Happy Lent

This is another in the occasional series I post of sermons by my friend, the Rev. Bruce Coggin. Bruce is a retired priest of the diocese who does heroic service taking care of two congregations whose buildings are still in the control of our former bishop, a circumstance which has caused them to be very creative about worship space and ministry. This past Sunday, however, Bruce preached at all four services at Trinity, Fort Worth. Two of his own grown children and their spouses and children were in the congregation, an added joy to the day.

And the photo? That's the absolutely shameless Mexican Plum abloom right now in my garden. Bruce and I were admiring it just yesterday.

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A Sermon

preached at Trinity Church, Fort Worth

Lent I, 2011

Happy Lent!

Does that surprise you? Well, I promise you, this is really a happy moment for me, a chance to be back with this family I get to see so rarely, since I'm still back and forth between Wichita Falls and Hillsboro most of the time. So I am particularly grateful to Fr. Wright for inviting me to preach today--and doubly so because it's the first Sunday of Lent, a great Sunday for preachers. And before we're through, I hope you'll have some reason to think of Lent as . . . well . . . a surprisingly enjoyable time.

Of course, it’s a challenge to preach to this house, especially today. I look out and see two of my children and their families, and I can see no fewer than four other priests among you; so the pressure’s pretty considerable. Aside from that, it’s the first Sunday of Lent, and how many first Sunday of Lent sermons have you listened to by now? I mean, you know all about Lent, don’t you? It’s that time of the year when our mother the church asks us to consider—pray about, read about, hear about, do about—all that in our lives which leads us to be less than God created us to be, to fail of our mission to glorify God by serving others and letting the divine light of Christ shine through us. You know what I’m talking about. We call it sin, and depending on our level of psychological sophistication, we can explore that pretty dispassionately—but we all know it’s real. I’m talking about the ways we behave, the things we do that get us off track, that “separate us from God,” the stuff we do out of foolishness or weakness or ignorance or even when we knowingly and willingly cooperate with that which we call evil—another reality we can discuss intellectually but which we all know is real.

So the church is wise to turn our attention to all that, and she offers us a whole batch of traditional tools for doing it: we give something up, take something on, come to church without fail, read the Bible, go to a class, pray the Stations of the Cross, and especially we try to feel really sorry about all the stuff we’ve been doing all the rest of the year we know we shouldn’t. It’s all supposed to be a kind of spiritual calisthenics to pump up our will power to resist the devil and all his pomps, to make us able to resist temptation. And all that’s good, and I commend it to you, and I hope God blesses your every act of spiritual discipline to you this Lent and every Lent. But, y’know? The degree of seriousness with which people take all that, I find, varies. Years ago in a little parish somewhere else in this diocese, I asked the senior warden what he’d given up for Lent, and he came back with, “Oysters.” Mercy. I used to give up cuff links with stones in them. Oh, the agony!

But though I am for all that, the fact is that the religious practices with which we at least ostensibly honor God each Lent can, if we’re not careful, turn into a distraction, a way to avoid taking a hard look at some of the more intractable problems within us that lead us to fail of our mission, to be less than God created us to be, to sin. I mean, look: my experience is that no matter how rigorous a Lent I keep, I’m still putty in the tempter’s hands most of the time. Lifting spiritual weights doesn’t seem to give me great spiritual abs. My suspicion is that there’s a lot more going on in me, in us, than just learning not to go to the picture show on Sundays or stay up late smokin’ cigarettes and playing cards or chasing after wine, wimmin, and song. I mean, look at the Bible lessons today, especially the Old Testament and the gospel lesson. Those are two of the greatest temptation stories ever told, and there’s nothing chintzy about the temptations there, nothing tawdry about getting another bath tub and buying some of those little pills. It’s serious stuff, high dollar temptation with everything at risk.

