilson. We lived in the Interfaith Center for Western members. After the workshop, an English brother and I were asked to stay on for two weeks and reorganize the chapter on Aesthetics, which at that point existed only as a separate document.

At the suggestion of Dr. Lewis, I enrolled in New York Theological Seminary to study for a Doctor of Ministry degree. My mother had died in 1974, and with my father having passed on earlier, my sister and I inherited the townhouse and a small amount of cash and equities. My sister was ensconced in Northwestern Connecticut with her husband and two children and a job in Hartford teaching four-year-olds in an inner-city private school. She had come to hate New York City. Mr. Kim wanted me to turn the townhouse into a Center. However, I felt that at any time Father might send me anywhere, and I would not be able to secure it. So it was sold and the proceeds divided.

For the Yankee Stadium campaign, my interfaith group had been merged by Mr.Kamiyama with a similar group in Westchester County, and, after the campaign, the whole group was reformed by him, leaving me out. With no church mission, I took classes at Union in order to witness to professors and any others, using money that I had inherited. Then I inherited $11,000 from a great-aunt. At Mr. Kim’s suggestion, I gave a thousand to the seminary for an unspecified educational initiative, and kept the rest, using that money for my studies at New York Theological.

The dean of the program was a Marxist Christian who knew me at Union. He opposed the seminary’s president’s intention to admit me to the program. However, the president, the legendary George W Webber of East Harlem Protestant parish had known me when I was a pacifist leader and was even a sponsor for one of my programs. Another faculty member opposed my admission on doctrinal grounds. However, the seminary’s policy was to admit anyone who said he or she was a Christian. So, I was admitted, and the dean said to me, “Johnny, I opposed your admission, but since you are here, I will do my best to help you become the best possible Unification Church pastor.” The program called for classes on Mondays and Tuesdays and the creation and execution of a program at the student’s religious institution, to be evaluated by Dr. Webber and my fellow students, leaders of the religious institution, and persons in the institution affected by my program. At the time I was the Carp IW visiting each Carp center in New York City and helping the center leader, none of whom were truly qualified for the position but were the best that could be found. I gave various forms of help and also Bible study and some other programs. So, I created a Doctor of Ministry project based on that mission. In January, I was replaced by Tiger Choi, and so needed to create an entirely new

demonstration project.

With the permission of Mr. Kim, I conceived of, created, and taught a two-semester course entitled Religion, Politics, and Economics in the Formation and Transformation of Society. I spent the months until the course opened in the fall researching and compiling a lot of readings for homework. These were excerpts, often quite short, from various forms of Marxism, left-feminism, the Bible, and Father’s three weapons. Among the courses’ tasks was arranging the three fields in a four-position foundation. I gave pop quizzes to find out who was reading the material, but no examinations, rather, term papers. There were two A+ papers: one by Robin Graham, showing God working for social change through individuals’ hearts; the other by Alex Corvin, relating Marx’s view that each human being is an ensemble of relations. During the evaluation meeting with the contingent from New York Theological, students from my course were asked to suggest improvements in my teaching. The visitors were impressed when one suggested that I too often had bad breath: this showed how in our family we really feel we are brothers and sisters. After the end of the course, I had to write about the project. In that document, Demostration Project, after a general description, I gave some blow-by-blow reports of class sessions, including excerpts from readings and points made in my presentations or in discussions. New York Theological’s program dean selected himself and the seminary’s Marxist, nonbeliever Professor of Old Testament History to evaluate the document. They wrote a lot of notes in the margins arguing with my critique of Marxist thinking, but finally concluded, “We didn’t think that Sonneborn could pull this off; but we have to admit that he did.” Thus, Satan having signed my passport, I was able to graduate. (The document is sometimes available for purchase on Amazon.)

After the completion of the course, Mr. Kim (now Dr. Kim) asked me to continue teaching at our seminary, as mentioned above. The next course that I created, was called Problems in the Principle. I compiled about 42 instances where questions in the Principle could arise but there were no answers guaranteed to be implicit in the official Principle books, so that each member of the class had to decide what answers to give, if asked, stating that he was giving only his personal opinion. Zin Moon Kim, who was at one point my central figure in the World Mission department in which I existed as head of the interfaith department, asked me to publish this list with some answers. However, I never got around to doing it.

In my position, I was among a number of leaders reporting directly each month to True Parents. I was given a secretary and inherited from the outgoing head a bunch of Hispanic members of dubious sincerity  urging me to kick them out, but I spent too much time trying to take care of them and my secretary. Again, I proved that while I can be an excellent team player, my ability as a leader is sorely lacking. I finally caught them using the department’s telephone for a call-girl business, and negotiated their dismissal.

I conceived of a weekend program: Christian Perspectives on the Family, and, having received Rev. Kwak’s permission, planned to hold this in the Bay Area, then in the Chicago area and, finally, in the Atlanta area, in each of which we had a strong presence. An Evangelical professor. who was friendly to us, was of significant help in developing the plan.

At the conference, a professor gave the United Methodist perspective, another gave the Presbyterian perspective, and a third gave the Roman Catholic perspective. To attract area clergy, there was a debate featuring a popular proponent of the traditional view of the family and a professor taking a liberal view. In the concluding session, I gave a 25-minute presentation of the Unification perspective. There were also breakout discussions, each led by someone other than one of the main speakers. Once I could confirm speakers and discussion leaders, the Oakland Family Church secured a resort in Santa Cruz as the venue, and promised to contribute two seasoned members to take care of the externals, leaving me free to be the MC, etc. I easily recruited the speakers for the three denominational perspectives. To determine the topics of the discussions and recruit leaders, I embarked on a 16- hour per day research and telephoning campaign.

