November 7, 2017

I Could Have Sworn This Was Heaven

What is your version of paradise? What dream, held most dear to your heart, is what you envision as your “heaven”?

The movie “Field of Dreams” is, to me, a bridge building presentation. Though Hollywood often misses truth in their cinematic efforts, this movie brings to light and understanding the deepest yearning of every beating, human heart – reconciliation through love.

To a boy now a man who wanted to have a connection to his father and the father that didn’t know how to act with a boy born to him in his mature years, their only connection was baseball and that became a painful exercise to a young man growing up in the turbulence of the 1960’s, where so much of what once was accepted as normal life was both questioned and cast aside in favor of a vastly different paradigm which often left people grasping for the human interaction that had likewise been cast aside for something fleeting, something more.

The summation of the movie where John Kinsella asks his son “Is this heaven?” to which his son Ray answers, “No, it’s Iowa.” underscores the misunderstanding about what truly comprises heaven. It isn’t until John says “I could have sworn this was heaven” that Ray begins to see – to truly see with spiritual eyes flung wide open – that it is his FAMILY and those precious connections moment by moment that are the peace and heaven so ardently sought for but seldom found in the 1960’s and beyond to our own day.

The tears roll down my face sitting here watching Ray and his father John have that long postponed catch in the backyard. It is at this moment of their reunion that each little segment of who I am and who I am trying to become is completely wrapped up in all that my parents tried to offer to me, it comes full circle every time I see this movie. It isn’t just the movie itself, but the emotional connection to everything good in my life that came from the two people who loved me the most in my life and with whom I had a catch, with whom I had a cry, with whom I felt the eternal circle of their unconditional love, and by extension the mortal surrogates to show me what it was and is to feel God’s love.

While your personal “Field of Dreams” may not involve a pickle between third and home, or the dream of being the one to hit the ball that saved the game, it really isn’t about baseball at all.

It is about rounding the bases or milestones of life and, in those older years, rounding third to come home to discover that all that is good about your family life IS your heaven, be it Iowa, New York, or a humble back yard in Alabama.

That’s what heaven really is all about.

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