Jen Kiaba, raised in Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, struggled with its insistence on arranged marriages, chosen by Rev. Moon. How she describes the matching ceremony:
One phrase stuck out to me in the monotony: "Do you want me to match you tonight?" A thunderous "Yes" answered Rev. Moon's question, and we were lined up into rows, divided down the middle, and categorized. … Suddenly Rev. Moon began pointing. A girl, then a boy would stand up, acknowledge each other, bow to Rev. Moon, and then be ushered out to be "processed" by administrators. My breathing was shallow; I tried to quiet my mind and draw upon the things I had been taught.
Absolute faith. Absolute Love. Absolute Obedience.
When Rev. Moon's finger pointed to me, time stopped. I looked deep into the eyes of the man who had bidden me to rise with his gesture and saw nothing. I was gazing into the eyes of the man who was determining my future, and I had expected to see some sort of timelessness, or to feel as though his eyes were digging into my soul. But he was looking through me, as though his finger had arbitrarily found its way to me in a game of love roulette. I felt suspended over an infinite emptiness.
Recent Dish coverage of Moon's death and his cult-like following here.
(Photo: Some 3,600 couples attend a Unification Church ceremony at a gymnasium in Cheonan, south of Seoul, on August 1, 2005. The ceremony is part of what the church called the International Blessing of 400 million couples to wrap up a week-long World Culture and Sports Festival sponsored by the church. By Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images.)
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