In the Garden of Eden, you recall, God gave Adam and Eve absolutely everything they needed, a perfect world—daily communion with God, no sickness, no death, all the world at their feet—so naturally they responded with a “Yes but.” And sensing an opportunity, along comes the old slithergadee and sidles up to Eve and gives her a line about the apples (the knowledge of good and evil), how she could whomp up an apple tart with those that would knock her husband’s socks off! (Did ya notice, by the way, he’s her husband? I don’t remember them getting married.) And, of course, she’s a pushover, as is he for the tart. In the textbooks on moral theology, there are whole chapters about the various moral steps between first temptation and the willing entry into the occasion for sin. Not with Eve. Nossiree. She’s right in there—just like most of us, certainly me. Temptation to action, theory to practice, one straight shot. Oh, I know that story’s true, because it’s mine—and if you’re anything like me, and I think you are, it’s yours too.

Not so in the gospel story. This critical moment in the story of Jesus comes right after his baptism. When I was rector of Cleburne some years back, it dawned on me that when we baptized somebody on Sunday morning, I could count on lunch at the Country Club, because that’s where we went straight from the font. Not Jesus. When he was baptized, he headed out into the desert, the metaphorical equivalent of that little room down inside you where nobody but you and God can go, where you can’t lie because you know you’re lying. He goes out to face temptation, the chance to fail of his mission from God, the chance to do less, to be less. And this time the old slithergadee doesn’t even come in disguise. Jesus knows him. And the opportunities he offers Jesus aren’t any thirty-nine cent stuff but rather real possibilities, ways Jesus could have taken to do, to be something other than God created him to do, to be, the incarnation of divinity.

First, the devil suggests a cheap stunt, to do trick religion, sensation religion, show-biz religion. And Jesus could have done that. Lord knows, trick religion works. People eat it up, and it can make you a whole bucket of money, get you a nice place out in the country near Azle and a private plane and a landing strip! What I mean. We know plenty about that today, but Jesus rejected it out of hand. Next we’re up on the temple and talking about jumping off to see if God means what he says, to which Jesus points out the folly of playing gotcha with God. Finally the devil plays his last card, his grossest offer of all: all this gorgeous stuff, the world and all its joys, they are mine, and I will give them to you if you’ll just play on my team! And Jesus says the equivalent of, “Buzz off, Buster, ya bother me!”

Now, do you think it took Jesus all those forty days of fasting to get his will power all reared back and pumped up and flexed to meet the devil’s challenge? Do you think it took a great act of moral fortitude for him to send Satan packing? I don’t. I mean, I don’t think he had to think twice. I think he finessed all the devil’s cunning, not by what we’d call second nature, but by his first nature. I mean, for Pete’s sake, his nature was, is, one with God’s nature, so all the tinsel the devil offered him looked downright tacky, and he recognized it at once. “You’re offering me what? Fuhgeddaboutit!”

Seems to me there’s something a lot bigger going on that Jesus Just Saying No to the tempter. I think he’s checking himself, seeing if he’s still on track, seeing if the various options to doing and being what God created him to do and be can pull him off his mission, off track, out of line. And when he makes himself vulnerable—forty days and nights without food, and I’ll do anything you ask, believe me!—he finds out that the so-called temptations are hardly worth thinking about. I don’t think it was will power at all. I think it was just his sense of himself as God’s servant.

Well, that’s how Jesus handled temptation. But how does it work for you, for me, for us? How do you conceive of temptation in your own case? What do you think is going on? I know that a lot of people—including me when I was growing up—have a notion of God sitting somewhere before a vast screen with a dot, a pip, for each and every one of us, watching to see somehow that we all get “tested,” to run something tempting and (usually) salacious in front of us just to see if we’ll trip up and break a rule. I know people think that way, because they tell me they do. But isn’t it pretty unappealing? Lord, when I was a kid growing up I loved to go spend the summers with my Coggin grandparents in Brownwood. And since we didn’t have no teevee, we sat in the evenings out on the front porch and talked about everything under the sun. My father’s brother, Uncle Shorty, was not particularly pious, but I remember when I said something about things in the Bible that didn’t make a lot of sense, didn’t add up, he cackled, “God just put that in there to fool ya!” Well, don’t know about you, but the notion of God somehow laying land mines for us, little traps for us to fall into along the way, just doesn’t add up for me. Can’t conceive of that. God is either always loving and caring or he’s always whimsical and sneaky, but he’s not both. I think we’ve got to find a better way to think about what we call temptation.