I moved into the Oakland Center five days before the conference. and marketed the program by purchasing from Barron’s labels to all clergy within a certain radius or ZIP Code of the venue. I sent promotional material to all such clergy whose education I believed to have been intellectual.

The conference went very well with the exception of one panel discussion, whose leader turned out to be unskilled for the task. A report, including the full text of my presentation, was published in a local newspaper. Meanwhile, Rev. Ki Hoon Kim, who at that time was responsible for the region including Chicago, having heard of the conference in advance, sent two horizontal-minded professors, who had become friends of the Chicago family, to Santa Cruz to spy on the conference and report to him. (For them, it was a junket.) When they came back to him reporting on the success of the conference, he contacted Rev. Kwak and demanded that it be repeated in his area. So, it was, with most of the same speakers and discussion leaders and marketed the same way. However, a middle-aged white sister took it upon herself to go door-to-door to churches in a mostly African-America area and persuaded maybe a dozen to attend. They asked particularly tough questions after my presentation. At that time, Michael Jenkins, who was the CAUSA leader in Indiana, gathered  the African-American pastors together and founded what became the American Christian Leadership Conference (ACLC).

It was decided that our presence in Atlanta was insufficient to hold a conference there. I soon began my new mission helping Rev. Kwak with his new book, as mentioned above, having cleared up my department’s situation and handing it over to a brother.

During these years, I conceived of and wrote, with tremendous help from Dr. Wilson, Dr. Hendricks, and Sarah Horsefall, and with professor Roy Carlisle (a Methodist professor in California who had attended conferences with our family), who copy-edited every line, Q & A: Christian Tradition and Unification Theology. Each short section presented a theological issue, for example, God’s omnipotence, and gave a Unificationist answer. One of our imprints published the book, and it was available through our bookstore. No author was named; however, my name is prominent on the first page after the title page, and the dean of American Religious History credited me as the author, as well as using it as a main source for her analysis of our doctrine in her book New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America.  A complete listing of my published writings follows.

    1.   Reponse to A. James Rudin's Report "Jews and Judaism In Reverend Moon's Divine Principle". Prepared by Unification Church, Department of Public Affairs; Daniel C. Holdgreiwe, Director, and Unification Theology Study Group; John Andrew Sonneborn, Coordinator, March 1977

     [ I wrote the text; others helped revise it.]

2.   Demostration project report.  John Andrew Sonneborn
     [ the paper that I wrote in 1980 describing the course that I taught as my Doctor of Ministry project]

3.   John Andrew Sonneborn. “God, Suffering and Hope: A Unification View” in Unity in Diversity - Essays in religion by members of the faculty of the Unification Theological Seminary. Edited by Henry O. Thompson.1984

4.   John Andrew Sonneborn. Questions and Answers: Christian Tradition and Unification Theology (New York: Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, 1984

5.   John Andrew Sonneborn. "Unification Theology, Ecumenicity and 'The God of Principle'" in Journal of Ecumenical Studies. 22, no. 4. (Fall 1986), (754- 63).

    [In "The God of Principle:  A Critical Evaluation," 22, no. 4 Journal of Ecumenical Studies (Fall 1986), 741-53, Frederick Sontag, a scholar who has written extensively on Unificationism, asked whether the revelation given to the Reverend. Moon and put down in Divine Principle is now so binding on God that God is incapable of adopting alternative paths. In the same issue John Andrew Sonneborn, in "Unification Theology, Ecumenicity and 'The God of Principle'" responds to F. Sontag's essay" (754- 63), by emphasizing that Unification theology understands God as choosing freely not to alter an overall plan.] Footnote in Mary Farrell Bednarowski, New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America, Indiana University Press.

I ghostwrote Rev. Kwak’s The Unification Position on Justice and World Peace, which he presented at a conference for lawyers in the Washington, DC area. Recently, I have been unable to locate a copy of it; however, at the conference he elaborated upon it at great length, and his speech is given in the relevant of issue of World & I.

In 1993, while working with Rev. Kwak on his book, I purchased a franchise in Kumon USA, found a venue, operated the business, and provided guided self-instruction. Over 1500 children passed through the program, which ended in 2009, after which I continued as a tutor, first in the No Child Left Behind program and then freelance until 2016.

In 2016-2017, I created a PowerPoint presentation called True Parents Seminar, which is actually a parenting workshop. The narration that accompanies the slides is posted on my blog, as is the entire presentation.

My wife, Mrs. Soungja Kim, (originally a 777 couple) with whom I was blessed in 1982 (while I was at the Santa Cruz conference) and I currently reside in a great public housing development in Harlem. We have two adult sons. Joonsun David and True Joonhee.     I have been doing Tribal Messiah activities with the New York blessing group led by the district pastor and attending the Harlem Family Church for Saturday Hoon Dok Hae and for Sunday worship services. I continue to write and to add new writings and earlier writings to my blog. Topics include human nature, human maturation, religion, philosophy, politics, and culture – including drama and music.

 

What now follows is largely copied from my comment on a post by Dr. Noda in our seminary’s blog Applied Unificationism (what is copied  is surrounded by single quotes).

