When we first meet Cara Jones in her documentary Blessed Child, she’s anxious about a pending performance. Some instinct leads to the correct assumption that she’s going to a Moth storytelling slam, but you are not prepared for what she admits when she steps on stage. Jones was raised in the Unification Church of Korean evangelical leader and self-professed messiah Sun Myung Moon, its members derisively known as the “Moonies,” for those of us that remember the ‘70s. While Jones critiques the church, she spends the bulk of the film’s 74 minutes ruminating on the meaning of family through the dysfunctional prism of her own. While villains definitely emerge, opportunities for healing and forgiveness make the film powerful and heartfelt.
The Unification Church came to prominence at the time of America’s last tectonic civil shift. Nixon, Vietnam and Watergate exposed many of the corrupt enterprises of the country’s elite while women and people of color continued to protest for recognition of their human rights. The conditions were ripe for a messianic figure with a message of equality and harmony, so Moon imported his brand of Christianity from Korea. According to his teachings, he and his wife were “true” parents, born free of original sin, the stain brought on the human race when Adam and Eve copulated without god’s consent. One of the superpowers Moon derived from this purity was the ability to divine people’s character among his followers and make heterosexual matches. These people were then married at mass weddings held in stadiums, and the children born of these couples were called blessed children for they, like Moon’s family, were born free of original sin.
Moon offered a world free of prejudice and heavy with patriarchal definitions about family. It was a grift, of course, with the Moons benefitting from free labor from his followers and millions of dollars in donations. They purchased mansions and evaded taxes, but serving a cause that will save the world is alluring and it spoke to Farley Jones, a one-time atheist who felt called to the teachings of the Unification Church during Moon’s first tour of America. The church offered structure for he and his wife to marry and raise a family, and he eventually rose to be its president. He had three sons and one daughter, Cara, who sought to emulate the devotion of her parents.
Jones began questioning her faith around the time of her own mass wedding in 1995, a year when the activities of Moon and his family came under renewed scrutiny. Her husband was off on missionary work, a reflection of the first three years of her life when her parents left her in the care of others while they proselytized, and she began the experimental life of a college student. Her rebellion extended to her parents, whom she rightly accused of putting the church before their daughter. The decades that followed were spent restructuring her world and healing from the abuse and betrayal inherent when rejecting a cult. The documentary is part of that therapeutic journey and she gives space to her brother Bow, the film’s cinematographer who left the church due in part to its condemnation of his homosexuality and who could be the subject of his own fascinating documentary, and her parents to reconcile with unaddressed pain and regret.
For her part, Cara Jones seems like a force of nature, one that wants to have a family of her own and who we see freezing eggs until a time when she can make that happen. There is a loneliness about her that she cannot address until she is fully at peace with her mother and father. They violated the sacred trust between a child and her parents, and that is a wound that only scars and reopens. To her credit she is able to accept what she gets from her family, each moment onscreen representing one more step toward a sense of wholeness. There is a catharsis with her mother, but Farley seems incapable of exposing his deepest emotions, preferring to be understood. There are moments when Cara and we as the audience are so close to getting the release we want from him, but Farley retreats within himself when on the brink of the sincerest apology.
Time can temper some zealots, and the reconciliation Cara seeks with her parents is clearly mutual. The church is even thrown some affectionate bones on occasion. It was an extended family for a long time and many of its characters helped shape her. But this is a story that begins its life on a stage and needs an ending, and it winds up a breath of hope and optimism at a time when one is so desperately needed. We all have to forgive our parents for the ways they fail us. Some of us will need to seek forgiveness from our children. This is a loving and necessary document to that process.
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