I like to think of temptation as an opportunity to test the system, a signal that there’s something wrong, static in the transmission, something out of alignment that makes the machine rattle and buck and veer in ways that eventually add up to a clear signal that I need to wake up and smell the rubber burning. A wheel out of alignment not only makes the ride rough; it’ll ruin your tire. When I notice my behavior going way out of the ordinary, especially if I like it, I’ve learned to run a test pattern and see what’s going on inside me.

I don’t always do very well. Ordinarily, the tempter has to do little more than wink, and I’m snagged. And I don’t reckon I’ll ever get there, as it were, but I do think I’m learning as time goes on. One sin I’ve had a lot of trouble with all my life is anger. Now, I don’t think anger is really a sin. It’s an emotion, just surges up from our innards any time we’re scared and perceive our sovereign will challenged. Anger’s not a sin, but the ways we react to anger can be profoundly sinful. And for a great deal of my life, I liked it. I mean, ever since I was really little, I liked it. It made me feel powerful (which was a delusion), it made me think I was in control (another delusion), it made me think I was winning against whatever, whomever crossed me (yet another delusion). I lived right into it, worked myself up into a real good dudgeon, got all puffed up. My Grandmother Yeager used to laugh and tell me I looked like a pouter pigeon! Well, after about half a century of that, somehow, God knows how, it dawned on me how really dumb that was and, somewhat later, how really profoundly sinful. It’s not over. I still have a hair trigger anger gun, and there are times I live right on into it, sometimes for days at a time. And finally when I’ve made myself downright sick, I figure out that I’m acting like Hell and creating a lot of Hell for myself and lots of other people. And then, finally, I have learned to stop and check my alignment. I ask myself, “What’s the matter with you? What are you not seeing? What gift is in front of you that you’re missing? What cheap something has got your eye off the ball? Look at the hurt you’re doing yourself and others. What on earth do you think you’re doing? Who on earth do you think you are?” And sometimes I get clarity, not through an act of will but through . . . well, the way I pray. I fail a lot, but over time I think God’s making some progress with me.

I look at temptation and giving in to temptation not so much as a pop quiz from a whimsical schoolmaster divinity but rather as clear evidence that somehow God the Holy Spirit is sending me danger signals, not so I’ll pump my pitiful will up to resist some bad but rather so I’ll get my head and heart back on straight, remember who I am and why I’m here and what God hopes for me, expects from me, promises me, has given me. You see, I believe our salvation, our destiny in God, does not depend on us, is an absolute gift from God. We look at Jesus and through his transfigured face we see God and, like John says, we either turn to it or away from it; and once we’ve turned to it, repented, then the splendor of God shines through Jesus and into us and through us, and God the Holy Spirit, like some kind of tractor beam, just draws us in like a trout on a Minnesota wiggler. When I am tempted and am cooperating with the tempter—a metaphor for fooling with stuff that might be titillating or gratifying or otherwise rewarding for a moment but that in the long run is utterly contrary to my calling to live in and from God’s always loving, always caring, always self-sacrificing nature—when I am in that mode, the Holy Spirit never fails to send those signals, delightful at first perhaps but afterward excruciating. I’ve come to see temptation not so much as a test of my will but of my alignment. My will, shoot, I know all too well about that weak member. But when I recognize temptation, I know the correction has already begun—and I’m grateful for that.