‘My first encounter with the teachings of the True Parents was in a lecture in the summer of 1970: “The Principle of Creation”. Certain points in the lecture were transformative as they gave me new hope. In 1969, I had abandoned  my hope for the conversion  to pacifism of individuals in democratic nations, decided  to become a rural minister, and enrolled in Union Theological Seminary to begin my studies in the fall of 1970.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

In the lecture, the first point that stimulated some hope was that individuals exist in families that protect and help them, and that their decisions concerning matters beyond the family are influenced by their participation in it. The lecturer pointed out that, further, families exist in communities that protect and help… etc. The next transformative insight was the principle of dual purpose. I immediately felt that, armed with these insights, I should resume my efforts for conversions to pacifism. This was one factor in my deciding, in September 1971, to commit myself to discipleship in Master’ project to help God realize the peaceful world (based on my understanding of the project’s regulations as they existed).  My stance in interpreting the points was transformativist, experiencing them immediately in the context of my ongoing life.

My next encounter with the Principle was the studying of Young Oon Kim’s Divine Principle and its Applications. (The book does not identify the Divine Principle as distinguished from its applications.)’ Susan Jacobson (who became my spiritual mother) and I had known each other as members of a music group (as detailed earlier in this document). I knew that Susan was a pure Christian attending the Riverside Church and that she was interested in the relationships between the races. She knew that I was a pacifist and a professional pianist, that I was 17 years older than she, and that I had had romances.  In the summer of 1970, Susan had turned 21 and, for the first time, I asked her out for a date, to attend with me a ballet performance. Unbeknownst to me, Susan had joined our family after graduating from Barnard College. She knew members do not fornicate, but did not know that they do not date and hold hands with a member of the opposite sex. So, knowing my interests, she accepted the date with the intention of witnessing to me. It was on our date that she invited me to a lecture at our family’s center in a railroad flat in a tenement building on West 161^st Street, on the edge of what was then Spanish Harlem. After Wesley Samuel lectured Introduction, Susan gave the Principle of Creation.

                   Intending to mention my current understandings, I am inserting now a summary of my activities in our family: Conveying the Principle to educated clergy; Center life with street witnessing and door-to-door fundraising, housecleaning the center, front desk reception, giving a few lectures, being woken up; doing research for Ms. Kim; attending part of 100-day training and then becoming a lecturer there; transforming rough translations into good translations; campaigning for Carnegie Hall while living in a small Carp center, meals with very little meat in them prepared differently by members from different nations; being the CARP IW for centers in New York City; presenting the Principle to educated clergy; organizing conferences on  the critique and catch a proposal to Marxist theory; Marxist theory member of the team of physically-older members visiting mainstream Christian clergy and urging their participation in Yankee Stadium; witnessing to professors and others at Union Theological Seminary; teaching courses at our seminary in Religion and Society, Unification Thought, Victory over Communism, and Divine Principle; bringing to our seminary religious speakers on peace and justice; copyediting books published by our seminary; head of Interfaith Department including organizing weekend conferences for interfaith clergy 1 trillion back one; giving editing suggestions to the team translating Level Four and later the team translating Exposition of the Divine Principle; helping Rev. Kwak complete Level Five by working on translation, offering suggestions including on content, and preparing the initial drafts of some chapters or sections; writing the draft of the official statement on The Unification Church Position on Human Rights and World Peace; Tribal Messiah activities; attending lectures by Dr. Lee on Unification Thought, helping reorganize the chapter on aesthetics; helping edit the translation of later Unification Thought books, translations of True Father’s speeches; attending matchings and being blessed; fathering two sons and raising helping to raise them; home church activities.

 ‘Miss Kim’s book included Mark 4:26’s description of the stages in the growth of a plant. Again, I considered this description to be widely comfortably acceptable, and labels of the stages, such as, ’forming’, ‘growing’, and ‘completing’ apt.  I have been spent a considerable amount of thinking about applications of this theory, both within Principle texts and outside of them, including in Euclidean geometry and in theory of narrative, the structuralist theory – especially as codified by A-J Greimas with 3 stages – becoming an important part of the framework of my thinking. Already in September197i, I applied the three-stage theory in developing my curricula for the second and third years of my M.Div. studies, and found each year’s curriculum internally coherent.

I was not particularly interested in the discussion of dual characteristics, but understood the nature of the subject-object relationship’ (which I have come to view as most importantly centered on the subject’s greater responsibility and the process of the formation of which I have detailed in a post “The Most Important Principles” on  johnnysonneborn.blogspot.com, along with the narration for my PowerPoint parenting workshop and other writings). ‘The principle/insight of the four-position foundation and its formation I understood as a description of how everyone thinks. For example, if one feels a slight penetration in one’s arm, one intuitively knows that it was caused by a force, that the force had direction, and that it originated as an impulse. The principle/theory of the three objects purpose I found realistic in its recognition that a child often takes the subject position, initiating a giving and responding.  Especially when the principle of dual purpose is applied to an individual in the family, it would appear to almost anyone as an ethical principle. It may be that family members universally are at least unconsciously aware of this principle. Nevertheless, I have recently been seeking to apply this as more fundamental, considering the purpose of the individual of any entity to be repairing, maintaining, or fortifying the entity’s foundation for realizing the purpose of the greater entity in which it participates. ‘

I told Susan of my favorable response to her lecture and my interest in studying it further. During the weeks before she departed for Berkeley to begin her Masters in French, I came to the center two times and we went for long walks in Central Park during which we sang Holy Songs which she was teaching me, and I rambled on about matters that intellectually interested me at the time. I was also very impressed with the way the members lived as a Platonic commune similar to that mentioned in Acts 2, contributing to the center all the monies that they earned on jobs and sharing goods bought with the monies. I was especially impressed that they consciously prevented their gaze from looking at anyone below the neck, lest they might become prurient and, as Jesus put it, commit adultery in their hearts.

