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Heaven
Heaven
When I was a small boy I wanted to be an astronaut. But I wasn’t interested in Mars or the moon; I wanted to be the first man to go to heaven. I would make my own rocket, fly out beyond the stars, and gaze in glorious rapture at the divine light of God.
But then real astronauts took off into real space. Afterwards, The Russian President Khrushchev remarked "We sent up Yuri Gagarin to find the kingdom of heaven, and he couldn't see it.”
Gagarin apologised: “I looked and I looked but I couldn't see God” – Bogda Nyet.
‘No,’ I wanted to shout. You haven’t looked hard enough. Go back, go back.
I was sure they must have made a mistake. For, as the son of a clergyman, I had little doubt that Heaven lay in wait.
This was the gift of faith– the heavenly reward, resurrection, salvation from death.
Now when I look back on the memory, I sometimes long for the childhood certainty that a place has been prepared for us and we live on after our death
Now I’m older, in the midst of my mid-life crisis, I think that the idea of heaven is the ultimate test of faith- the yardstick by which we discover whether we believe or not.
So I made a film about it, and wrote a novel called The Colour of Heaven because it seemed to me that the truest certainty in life, its actual meaning, is the fact of death – and that understanding this fact, and deciding whether this life is all there is – or not – is perhaps the most important question we should try to answer.
I‘m still not sure that heaven exists as a physical or even a spiritual space. But I do know now, more than ever before that we need a destination for our affections. At the very least heaven perhaps lies in moments of beauty, rapture and radiance - little epiphanies, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark, are all that heaven allows - a perfect sky, the city of Venice, music, true love, children, parents, transience, beauty.