Father shared some thoughts about its significance on the occasion of Heung Jin Nim's Seung Hwa ceremony at Belvedere on January 7, 1984. His comments were printed in the January-February 1984 issue of Today's World.

I'd like to make a very clear announcement that will set the tradition of our movement and our church. In the secular world, death signifies the end of life. However, in our world, death is like a rebirth or a new birth into another world, particularly for those who give their life for the purpose of the Kingdom of Heaven and for the sake of the movement are special heroes.

For that reason, we must not make those occasions gloomy or sad or feel discouraged. Instead, we shall rejoice in the victory of the spirit in which that life was given for the mission. If we here on earth become very mournful and gloomy, it is like pulling the person who is going up to the heavens down to the ground.

This is a birth from the second universal mother's womb into another world, just like when a baby emerges from its first mother's womb.

A Seung Hwa ceremony is actually comparable to a wedding, when men and women get married. It's not a sorrowful occasion at all. It's like an insect coming out of its cocoon, getting rid of a shackle, and becoming a new body and a new existence, a new entity. That's exactly the same kind of process.

In our way of life and tradition, spirit world and physical world are one, and by our living up to that kind of ideal, we bring the two worlds together into one.

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