Blessing ceremony of the Unification Church was first held in 1961 for 36 couples in Seoul, South Korea by Sun Myung Moon and his wife Hak Ja Han, shortly after their own marriage in 1960. All the couples were members of the Unification Church. Moon matched all of the couples except the 12 who were already married to each other from before joining the church, which was officially founded in 1954. Later Blessing ceremonies were larger in scale but followed the same pattern with all participants Unification Church members and Moon matching most of the couples. In 1982 the first large scale Blessing held outside of
Nansook Hong Nansook Hong Nansook Hong (born 1966), is the author of the autobiography, "In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Family", published in 1998 by Little, Brown and Company. It gave her account of her life up to that time, including her marriage to Hyo Jin Moon, the first son of Unification Church founder and leader Sun Myung Moon and his wife Hakja Han Moon. "In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Family" is a 1998, non-fiction work by Hong and "Boston Globe" reporter Eileen McNamara, published