Between Margaret’s and my two-day vacation (ten blocks from home) and my current two-and-a-half-day Anti-Racism Training adventure I preached Thursday night, and was comfortable enough with how things went for me to leave my sermon out where people might see it. It went like this. . . .
So many things—so many things, sisters and brothers—so many things are impossible that certain days I marvel that we can get out of bed in the morning.
Can the world ever hear the good news that we who follow in the way of the cross are not out to force our faith down anybody’s throat? Can the church ever learn to overcome facile dichotomies between traditional orthodoxy and liberating liberalism? Can peoples who have known in their flesh and in their hearts the chastening rod and the stony road of insult and oppression attain a spiritual freedom that heals wounds that are centuries old and new every day? Can that extraordinarily peculiar race of dominant peoples, those who have learned to think of themselves as normal, as white, as straight, as participants in a social hierarchy defined by male dominance and the economic upper classes: can straight white guys ever understand, understand, I mean not just feel-your-pain say they understand, but can we even begin to understand, see the light, recognize where the problems lie, who we are, who anybody else is, how to move ahead in a world that isn’t ours to own, to fix, to decide when we’ve done enough and on whose behalf? Can we get there?
A straight white guy—okay, to be more precise, kinda warped, not exactly straight—that kind of white guy dares not presume to tell anybody else whether we can get to the end of our struggles. That only aggravates the problem.
And yet I dare not keep silent, because even in the worst of days, when white batters black into slavery, when man shackles woman into her place, when a particular love dares not speak its name, even at the most wrong-headed pinnacle of every phobia and -ism we can name, it does no one good for some folks, even for the oppressors, to be utterly silenced: that only re-inscribes us in a cycle of suffering and self-justification, only gives some sorry dude an excuse for why he didn’t get the call, why he’s the real victim, only invites us to perpetuate for another aching generation the wretched divisions that derive not from God’s creation of a harmonious plenitude of diverse human creatures, but from our sinful parody of God’s creation by which we institute separations of race, gender, caste, sexuality, even orders of ministry.
And since you called me here to speak—and not just to be silent, as I might more safely have done—I will try to bring here a message that I think I’ve heard from the saints, from Augustine and Athanasius, from Catherine and Julian, from Sojourner Truth and William Stringfellow.
That message runs like this: Those reconciliations, those recognitions are not possible on our own strength. No white guy’s gonna fix it, nobody ever’s gonna be the final person who gets to adjudicate when some “we” has overcome sexism, racism, heterosexism, classism, and so on and so on and so on. Those weaknesses lie not within our strength to heal. Any time you hear, “I know the guy who has the answer—he’s out in the wild side of the city,” or if they say, “I read her books, she’s in the library,” y’all better not listen. That’s the impossible part.
The other part of that message runs this way: The only path toward reconciliation leads by the way of love, true love, one-step-beyond love, love not like the love with which I love Margaret, or even Monique*, but the love that reaches to somebody I’ve never met, someone who thinks I’m a danger to the church, a threat to humanity, someone who thinks it’s worth bombing me into surrender or clubbing me to a bloody pulp, the way of love that teaches me that I can’t see my own faults clearly enough to confess them truly, that I need your help, and God’s grace, to learn how I go wrong. And God offers that grace freely, and we as a community knit together by a shared faith that’s bigger and deeper than anyone’s individual doubts or affirmations, as a community across bounds of time and geography and race and gender and class. As we shared faith we share that grace—or as a coincident assembly of suspicious strangers we share nothing, nothing worth partaking in the first place.
I live by your faith. We learn and love by God’s grace. Together: because when we make room for God, lightning flashes from the east to the west, from the south to the north, from the Castro to Lynchburg Virginia, from the Ladies Room to the Gents’. Then the truly Human One can be seen, laughing with us, loving us, weeping, giving up human life so that we can become divine.
And that’s not just “possible”—that’s true.
[*Monique Ellison is a Seabury alumna, class of 2002, who was saying mass for the evening; I was just preaching. Monique was a treat to work with while she was here, and she delights us by coming back to visit from time to time.]
When the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.
Posted by: Denton at January 13, 2004 04:19 AMThe most basic duality that exists with variables is how the programmer sees them in a totally different way than the computer does. When you're typing away in Project Builder, your variables are normal words smashed together, like software titles from the 80s. You deal with them on this level, moving them around and passing them back and forth.
Posted by: Ottewell at January 13, 2004 04:19 AMThat gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.
Posted by: Margery at January 13, 2004 04:19 AMWhen Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.
Posted by: Salamon at January 13, 2004 09:38 AMThe rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read:
Posted by: Jerman at January 13, 2004 09:38 AMWhen compared to the Stack, the Heap is a simple thing to understand. All the memory that's left over is "in the Heap" (excepting some special cases and some reserve). There is little structure, but in return for this freedom of movement you must create and destroy any boundaries you need. And it is always possible that the heap might simply not have enough space for you.
Posted by: Warham at January 13, 2004 09:39 AM