Heaven is where your Heart is.

How many of you at times feel that you are in this World, but not of it?  It is not uncommon to feel this way.  For many of us these are the first stirrings, the first pangs of discontent with the world of matter, or the physical World.  Many wisdom schools tell us this World is “Maya”, or Illusion.  We ask ourselves – “Is this all there is?”   We know there must be more.  The religions we grew up with talked about heaven.  That if we lived a good life, and if blindly followed the dogma we were taught that we would enter the pearly gates, and we would see our loved ones, and be with God; it was just that simple. 

We were made to feel quality if we thought, or felt, or acted counter intuitively to what we were taught.   In essence we had to be good children in the eyes of our religious communities, and especially in the eyes God.   Read your scripture, do and behave as you’re expected, and be a good person.  Some fundamental sects don’t believe in doing good works; simply by professing that you accept Jesus as your Lords and savior you are born again. 

You would think that that would be enough.  But, still we ache for something more.  Even if we are completely lost to and in the World of matter, and illusion that does everything to distract us from the reason why we are here, we still feel a pull,  a nagging feeling in the depth of our soul, to desire that which is beyond knowing – in scriptures, in ritual, in community.  We desire to have “Gnosis”, or direct knowledge or experience of God. 

I like to put in terms that everyone can understand: We are homesick…   Anyone who has missed their parents when they visited relatives all summer when they were kids, or went to summer camp, or even more direct and heartfelt, me miss a loved one who has passed on.  I am man who never really knew his father.  My father worked shift work; when he was home he slept.   I was repeatedly told not to wake my father.  I was told to be quiet, and stay out of the way.  We tend to fear that which we don’t know or understand.  I never knew my father, really.  He passed before I had a child.  My daughter told me once that she met him in heaven before she was born…. That gives me pause – for we are born with everything we are, and need, but this world – being the dream that it is we forget.  There is a prayer that asks: “Lord, show me my face before I was born.”

I have spent my life seeking that face.  I knew early on that something wasn’t right.  One day I realized sometime after my father: John Henry Turnbull – had passed that I had always longed for my father.  No, I ached, pined, longed, yearned, out and out hungered for the father.  Until recently I have been reticent even to say the god.  I was angry, and I wanted answers.

I wanted to be home with father and feel that love that only union could provide.  But, wait what about the other parent, what about – mother.  She had never left me; she helped me get this far, she has nurtured me, loved me, and provided comfort through my trials, and my quest.  I know her well, I call her – Soul.  Father spirit, Mother Soul, Sun and Moon, Gold and Silver, Anima and Animus – in the inner firmament that is my mind, in the temple of my body we are one, I am home.

Jeffrey Scott Turnbull