When Susan was to depart, I selected Gil Roschuni to teach me more about the Principle. It was his first time teaching it, and during weekly visits, he read to me every word of Young Oon Kim’s 1970 book. I argued all the way, but he provided answers, returning always to the father - son relationship. When I strongly doubted communication from departed persons, he, who composed songs accompanied by his guitar, said that he had been conversing with Brahms. I knew Brahms’ music and life quite thoroughly, and the things that he reportedly said to Gil fit well with those.

‘Of great importance to me, second only to the theory of dual purpose, were the theories of the three stages of the growing process and of indirect and direct dominion. The concept of God’s indirect dominion of a person (which can be metaphorically extracted from the verse in Mark) resonated well with my Quaker inclinations, and the concept of God’s direct dominion supported my hope for the end of religion as prophesied by Jeremiah. I am considering that the Principle texts’ theories exemplified in the above Bible verse may be descriptions of the way all human beings think.

By the time Gil finished reading the book to me, I had peeked at the last chapter and realized who Master was. As reported above, it was not until September 1971 that I was ready to join Pioneers of the New Age, as the centers centered on the Ms. Kim were called.  When I then expressed to the center director  Barbara Mikesell my desire to join, she handed me a form from HSA-UWC asking did  I “believe the Divine Principle” and soliciting a donation of $10 as an affirmation of interest. I agreed with the Principle’s overall teachings but not with every detail, and took the form home.

Since I had found myself planning my life based upon the principle of three stages, I realized that I should in good faith state that I “believed the principle”, went to the center, and signed the membership form. Barbara pointed out that in view of my full-time studies and that I was not earning enough money to contribute to the center, I would have to be an “outside member”.

While attending the first lecture, I had accepted the discussion of the original mind, conscience, and the fallen mind as descriptive of my everyday experiences and was pleased that it affirms my long-held assumption (and the assumption of progressive education) that everyone is fundamentally altruistic. This had prepared me, finally, for some discussion of discordant human society; however, I doubted the existence of angels, thinking that that was likely a mythologizing of a tendency within persons to promote the purpose of the individual over the purpose of a whole, fearing that pursuit of the latter might lead to total loss. (Some years later, I proved to myself that if there were no angels, the entire Principle of Creation would unravel.) The discussion of Jesus’ role in the attempt to dispel the “fallen mind” was familiar as a description of my ongoing religious practices.

I have found True Father’s persistent use of numerology, which at first bothered me, to be a tool for understanding the Bible, assuming that final redactors used the numbers to signify the nature or meaning of that to which they refer. When asked about the actual historicity of the Bible’s 10 generations before Noah, True Father said that they did not need to be generations but could be the number of providential figures. If my view that, owing to the human portion of responsibility, the only thing predetermined is the fulfillment of the steps of the scenario (in the ever- continuing activities of creation)  leading to the realization of the world according to God’s ideal is true, then any of the biblical and post-biblical periods that are neatly matched up could have been shorter, perhaps divisible by 10 or 4: however, the pattern of initial exemplification, through establishment of a communicable standard, to attempts to realize the standard, would remain.’

^{My general response to the story of the Fall, its consequences, and the analysis of freedom, expressed best in Exposition of the Divine Principle, I is that which Alison Wakelin reported in her comment on Dr. Noda’s post, that it is plausible that all subsequent human ills have stemmed from the spiritual invasion of a couple who are the ancestors of all subsequent human beings.  I find Eve’s growing admiration and love for the Archangel,  past the point where her conscience warned of its inappropriateness, to the point where she could not stop but agreed to its consummation, to be typical of the process of yielding to a temptation. Absent in the story is any mention of Adam, Eve’s sibling relationship with whom constituted the immediate whole of her existence as she sought the further realization of her individual purpose by sensual gratification, new knowledge, and becoming “like God”.  Of significance to me greater than the story is the assertion that the immediate consequence of the Fall was undue fearfulness. I find that to be a crucial factor in many rational but regrettable decisions.}

The chapter on the Fall in Exposition of the Divine Principle contains two further important principles. The first is the four-step process of the fallen original nature. Having read that, I readily began to consciously always seek to perform its converse. (Nonetheless, on three important occasions I realized that I had failed to do so.) Wholly eye-opening to me was the chapter’s principle of freedom: that internal freedom consists of acting according to the Principle and that freedom is complete only with the intended result. I understand the former to be willing and acting to fulfill one’s fundamental desire, which is to give love aiming for the greatest imagined result. It is in the process of forming my will that “evil forces” intervene. Internal alienation is from one’s fundamental desire.

‘Finally, regarding the interpretation of church rituals and key events: Such, if participated in wholeheartedly, are by their very nature transformative at least temporarily. I have been wholehearted in the ones in which I have chosen to participate. My natural intellectual search for their deeper or more precise meaning has not greatly influenced their effect.’

**

Now, I chronologically give details of some of my life in our family.

