Last Sunday I attend my first interfaith passover seder, at Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul. There were around 150 people present, from many different religions (though almost entirely white), commemorating together the Jewish liberation from Egyptian slavery. In addition to a traditional Haggadah "liturgy", representatives from six other faith communities were given an opportunity to speak about liberation or an exodus from their religious perspectives, and at the tables we had an opportunity to speak from our own perspectives, particularly with the "questions" aspect of the seder.

A particular comment in Louis Gregory's biography struck me as illustrating the combination of personal responsibility and material detachment in Reinhold Niebuhr famous prayer, "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference."

Microsoft's Books Online article on SQL Injection does a great job of reviewing the possible attacks against dynamic SQL statements (using EXEC or sp_executesql). I won't re-hash their discussion and suggestions. What I offer below is a sample remediation effort for this set of statements (the @Fields and @Values variables are actually stored procedure parameters):

DECLARE @Fields VARCHAR(1000), @VALUES VARCHAR(1000), @SQL NVARCHAR(2500);
SELECT @SQL = 'INSERT INTO MyTable (' + @Fields + ') VALUES (' + @Values + ')';
EXEC(@SQL);

It was about three years ago, while attending a conference at Green Acre Bahá'í School in Eliot, Maine, that I had the bounty of making a sunrise pilgrimage to the burial site of Louis Gregory, Hand of the Cause of Bahá'u'lláh. At the time I knew little about him — that he was an early African-American adherent of the Bahá'í Faith, a fantastic and tireless teacher, well-loved by 'Abdu'l-Bahá, and thanks to the Master’s encouragement, one-half of perhaps the first black/white Bahá'í marriage in the U.S.

A friend asked about the need for the concept of "fear of God" in the Baháí Faith. Can one be a Baháí without it? More generally, do Baháís accept that there can be compassion and altruism without this "fear"? I found the simple answer today: no (read on for the references). But as with so many concepts, it seems important to dig into the words, exploring their literal and symbolic meaning both inclusive of and apart from our pre-conceived notions.

Recently, I received a code delivery that worked on our development server but failed in unit tests on my box. The culprit was a method that transformed a List<T> into a DataTable and used that DataTable to load data into SQL Server using SqlBulkCopy. Lesson: apply column mappings.

While it was unfortunate that we were not able to see the Shrine of the Báb in all its golden-domed grandeur (covered over during on-going rehab), we had the bounty of being only the third pilgrim group to visit the restored Ridván Garden outside of 'Akká. The Bahá'í World News Service has an excellent article, from October 2010, on the restoration work and the history of the garden: Holy place restoration sheds light on region's heritage.

It is indeed a beautiful and calming place, and one can well imagine the relief of leaving the horrid conditions of the city to spend a few hours in joyful company on the island. This entire complex is filled with trees and plants descended from those brought across the deserts by pilgrims from Persia (as mentioned somewhere in The Chosen Highway), particularly cypress, pomegranate, and various citrus fruits (the tangerines were ripe and wonderful!). The peace and tranquility in this site, which is only a few hundred yards from apartment buildings, could easily send one into a rapturous state.

A friend recently told me about this passage from the collection of Bahá'u'lláh's writings called Prayers and Meditations. In Facebook conversation I've been talking about my limited and impersonal understanding of "God". This passage might seem a bit paradoxical to that viewpoint, at first glance. The paradox is because of my inability to precisely describe the nuance of a belief that lies somewhere between the poles of atheism and personal theism, without recourse to philosophical language (the best "school of thought" to describe my own core belief has always been panentheism).

In responding to a friend about the nature of the "god concept" in the Bahá'í Faith, I began to collect a number of passages and add a few comments as to why I chose them. And then I found this hitherto unknown (to me) statement from 'Abdu'l-Bahá. It could not be more plain, and completely justifies what a fellow Bahá'í once said to an atheistically-inclined friend: "I don't believe in the same God you don't believe in."

There is more to show about the holy sites and places visited, but first I want to share some miscellaneous photos of birds, fruits, trees, and a bee.