So Happy Lent! This is the season in which we remember poignantly that we have an eternal calling, a divine destiny to which God called us before the foundations of the earth were laid. And we use Lent to call ourselves back to taw, to check our alignment, to remember that we are caught up in the divine love that means to draw us to the light of Christ in Jesus, into the beam of the Holy Spirit’s love that will eventually bring us all into God’s splendor where we’ll spend eternity. Lord, with all that given to us in full measure, what could the devil offer that would be even vaguely “tempting”? I mean, when we’re seeing straight and praying straight, we can look at just about anything that wants to take us off course and say, lightheartedly like Jesus did, “What? That stuff? You’ve got to be kidding! What would I do with that mess when I’ve got God?”

Happy Lent!

Happy face

If you are having a bad day, just look at this face. Have you ever seen anyone happier over a bunch of flowers?

I plan to refer to this frequently. Thanks to my nephew's husband for pointing this out.

Women or the State?

Who will control women's reproductive lives? Women themselves, or the State?

Republicans want the government to be in control. Planned Parenthood wants women to be in control.

Here's what Planned Parenthood is doing to help women.

The United States has one of the highest teen birth rates in the Western world, and North Texas has the most repeat births to teens in the United States.

Planned Parenthood of North Texas if the only nonprofit network provider of family planning services in Tarrant County.

Texas has the highest rate of uninsured people in the United States. Approximately one million Texas women have no access to reproductive health services, including Pap smears.

Planned Parenthood of North Texas provides vital preventive healthcare -- birth control, family planning counsel, well=woman exams and more -- for its patients, most of whom have no insurance or not enough.

Children of teen mothers are more likely to be born prematurely and at low birth weight, and twice as likely to suffer abuse and neglect. Texas has the 44th lowest rate of women receiving prenatal care.

Planned Parenthood of North Texas uses medically accurate sexuality information -- providing health information and outreach programs to prevent unintended pregnancies and protect maternal-child health.

About 10,000 U.S. women are diagnosed with cervical cancer annually and 4,000 of those die of the disease, which is the second leading cause of cancer deaths to women worldwide.

Planned Parenthood North Texas performs more life-saving cervical cancer screenings than any Texas healthcare provider.

Abortions comprise only 3 percent of Planned Parenthood-provided services nationwide. Eighty-two percent of their clients receive services to prevent unplanned pregnancies, services that help prevent 621,000 unplanned pregnancies. Other services included Pap smears and breast exams as well as tests to detect sexually transmitted diseases and treatment if needed.

The bottom line?

Planned Parenthood works to give women control over their reproductive decisions. And that's what makes it anathema to Republicans, who want to cut all funding for the organization.

Republicans say abortion is a "forever decision with forever consequences."

Well, so is an unplanned pregnancy -- even more so now that Republicans are cutting health care for children, education for children, food stamps for children, and on and on.

So speak up, women. Your right to control of your own body is at stake here.

While I wasn't looking

While I was busy at Executive Council, my garden was busy too. When I left home for the meeting, things looked pretty brown and barren around here in the wake of all that cold weather. But while I wasn't looking, Spring's scouts arrived.

The snowdrops were what I spotted first. Their spiky leaves had been frozen to mush by the Arctic weather of a couple of weeks ago. And yet, this week, tiny white and green blossoms reared their teensy lovelinesses above the browned leaves and brought tears to my eyes. Such valiant little beauties deserve applause!

Many of the leaves on the ancient winter honeysuckle were blasted by the frigid weather and left looking as crisped as if they had been singed by a fire. I worried that we had lost all the just-budding blooms. But oh me of little faith. This strong grande dame made use of this last week of warm weather to put out a whole new generation of tiny white blossoms that sent sweetness wafting through the garden like whispers of young love.

And her friend the Japonica was not to be outdone. She is steadily covering herself with red blossoms that will begin opening tomorrow I am sure.

The Lenten Roses laugh at these two laggards. They began blooming just prior to the arrival of the Arctic weather and haven't stopped since.

And now the daffodils are joining the list of blooming gifts -- God's grace notes as we await the turning of the season.

Go God.