     While I was in hundred-day training, Col. Han pulled me aside and asked me to smooth out his translation from the Korean of the proclamation of PWPA.  In this way, I gained a reputation for my further translation help. Col. Han had me work on translation of Father’s speeches at our seminary’s commencement exercises for several years. Even before I moved into a center, the center director Philip Burley had me witnessing to mainstream clergy, taking me to a radio program in which information about our family was given to a panel of a rabbi, a Protestant minister, and a Catholic priest. He had me present our doctrine. Unfortunately, there was a call in by a woman who complained about True Father’s careless description in Lincoln Center of the European persecution of Jews as punishment for their rejection of Jesus, and from then the whole program focused on Christian-Jewish relationships.

Before Father’s Lincoln Center talks, he gathered members in the center, now having been moved by Barbara to a beautiful building in Riverdale. I was there. Father, sitting on a hassock, asked us where he should give the talk. We all replied, “The Riverside Church. Everyone will want to attend. It’s in Harlem.” It would of course be free. History shows that Father instead chose Avery Fisher Hall, with expensive tickets having to be purchased for all three evenings. He wanted to reach the powerful first, as the quickest possible way.

In January 1973, facing the final semester at Union, with a lower course load, i moved into the church center, at that time a five-story former institution building on East 71^st St. It was there that I first experienced the typical life of center member with activities mentioned above. At first, I slept on a sleeping bag on the floor of a room just large enough to hold two rows of bunkbeds and enough space to walk between. I slept at the window end next to the radiator with my head under one bunkbed and my feet under the other. Later, I slept in a larger room, with men spread out on the floor and with the group leader treating us as a drill Sgt. treats raw recruits, so that we would learn discipline. During that spring, Father sent in first a sizable contingent of Dutch members and then a large contingent of Japanese. One day, when I was feeling unhappy, I decided to clean all the cabinets where tableware was stored, as a condition for indemnification. While I was doing that, Barbara came and said, “Would you like to meet Father?” Of course, I did, and she took me up to the second-floor servants’ quarter where Father and Dr. Lee were sitting on cushions on the floor. Barbara, introducing me said, “Father, this is Johnny Sonneborn. He goes to Union Theological Seminary where all the Communists are.” Father looked at me, and asked, “You never married?” I replied, “Something always stopped me.” Dr. Lee explained that Father had just given him the mission of solving evolution theory.

At Union, I received two A+ evaluations. One was for a paper on the Lucan infancy narrative: I showed that it compared the growth of Jesus and John the Baptist, establishing Jesus’ superiority at every step. The professor who gave me the evaluation was the leading Catholic scholar on the New Testament. The second was an assignment by a Woodstock College professor of a book by Ernst Bloch. I didn’t read the book, but read many book reviews and was able to cite pages. The book was about antinomies, such as here – there, now – then. I posed, instead, the sequence now – next, arguing that only this was of importance in a scenario. I had gained this understanding from the study of Father’s teaching on how God conducted the Providence for Re- creation, and from some remarks by Hyo Jin Nim.

I offered a copy of Miss Kim’s book to Walter Burghardt of Woodstock College, the greatest expert on early church doctrine. As a humble priest, he took the time to read it carefully and, on returning it to me, said our doctrine was closest to that of Emil Brunner. Cyril Richardson, the greatest Protestant expert on the New Testament and early church, read it with avidity. Within a few days, he gave a sermon in the main sanctuary. After finishing, when he saw me standing in the narthex, he came rushing down the aisle and exclaimed, “Sonneborn!” throwing his arms around me, “It’s all about love! The second part is all nonsense of course.” Dr. Richardson had, decades earlier, written a book (which was published) proving that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity had no basis in the New Testament. The Church of England forced the withdrawal of the book. Now he found support in Divine Principle. I reported this to Ms. Kim, and she asked me to arrange a meeting of the two. I procrastinated. One evening, I was all alone in the living room of the apartment in which I was living with other members of the interfaith witnessing team. Suddenly, at about 11 PM,  I felt the strong urge to pray, so I knelt down on the wooden floor, but couldn’t think what to pray for. Also, with my Quaker background, I was uncomfortable engaging in lengthy prayer. Nevertheless, I felt compelled to continue praying. I finally gave up after at least one hour and went to bed. Actually, during that night, Dr. Richardson was dying of a heart attack.

One day, when I was about 30 years old, a young woman in my music group, who knew me well because she was married to my best friend, said to me, “Johnny, you worked so hard to establish a foundation, but then you failed to take the culminating step.” A couple of years ago, upon reflection, I realized my experience with Dr. Richardson was an example of just that and, furthermore, that I had had other such  omissions on assignments in our family.

Our interfaith team was gathered there because Mr. Kim wanted the New York Unification Church to become part of the Council of Churches of the City of New York, and the previous application had been rejected. Mr. Kim wanted us to file a legal challenge to our exclusion, and amongst us a Baptist minister found a Harlem lawyer to represent us. The Council included a Mormon and some others with unorthodox doctrines. I holed myself up in a room in Union for two days and did exhaustive research on the doctrines of the various members of the Council, showing that our doctrine was at least as orthodox as some of the Council members. The Council scheduled another vote on the matter. Our members scattered throughout the boroughs visiting each and every one of the members who were representatives of their denominations, finding some who supported us: enthusiastically but not enough to win a majority. The Council again rejected us, (with the Episcopalian Suffragan Bishop explaining, “It’s a plot to take over the world from Korea”.) We went to trial, but the judge ruled against us, claiming that the Council was a private club and so had the right to exclude anyone for any reason.

