Some people come into your life to open a door you didn’t know was closed. You didn’t ev
Some people come into your life to open a door you didn’t know was closed. You didn’t even see it. And then they swing it open and let the breeze in. . This is my beloved Sasha Sagan. She taught me that the language of the heart trumps the clunky cage of words. Her father, Carl Sagan, died the year I learned about him. I was watching the movie Contact, and it astonished me. He died just before the film’s release. Soon after the movie, I began reading his books and devouring his mind. . I was raised in Nashville, in a culture wrapped in Christianeze. I grew up to believe that if you didn’t say the right words, or call God the right name, you would be rejected. Holiness was localized. Right-wording was paramount. I saw words like ‘relativism’ and 'the Universe’ and 'subjectivism’ as code for deception. I built a wall around learning. . When I met Sasha, she changed me. She was raised without religion. But she was raised with awe and reverence for Life and the strange magic of existence. Her parents taught her that the Universe is Holy, that the truth is everywhere, that understanding is limitless and free. She is a secular agnostic Jew. I am a gay Christian confused wanderer. How could we possibly communicate? Our inherited language is so different. And yet, we couldn’t stop laughing and high-fiving and hugging mid-sentence and shouting 'YES! Wow. That’s it!’ . Our hearts went ahead of us and said everything. Our words caught up. In the felt-safety of instant love, the tricky politics of language didn’t trigger defense. Instead of fighting over definitions and traditions, we listened to each other with rapture. . I feel closer to God when I’m with her. She laughs, and agrees. She wouldn’t say it like that, but we mean the same thing. . Right now, Sasha’s parent’s love story, recorded on a golden disc and sent into space on the Voyager 1 spacecraft in hopes of contact with intelligent alien life, is hurtling through space. It launched in 1977 and is now the only thing humans have ever made that has reached interstellar space. The disc has an estimated shelf-life of a billion years. . (Follow her on Twitter and love her: @sashasagan) -- source link
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