SAY THANK YOU TO EVERYBODY AND EVERYTHING

Message by Rev. Tetsuo Watanabe, President of SKK,

Meishu-samas Birthday Service, December 22 & 23, 2006,
Hall of Worship, Atami Sacred Grounds, Japan
Good morning, and welcome to todays birthday service for
Meishu-sama. We just held the service to celebrate his 124 th
birthday, solemnly, with sincere gratitude. We then received
Johrei from Kyoshu-sama, and listened to his deep and inspiring
message. Thank you Kyoshu-sama for this.
[Introducing those from abroad]
[December 22] First, I would like to introduce you to those
from outside of Japan who are attending todays service. We
have a total of 36 ministers and members from 10 countries with
us, from Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, the United
States, Angola, Mozambique, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and
Canada. Please welcome them with a big applause.
[December 23] Yesterday, we had a total of 37 members
from 10 countries outside of Japan attending the service. Today,
we have a total of 13 members from 5 countries with us, from the
United States, New Zealand, Mongol, England, and Brazil. Please
welcome them with a big applause.
[Kyoshu-samas message, God is our parent.]
This year is going to end soon. How was this past year for
you? Did you finish your preparation to greet the New Year?
This year, we received many, many written testimonials from
you regarding Sonen Jissen, or, the practice of faith through daily
reflections.
I remember one of them said, Kyoshu-samas
messages are the messages from Meishu-sama.
It has
impressed me deeply, and I totally agree with this statement.
Next year, we would like to continue reading and studying
Kyoshu-samas words, humbly, with an open mind, so that we can
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understand Meishu-samas teachings more deeply.

In his message today, Kyoshu-sama said that God is our
parent. One of the poems in our prayer book, by Nidai-sama,
says, Each one of us is born with a physical body, and a soul
bestowed by God a part of Gods own Being. [page 19] God is
a much stricter, and much more loving parent than our own
human parents. And sometimes, we forget that God is our
parent.
For example, when people experience some serious
purification, they sometimes feel, Maybe God does not love me;
maybe God has forsaken me. But it is not true. God wants us to
get closer and closer to Him, and God sometimes gives us a
purification because He loves us a lot.
For any kind of serious purification, God prepares some kind
of relief or blessing behind it. God prepares for us joy behind
sadness, hope behind desperation. This is Gods love for us as
our parent. Therefore, whatever negative thoughts we may have,
we can put them in Meishu-samas hands through this Sonen
Jissen practice, and we can just do what pleases God.
What is the most important thing that we can do to please
God? It is that we have the feeling of gratitude. In the present
world, there are too many people who do not realize that they are
being blessed by God abundantly, and therefore, cannot be
grateful to God.
Some time ago, I read an article in a daily newspaper that
says, In most public schools, children say thank you for this
food, before eating the school lunch.
But some mothers
protested to the schools and demanded that this practice stop,
because they are paying for the lunches and children do not need
to be thankful. If some parents think that their children do not
have to be thankful for the food they eat, these parents are really
in a pitiful state of mind. Some other parents say, It is forbidden
by our Constitution to pray in public schools. Probably these
parents tell the children not to give thanks for the food after
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finishing meals. If parents think this way, I have a grave concern