For my Masters thesis, I first wanted to write about the numerology in the Bible, showing its grounding in reality, for example, the number 10 grounded in the 10 months of gestation. However, since this would have taken too much time away from my participation in center life, I created a worship service. It was performed in the Congregational church where I was the music director, and consisted largely of hymns in which the words had been written by Charles Wesley (brother of the founder of Methodism), The hymns surrounded the sermon. I arranged to have many Methodist hymnals delivered to the church since some of the hymns were not in the Congregational hymnal. I trained the choir to be able to lead unfamiliar hymns, and imported an untrained soloist from my music group to sing Gentle Jesus… Pity my simplicity, Thou was once a child like me. I arranged the sequence of the hymns on one side of the sermon to show God’s Providence leading up to and including Jesus, and on the other side of the sermon the progression of a Christians’ spiritual life, from hopelessness to sanctification. I gave the sermon titled Charles Wesley the Christian Story and the Story of a Christian. Two Union professors came all the way out to Rockaway Park to evaluate my performance. One was the school’s chaplain, an Episcopalian, and the other a Methodist professor who taught subjects such as prayer and liturgy. They were particularly impressed because the adolescents in the balcony at the rear of the sanctuary listened intently to my sermon, rather than fooling around. I then had to write about my organizing the service and my reasons for each step. Amongst other things, I wrote that I chose the hymns to enable people to become excited or to become calm, etc. The two professors, reluctant to approve strongly of anything written by a Unificationist, seized on that and said that I was manipulating the congregation . So, they gave me only a strong approval of the service but abstained from giving the text the honor that it deserved.

It was my strong intention to go the formula course after graduating, even though that would have been torture, since I wanted to clean my character. However, Ms. Kim ordered me to go directly to Washington to help her research for a book she was writing. I told her I didn’t feel ready and wanted to wait until mid-July, but she had assembled two others and there was a Christian minister who recognized that our teaching is covenant theology. So, I went on down. Right away I came out trying to establish myself superior to one of the brothers. Then, I would do my exhaustive research and present results at length to the group. I never did understand what kind of book Ms. Kim was writing: she was proving that every idea Father had, some person somewhere at some time had had that idea. When Royal Davis had come aboard replacing all others, he found out that I was not properly contributing. So, Miss Kim gave me back to Father, who sent me to 100-day-training in Belvidere.

When I arrived, there were two great lecturers: Michael Warder and Terry Walton; however, after a few weeks, they both suddenly left. Because we had the best grades on tests, Kem Mylar and I were selected to begin lecturing immediately: he would do the first chapter and I the second, and so on. I was told of this appointment while we were all watching a movie. I went to an older member and asked him how to prepare a lecture. He said that I should recite a paragraph from Divine Principle Study Guide, and then check to see what differences I’d made from the text. That way, I would learn what part of the Principle I did understand.  When the hundred-day program had first started, with Young Whi Kim himself lecturing, students listened to lectures for six hours each day. When they complained that it was too much, Father said, ”Okay, you will listen eight hours a day. Then six hours will seem simple for you.” David Kim was the father figure in the program and Takeshi Furuta, who had arrived with Mitsuko in New York to prepare the way for Father’s settling in America, was the mother figure. I used to pray very quietly or even silently, and Mr. Furuta was determined to change that. He suggested that I practice my lectures to God, who would then give me corrections. Of course, I did that, imagining God hovering in the upper corner of the room. The lecture that I was practicing was The Mission of the Messiah, and I noticed that when I recited Jesus’ words my voice changed. I succeeded in memorizing every word and gave lectures exactly that way, except for one day when I added at the end a paragraph from Father’s speech at Madison Square Garden. After the lecture, an older, spiritually-open sister told me that Jesus himself had come to listen to the lecture, but that when I tacked on the extra words, Jesus left.

The training was interrupted so that we could go to New York City and witness for Father’s speech at Carnegie Hall. I stood outside the building, where about six Christians protested and a very large number of our members surrounded them. Still, they kept up with the protest: I admired them.

Back in Belvidere, Mr. Kim let me read all trainees’ reports on their witnessing, and had me choose 3 to take to New York and witness to mainstream clergy. I chose three sisters. One, British, soon developed a serious personal problem, which I had no understanding of how to solve. So, she left. The two sisters would fan out visiting clergy and bringing them to me to introduce them to our teaching. I tried various ways of teaching the Principle that I thought would satisfy these well-educated Christians. I was also very punctilious about the cleanllness of the desk, etc., doing more cleanups after the sisters had done theirs. Periodically, we reported to Mr. Kim. He would say, “No results, eh? Let’s start all over again”.

Our seminary opened. I had been on a work team painting the dining hall. I imagined that I was doing this for my own child, and was extra careful. I declined the chance to study at the seminary since I already had my Master’s degree and because I wanted to continue with the interfaith mission (or perhaps I was afraid of center life with fundraising trips). I could have been very useful helping the students with their homework. Before the opening, our brother Richard Sapp in North Carolina witnessed to two professors, appealing to the self-interest of each. He sent each to my team, and I gave a weekend workshop to each. I took each to Mr. Kim. He hired each. One was Dr.Matczak, who hoped that we would publish his books. The other was Dr. Lewis, who turned out to be evil, seducing some sisters and composing and putting on a play with some inappropriate dialogue. He finally provoked the administration to the point that they fired him.