Dwight Eisenhower on organized labor

Telephone Broadcast to the AFL-CIO Merger Meeting in New York City.
December 5, 1955

"You of organized labor and those who have gone before you in the union movement have helped make a unique contribution to the general welfare of the Republic--the development of the American philosophy of labor. This philosophy, if adopted globally, could bring about a world, prosperous, at peace, sharing the fruits of the earth with justice to all men. It would raise to freedom and prosperity hundreds of millions of men and women--and their children--who toil in slavery behind the Curtain.

"One principle of this philosophy is: the ultimate values of mankind are spiritual; these values include liberty, human dignity, opportunity and equal rights and justice.

"Workers want recognition as human beings and as individuals-before everything else. They want a job that gives them a feeling of satisfaction and self-expression. Good wages, respectable working conditions, reasonable hours, protection of status and security; these constitute the necessary foundations on which you build to reach your higher aims.

"Moreover, we cannot be satisfied with welfare in the aggregate; if any group or section of citizens is denied its fair place in the common prosperity, all others among us are thereby

endangered."

Read it all here

More on Wisconsin

Here's some more information:

Read 12 things you need to know about the uprising in Wisconsin here

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and Paul Krugman here.

For what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.

Some background: Wisconsin is indeed facing a budget crunch, although its difficulties are less severe than those facing many other states. Revenue has fallen in the face of a weak economy, while stimulus funds, which helped close the gap in 2009 and 2010, have faded away.

In this situation, it makes sense to call for shared sacrifice, including monetary concessions from state workers. And union leaders have signaled that they are, in fact, willing to make such concessions.

But Mr. Walker isn’t interested in making a deal. Partly that’s because he doesn’t want to share the sacrifice: even as he proclaims that Wisconsin faces a terrible fiscal crisis, he has been pushing through tax cuts that make the deficit worse. Mainly, however, he has made it clear that rather than bargaining with workers, he wants to end workers’ ability to bargain.

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And that last point is the most important one -- without unions, there will be no countervailing power against that of corporations and yes, even government.

Yes, some unions need reform, but doing away with them would be much worse than most people can imagine. Remember, unions are the folks who brought you the weekend -- and safer work places -- and child labor laws . . .

And even Walker isn't opposed to all unions -- note that the unions that supported him financially are given exceptions in this bill.

Two quotes

Here are two quotes that I think sum things up nicely.

My daughter was following the debate in the Texas Lege this week as Republicans try to force Texas women seeking an abortion to have a sonogram and to listen to the heartbeat. She texted me the following comment, which I think is best summation I have ever heard of the Republicans' war on women.

State Senator from San Antonio to Sen. Dan Patrick on the Senate floor this week:

Leticia Van de Putte: "I imagine you have the votes to suspend or you wouldn't be bringing it up. It is our responsibility to protect that child once that child's born too. When we start debating a budget, let's make sure we don't cut 100,000 vaccines. Let's make sure we've got health insurance. We seem to worship what we cannot see, but as soon as that baby's born, oh no, we don't want to be intrusive. Texas is going to shrink government until it fits in a woman's uterus."

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And another, on the Republicans' war on the middle class:

Joshua Holland from AlterNet:

"The Right has made great political progress getting Americans to ask the question: "How come that guy’s getting what I don’t have?" It’s the crux of the politics of grievance. Progressives need to get Americans to ask a different question: "What’s keeping me from getting what that guy has?" At least part of the answer is the Right’s decades-long assault on private sector workers’ ability to organize, and the latest battle is being waged in Wisconsin."

Holland is right on target.

Wisconsin had a surplus before the Republican gov cut taxes for businesses. The employees union didn't cause this crisis -- the tax cuts did.

When will middle to lower class Americans get a clue that the Republicans do NOT have our best interests at heart?