for the future of these children, and for the future of this country,
Japan.
We receive nourishment from the life of animals and plants,
and they in turn receive life from God. We have to be grateful for
this life from God. Those who cannot do so naturally cannot
respect and treasure their own life, or the lives of other people.
The many cases of suicides, or of murders of an individuals own
parents or children, which are reported frequently recently, must
be the signs, the results, of this trend of ungrateful thinking that
many people have.
As Kyoshu-sama said in his message today, God is trying to
nurture us and to complete us as His children. Our lives are
being nourished and nurtured by the life of God. The first duty
that we need to do as Gods children is to be grateful to God, and
to try to live in accord with Gods Will.
[Expressing Gratitude for everything]
The past year, we tried to practice Sonen Jissen, and to
become more aware that we are all agents and instruments of
God, that we have a divine essence within us, and that we are
the sum total of our numerous ancestors. We also tried to
recognize our ancestors who may be suffering in the spiritual
realm, to talk to them, and to leave them in Meishu-samas
hands, to be purified and healed by God. We would like to
continue this practice next year.
Another important point I would like to emphasize is that
many of our ancestors were purified and healed by the light from
Meishu-sama, and their happiness and gratitude are reflected in
our minds as our own joy and happiness. We need to recognize
it, and we can express our gratitude to God and Meishu-sama,
together with our ancestors.
In his message today, Kyoshu-sama also said that we need
to place our feelings of joy and gratitude in the hands of God,
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with courage, and ask God to accept them. Since I received this
message of Kyoshu-sama, I thought a lot by myself on how to
offer my joy and gratitude to God, to be accepted by God. After
much thinking, I came to a certain conclusion or idea, and I
shared it with Kyoshu-sama, who said, Thats a good idea.
Since Kyoshu-sama said it is O.K., I would like to relate it to you,
and I would like to put it into practice, with you.
It is called practicing the thought of gratitude or
expressing our feelings of gratitude. Whatever we come into
contact with, such as other people, or even the sunshine, water,
air, mountains and rivers and trees and plants, even a single
flower, God gave life to them and God prepared them so that they
can nurture and nourish our lives. Therefore, we can express our
gratitude to them with the words, thank you.
What I am proposing now to say thank you to everything
we encounter, is different from our regular phrase of greeting,
thank you, which we use casually and as a custom. Kyoshusama said today, Words belong to God. We can use words not
as empty words, but as really living and powerful words. If we
put our real feelings of gratitude strongly into the phrase thank
you and say it, then, these will become really living and powerful
words.
The Japanese word for thank you is arigato, which
originally comes from the expression impossible to exist or it
rarely exists, or it is a miracle that such a thing happens. It
implies gratitude to God.
There is a gift shop in front of this Hall of Worship, and there
is a very interesting book for sale at the store. The title of the
book is Messages from Water. It is a collection of pictures of
frozen crystals of water in many different forms. The pictures
show that beautiful and benevolent words create beautiful
patterns of water crystals. Human bodies, and bodies of animals
and plants, are mostly water, and vibrations of beautiful words
have a good effect on water.
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One farmer I know, who is practicing nature farming, goes

into his field in the morning and addresses the crops with loud
voice, Hello, good morning, how are you. Are you all O.K.
today? This farmer must know the power of words on plants.
If I say, Lets call out to everything around us and say
thank you, then you might think, Aha, Reverend Watanabe is
making another strange proposal. Sure, if you begin to say out
loud, in front of other people, Thank you, water, Thank you,
air, Thank you, flowers, then people would naturally think, Oh,
my goodness, this person must be crazy and should go to a
mental hospital for a check-up.
If people are around you, you can just whisper, in soft voice.
Meishu-sama said that when we say the Amatsu Norito it is better
to recite it out loud, not silently. So, if you see people close by,
you can just say thank you in a very soft voice but with your
heart in it. It is important to try to express your gratitude with
your words, with your voice. It is to be grateful not only to that
particular person or particular object, but to be grateful to God,
who gave it to you.
[Express gratitude to people around us.]
Your family members are staying home, looking after the
house, while you are here today attending the service. So, you
can thank your family, out loud, when you return home. Even
casual contact with other people is caused by some spiritual
affinity and spiritual relationship. On your way home today, you
can say thank you to the bus driver or taxi driver you meet, or
a clerk you meet at a convenience store, or a gas station
attendant.
Consider family members who are having purifications and
for whom you need to care, or your mother-in-law or father-inlaw with whom you live and who are hard-headed and criticize
you constantly. You can think of these people as valuable people
whom God sent to you so that you can be trained and
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strengthened. Then, you can summon your courage and express