Rev. Kwak selected me as one of five Americans to go to Korea and attend Dr. Lee’s first workshop in English. The others were Joe Tully, Lloyd Eby, Tony Guerra, and Andrew Wilson. We lived in the Interfaith Center for Western members. After the workshop, an English brother and I were asked to stay on for two weeks and reorganize the chapter on Aesthetics, which at that point existed only as a separate document.

At the suggestion of Dr. Lewis, I enrolled in New York Theological Seminary to study for a Doctor of Ministry degree. My mother had died in 1974, and with my father having passed on earlier, my sister and I inherited the townhouse and a small amount of cash and equities. My sister was ensconced in Northwestern Connecticut with her husband and two children and a job in Hartford teaching four-year-olds in an inner-city private school. She had come to hate New York City. Mr. Kim wanted me to turn the townhouse into a center. However, I felt that at any time Father might send me anywhere, and I would not be able to secure it. So it was sold and the proceeds divided.

For the Yankee Stadium campaign, my interfaith group had been merged by Mr.Kamiyama with a similar group in Westchester County, and, after the campaign, the whole group was reformed by him, leaving me out. With no church mission, I took classes at Union in order to witness to professors and any others, using money that I had inherited. Then I inherited $11,000 from a great-aunt. At Mr. Kim’s suggestion, I gave a thousand to the seminary for an unspecified educational initiative, and kept the rest, using that money for my studies at New York Theological.

The dean of the program was a Marxist Christian who knew me at Union. He opposed the seminary’s president’s intention to admit me to the program. However, the president, the legendary George W Webber of East Harlem Protestant parish had known me when I was a pacifist leader and was even a sponsor for one of my programs. Another faculty member opposed my admission on doctrinal grounds. However, the seminary’s policy was to admit anyone who said he or she was a Christian. So, I was admitted, and the dean said to me, “Johnny, I opposed your admission, but since you are here, I will do my best to help you become the best possible Unification Church pastor.” The program called for classes on Mondays and Tuesdays and the creation and execution of a program at the student’s religious institution, to be evaluated by Dr. Webber and my fellow students, leaders of the religious institution, and persons in the institution affected by my program. At the time I was the Carp IW visiting each Carp center in New York City and helping the center leader, none of whom were truly qualified for the position but were the best that could be found. I gave various forms of help and also Bible study and some other programs. So, I created a Doctor of Ministry project based on that mission. In January, I was replaced by Tiger Choi, and so needed to create an entirely new demonstration project.

With the permission of Mr. Kim, I conceived of, created, and taught a two-semester course entitled Religion, Politics, and Economics in the Formation and Transformation of Society. I spent the months until the course opened in the fall researching and compiling a lot of readings for homework. These were excerpts, often quite short, from various forms of Marxism, left-feminism, the Bible, and Father’s three weapons. Among the courses’ tasks was arranging the three fields in a four-position foundation. I gave pop quizzes to find out who was reading the material, but no examinations, rather, term papers. There were 2 A+ papers: one by Robin Graham, showing God working for social change through individuals’ hearts; the other by Alex Corvin, relating Marx’s view that each human being is an ensemble of relations. During the evaluation meeting with the contingent from New York Theological, students from my course were asked to suggest improvements in my teaching. The visitors were impressed when one suggested that I too often had bad breath, because this showed how in our family we really feel we are brothers and sisters. After the end of the course, I had to write about the project. In that document, Demostration Project, after a general description, I gave some blow-by-blow reports of class sessions, including excerpts from readings and points made in my presentations or in discussions. New York Theological’s program dean selected himself and the seminary’s Marxist, nonbeliever Professor of Old Testament history to evaluate the document. They wrote a lot of notes in the margins arguing with my critique of Marxist thinking, but finally concluded, “We didn’t think that Sonneborn could pull this off; but we have to admit that he did.” Thus, Satan having signed my passport, I was able to graduate. (The document is sometimes available for purchase on Amazon.)

After the completion of the course, Mr. Kim (now Dr. Kim) asked me to continue teaching at our seminary, as mentioned above. The course that I created, was called Problems in the Principle I compiled about 42 instances where questions in the Principle could arise but there were no answers guaranteed to be implicit in the official Principle books, so that each member of the class had to decide what answers to give, if asked, stating that he was giving only his personal opinion. Zin Moon Kim, who was at one point my central figure in the World Mission department in which I existed as head of the interfaith department, asked me to publish this list with some answers. However, I never got around to doing it.

In my position, I was among a number of leaders reporting directly each month to True Parents. I was given a secretary and inherited a bunch of Hispanic members of dubious sincerity from the outgoing head, urging me to kick them out, but I spent too much time trying to take care of them and my secretary. Again, I proved that while I can be an excellent team player, my ability as a leader is sorely lacking. I finally caught them using the department’s telephone as a call-girl business, and negotiated their dismissal.

I conceived of a weekend program: Christian Perspectives on the Family, and, having received Rev. Kwak’s permission, planned to hold this in the Bay Area, then in the Chicago area and, finally, in the Atlanta area, in each of which we had a strong presence. An Evangelical professor. who was friendly to us, was of significant help in developing the plan.