Shelter

Sermon given at the Executive Council meeting in Fort Worth

February 16, 2011

Sirach 34:14-19

Psalm 94:2-15

Romans 14:10-13

Luke 14:15-24

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When I made my first trip to Israel with Gayland soon after we were married, I was immediately struck by two things:

One was how scripture and geography slammed together for me – as we drove “up to Jerusalem” from the Tel Aviv Airport, we came over a rise and saw above us the white stones of Jerusalem shining in the light of an enormous full moon.

It was indeed a shining city on a hill.

The other was how much it all looked like West Texas.

There was the same rugged landscape, the same scrubby brush, the same austere beauty, even, I would swear, the same sheep. As a West Texas girl, it made me feel a new identification with the folks I met in scripture.

So when we read in Sirach:

. . . The eyes of the LORD are upon those who love him; he is their mighty shield and strong support, A shelter from the heat, a shade from the noonday sun, a guard against stumbling, a help against falling . . .

let me tell you, having grown up where it can be 110 in the shade, I know how lovely is a shelter from the heat, a shade from the noonday sun, a guard against stumbling in a rugged desert land, where the heat can kill you and a fall can bring you face to face with a scorpion or an angry rattlesnake.

And as for Romans --

¹³ Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister.

When your nearest neighbor is 60 or more miles away on the next ranch, you aren’t much into judging them or making things harder for them. The big spaces of West Texas and its sparse population have bred into the people there an abiding faith in the vastness of God’s mercy, a deep-seated pragmatism about the nature of humanity, and an innate sense of justice.

Yes, they are for the most part a conservative bunch, but it is the conservatism of those who work the land, not the pinched conservatism of those who worry that there’s not enough to go around – not enough money, not enough food, most of all, not enough of God’s love. That last is the worse, of course, because if you think there are limits to God’s love, you have to work very hard at keeping out all those other people who might get your share.

West Texans learned long ago – they had to survive – that there will be enough for everyone if we share, IF we pool resources, IF we help one another out, IF we respond when others call us for help. Because when we need help, it doesn’t matter if your neighbor is black or brown, or gay, or an illegal worker, or even a Baptist. What matters is that they show up, and help.

And as for turning out for the feast -- you can count on West Texans to not only show up but to bring spit-roasted cabrito, cole slaw, potato salad, tamales, rice and beans, and gallons of iced tea, sweetened and unsweetened.

In Iraan, the tiny town in which I grew up, every mom in town knew that names of every kid in town AND that of their dog. In the summers my brothers and I would run out of the house in the morning – with mom yelling after us – “Did you grow up in a barn? Shut the door!” -- and be gone until we were called in for the evening meal.

We’d ride our bikes, go swimming in the Pecos River – when there was water in it -- play sandlot ball – we’d surge from one end of the little town to another and up to the hills outside of town. Sometimes all us kids might wash up at our house for lunch, or at someone else’s house. Wherever we ended up, the mom of the house would feed us all. Without question, every kid was welcomed, every kid was fed – and the dogs were given water and a treat.

These good women, most of whom were hard shelled Baptists who had more than a faint distrust of the four Sherrod kids’ Catholic faith But they never discriminated when it came to feeding us. We were kids, we were hungry, we were welcome.

These same good women would turn out for dinners at the local community center even when they were sponsored by the Catholics. They knew one might turn down such an invitation only If you were on your death bed. If you didn’t show up more than once, you risked finding yourself left out of other community events. These folks know the value of relationships. Showing up to show support for one another means a LOT in these small towns.

These experiences taught me more about welcoming folks to the feast than almost anything else in my life and have served me well in recent years.

It is very meet and right that these readings should arrive on our calendars as we do our work here in the Diocese of Fort Worth, for they speak to the survival tools we have used through the last few years, especially the last two years when Episcopalians have been split one from the other by decisions made by our former leaders. And believe me, there were days when it looked darker than midnight under a skillet.

Faced with the loss of sisters and brothers and of beloved church homes, we turned to God and to each other.

