Today’s essay, written over several pieces of the most delectable California roll sushi, is something of a landmark for me. After writing it, it felt like a key: The key to a door I’ve been searching for all my adult life (which I’d even thought of as a door, for many years). But will it turn the lock?
I think something fundamental is missing from the way we look at life. I hear my fellow religionists talk of heaven as though it were a place unattainable, awaiting physical death to grant us access to spiritual heaven. Isn’t there a contradiction in that?
Or my fellow scientists, who reject the burden of a God Who would limit their thinking according to what thought itself understands of spirituality. Yet they, too, leave something unexamined. Something no one is looking for, perhaps because it violates every belief we have.
What if heaven, a place purportedly free of space and time, were not some place else than here, or some when away, as at the time of our death. What if the Kingdom of God were truly “within you”, and we had no further to look than our own doorstep? “He who hath known himself hath known God.” What if everything we understand God, life, and heaven to be, are but abstractions begging us to seek their reality, and which could be known truly if not for the search?
What if heaven is where we are, but one cannot enter unless he chooses to do so? A heaven, so perfectly hidden, it hides itself in plain sight. A heaven that disguises its beauty by allowing us to see “ugliness”, and that withholds its joy because we are firm believers in “sorrow”. A heaven that is all around us, that we are born into, but we cannot know until we’ve died to the “life” we call home.
I extrapolate my essay from the central idea that God is both good and perfect. Everything else follows from this; whatever tangents I follow, they relate to this. From just that one thought, I am forced to reconsider everything else. I must then say that “God” is meaningless as a symbol, “good” is the joy I experience in my life, and “perfect” means it is real and does not submit to unreality. What “real” and “life” mean: these are what lie behind the door…