At the conference, a professor gave the United Methodist perspective, another gave the Presbyterian perspective, and a third gave the Roman Catholic perspective. To attract area clergy, there was a debate featuring a popular proponent of the traditional view of the family and a professor taking a liberal view. In the concluding session, I gave a 25-minute presentation of the Unification perspective. There were also breakout discussions, each led by someone other than one of the main speakers. Once I could confirm speakers and discussion leaders, the Oakland Family Church secured a resort in Santa Cruz as the venue, and promised to contribute two seasoned members to take care of the externals, leaving me free to be the MC, etc. I easily recruited the speakers for the three denominational perspectives. To determine the topics of the discussions and recruit leaders, I embarked on a 16- hour per day research and telephoning campaign.

I moved into the Oakland Center five days before the conference. and marketed the program by purchasing from Barron’s labels to all clergy within a certain radius or ZIP Code of the venue. I sent promotional material to all such clergy whose education I believed to have been intellectual.

The conference went very well with the exception of one panel discussion, whose leader turned out to be unskilled for the task. A report, including the full text of my presentation, was published in a local newspaper. Meanwhile, Rev. Ki Hoon Kim, who at that time was responsible for the region including Chicago, having heard of the conference in advance, sent two horizontal-minded professors, who had become friends of the Chicago family, to Santa Cruz to spy on the conference and report to him. (For them, it was a junket.) When they came back to him reporting on the success of the conference, he contacted Rev. Kwak and demanded that it be repeated in his area. So, it was, with most of the same speakers and discussion leaders and marketed the same way. However, a middle-aged white sister took it upon herself to go door-to-door to churches in a mostly African-America area and persuaded maybe a dozen to attend. They asked particularly tough questions after my presentation. At that time, Michael Jenkins, who was the CAUSA leader in Indiana, gathered  the African-American pastors together and founded what became the American Christian Leadership Conference (ACLC).

It was decided that our presence in Atlanta was insufficient to hold a conference there. I soon began my new mission helping Rev. Kwak with his new book, as mentioned above, having cleared up my department’s situation and handing it over to a brother.

During these years, I conceived of and wrote, with tremendous help from Dr. Wilson, Dr. Hendricks, Sarah Horsefall, and professor Roy Carlisle (a Methodist professor in California who had attended conferences with our family), who company-edited every line, Q & A: Christian Tradition and Unification Theology. Each short section presented a theological issue, for example, God’s omnipotence, and gave a Unificationist answer. One of our imprints published the book, and it was available through our bookstore. No author was named; however, my name is prominent on the first page after the title page, and the dean of American Religious History credited me as the author, as well as using it as a main source for her analysis of our doctrine in her book New Religions in America.  A complete listing of my published writings follows:

6.   Reponse to A. James Rudin's Report "Jews and Judaism In Reverend Moon's Divine Principle". Prepared by Unification Church, Department of Public Affairs; Daniel C. Holdgreiwe, Director, and Unification Theology Study Group; John Andrew Sonneborn, Coordinator, March 1977
     [ I wrote the text; others helped revise it.]

7.   Demostration project report.  John Andrew Sonneborn
     [ the paper that I wrote in 1980 describing the course that I taught as my Doctor of Ministry project]

8.   John Andrew Sonneborn. “God, Suffering and Hope: A Unification View” in Unity in Diversity - Essays in religion by members of the faculty of the Unification Theological Seminary. Edited by Henry O. Thompson.1984

9.   John Andrew Sonneborn. Questions and Answers: Christian Tradition and Unification Theology (New York: Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, 1984

10.                     John Andrew Sonneborn. "Unification Theology, Ecumenicity and 'The God of Principle'" in Journal of Ecumenical Studies. 22, no. 4. (Fall 1986), (754- 63).

    [In "The God of Principle:  A Critical Evaluation," 22, no. 4 Journal of Ecumenical Studies (Fall 1986), 741-53, Frederick Sontag, a scholar who has written extensively on Unificationism, asked whether the revelation given to the Reverend. Moon and put down in Divine Principle is now so binding on God that God is incapable of adopting alternative paths. In the same issue John Andrew Sonneborn, in "Unification Theology, Ecumenicity and 'The God of Principle' " responds to F. Sontag's essay" (754- 63), by emphasizing that Unification theology understands God as choosing freely not to alter an overall plan.] Footnote in Mary Farrell Bednarowski, New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America, Indiana University Press.

I ghostwrote Rev. Kwak’s The Unification Position on Justice and World Peace, which he presented at a conference for lawyers in the Washington DC area. Recently, I have been unable to locate a copy of it; however, at the conference he elaborated upon it at great length, and his speech is given in the relevant of issue of World & I.

In 1993, while working with Rev. Kwak on his book, I purchased a franchise in Kumon USA, found a venue, operated the business, and provided guided self-instruction. Over 1500 children passed through the program, which ended in 2009, after which I continued as a tutor, first in the No Child Left Behind program and then freelance until 2016.

In 2016-2017, I created a PowerPoint presentation called True Parents Seminar, which was actually a parenting workshop. The narration that accompanies the slides is posted on my blog, as is the entire presentation.

My wife, Mrs. Soungja Kim, (originally a 777 couple) with whom I was blessed in 1982 (while I was at the Santa Cruz conference) and I currently reside in a great public housing development in Harlem. I have been doing Tribal Messiah activities with the New York blessing group led by the district pastor and attending the Harlem Family Church for Saturday Hoon Dok Hae and for Sunday worship services. I continue to write and to add new writings and earlier writings to my blog. Topics include human nature, human maturation, religion, philosophy, politics, and culture – including drama and music.