your gratitude to them and say thank you.
It might be quite possible that the person to whom you
voiced your gratitude today might be healed and find relief, some
day and somewhere, because of your simple greeting. The
person might realize their own value because of your words of
gratitude, and might recover from their depression and
desperation. Nowadays, many people commit suicide, thinking
that nobody needs them, that there is no reason to live.
Just one expression of thank you from your mouth might
give a powerful message to a person: that this person is a
valuable, priceless individual to themselves, to their ancestors
and to God.
If we can say thank you simply, without hesitation, then
we might become a part of the great harmony that Kyoshusama mentioned today, we might become the hope in the minds
of those in desperation.
We can say thank you with the same frame of mind as
when we channel Johrei. When we say thank you to a person,
we can think of all the ancestors behind that person and speak to
these ancestors with our words of gratitude. Then, the ancestors
would respond to your words, and will guide and protect the
person more.
[Gratitude gives birth to gratitude, and ingratitude creates more
ingratitude.]
Meishu-samas teaching says, Gratitude gives birth to
gratitude, and ingratitude creates more ingratitude.
When
strong thought of gratitude, expressed in words, flows and moves
back and forth between and among people, between people and
their ancestors, between people and nature, and between people
and God, it can amplify and enlarge, and generate strong
currents of gratitude and joy. And it can powerfully influence
even those people who are unhappy and sad. I firmly believe
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that gratitude from the heart brings about happiness.

From my experience of observing people, I realize that there
is a type of person who can easily and readily receive blessings
from God, and also a type of person who cannot receive blessings
so easily. For example, suppose there are two people here, both
of them suffering from headache and lower back pain, and
suppose both of them find their headache gone after receiving
Johrei. One of the two people is the type who can readily receive
blessings. The person is grateful and expresses gratitude for the
headache gone. That person most probably receives a second
blessing, this time, the healing of lower back pain.
On the other hand, the person who cannot receive blessings
easily is not grateful for the cure of headache, and instead,
complains that the lower back pain persists. This type of person
discovers that not only isnt the blessing received for the lower
back pain, but the headache comes back. I really believe that
being grateful to God, and expressing it, is the path to happiness.
Most people have certain issues or problems for which they
cannot be grateful. But if a person is filled with complaints and
ingratitude all the time, then gradually the feelings of hatred and
sadness become stronger and bigger, which brings about more
reasons to be unhappy.
As Meishu-sama said, ingratitude
reaches dark forces. So, we have to be careful of our thoughts
and feelings.
For many years, I set aside in my mind Meishu-samas
birthday as the special day of gratitude.
The joy of being
connected with Meishu-sama and being able to serve in his work
of relieving the suffering of humanity, is the greatest joy for me.
With my words of thank you, I would like to share this feeling of
gratitude with everybody I meet.
I believe this is another way to express our gratitude to
Meishu-sama. Meishu-sama said that gratitude connects us to
God. We would be living in harmony with Gods Will when we are
grateful to other people and to everything that has been given to
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us to nurture us and nourish us. Gratitude is the way to be in

harmony with Gods Will for this great creation, the way to come
closer to Meishu-sama, our model and prototype, and it is the
way to come closer to God, who is our parent.
At the conclusion of this year, we would like to say, thank
you, thank you very much, from our heart, to our family, to
those who helped us and cared for us, and to everybody. And we
would like to say it also to the mountains and rivers and the trees
and plants and everything in Mother Nature. If we can end this
year with thank you, then we can greet the New Year with
gratitude.
[Conclusion]
At this time, we would like to offer our promise to God and
Meishu-sama that we will continue to serve in Gods work of the
construction of Paradise on Earth, and to deepen our faith and
express our gratitude always, and to keep practicing Sonen
Jissen.
[For December 23 only.]
Today, at 2:00 oclock in the afternoon, we will have an
orchestra concert here at this hall of worship to celebrate Meishusamas birthday.
Sandai-sama (third spiritual leader) and
Kyoshu-sama (our current spiritual leader) will attend. Lets
enjoy this wonderful music concert.
At this time, I have one request of all of you. A few days
ago I visited Sandai-sama and invited her to come to todays
concert. She said, with some hesitation, When I appear before
our members, many of them take my picture, up front and up
close, with their digital cameras and cell-phones. Now that I am
older, I hesitate appearing before them and being subjected to so
much picture taking. To this, I replied, I will request our
members not to take so many pictures. Please dont worry about
that, and please come to the concert.
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I understand very well that you would like to take pictures of

Sandai-sama with your cameras, in memory of your attending
this service and the concert. But please respect Sandai-samas
wishes. If you really cannot resist the temptation to take her
picture, please do so in a quiet, unobtrusive way, from a distance
of 10 yards or 20 yards. Thats my request to you.
[For both December 22 and 23.]
I wish all of you a happy New Year, and hope and pray that
the next year will again be a wonderful year for you. Thank you
very much.
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