We have prayed together, played together and shared meals – at THIS table and at many many other shared tables – at pot lucks, and diocesan picnics, at Lenten suppers, at meals in each other’s homes, gardens, barns, and backyards.

These readings speak of the food that has sustained us – the grace, shield and hope of God’s unlimited love, the delight of inviting others to the feast to which we’ve been invited, the challenge of creating a healthy welcoming diocese out of the remnants of a diocese founded in anger and fed on dissatisfaction, dysfunction and disinformation.

Most of all they speak to the job that faces not just us in this diocese, but all of us on this Council – that of reconciliation and renewal.

How do we in this diocese welcome back those who sat in silence while many of us were called terrible names, subjected to public shaming, asked – or told – to leave our church homes because we are “not real Christians?”

Believe me, while our heads may agree with our bishop that we should offer them prodigious welcome, still raw broken hearts aren’t so sure. I suspect that’s the case with some in this room too.

How do all of us reach out to those who reject the invitation to the feast, who indeed claim that the feast is poisoned – not just here in this diocese but in the wider communion?

Well, one thing’s for sure. We can’t do it on our own. As the people of West Texas know so well, we will only do it with God’s help and that of one another.

We will do it by remembering what we heard today – that they who fear the LORD are never alarmed, never afraid; for the LORD is their hope.

We will do it by remembering that we are not to judge our brother or sister^[a]? Or treat them with contempt?

We will do it – as Bishop Katharine said last night – by turning to one another as the beloved.

Most of all we do it by reminding ourselves and them of God’s unlimited love to which all are welcome and of which all are invited to partake.

For Bishop Ohl is right -- we must offer them prodigious welcome, as God has prodigiously welcomed us so often in our own lives.

Amen.

Sermon given at the Executive Council meeting in Fort Worth, February 16, 2011

It gets better

Today, I am very proud of my church, The Episcopal Church, and of my city, Fort Worth because leaders in the church and in my city have spoken out to tell hurting young people that "It Gets Better."

In the face of recent suicides, it is more important than ever that the voices of church leaders be heard to counter those who would use the Bible as a weapon against young fragile people. And it is important for secular leaders to speak up as well,

So I give thanks to Bishop Gene Robinson, to the bishops of the Diocese of Los Angeles, and to the Rev. Susan Russell, just a few of those in The Episcopal Church who have spoken out. And I give thanks for City Councilman Joel Burns, an old friend, who made himself emotionally and politically vulnerable in order to reach out to suffering young people.

Pray for
Tyler Clementi, 18-year-old Rutgers University student
Asher Brown, 13, of Houston, Texas
Seth Walsh, 13, of Tehachapi, California
Billy Lucas, 15, of Greensburg, Indiana
Raymond Chase, 19, of Providence, Rhode Island
Caleb Nolt, 14, of Ft. Wayne, Indiana
Justin Aaberg, 15, of Anoka, Minnesota.

And watch the videos below. I believe this is what God calls all of us to do.





Bishop Gene Robinson




The Rev. Susan Russell




The Bishops of Los Angeles



City Councilman Joel Burns

Go. Read. Pray.

Please go read what the Rev. Michael Hopkins said in his sermon on Sunday.

It is at this link.

http://fromgloryintoglory.blogspot.com/2010/10/who-let-samaritan-lepers-in.html

Go. Read. Pray.

Missing part of one wing

I miss Mom every day, but I miss her most on Sundays.

Sundays were when I had more time to spend with her, to have a leisurely lunch after church, and maybe take a drive through the prettiest neighborhoods of the city, or out in the countryside.

Mom loved riding in the car. She talked with me more, engaged with me more, when we were in the car together. I think this was a legacy of the necessarily long car drives she and my dad made on a regular basis out in West Texas. Iraan, the tiny town in which we lived, was -- as everyone joked -- 300 miles from EVERYWHERE.

Highway near Iraan

It took nearly a two-day drive just to get out of the state of Texas. So my busy parents found this time in the car as precious space in which they could talk, undisturbed except by the necessity to admonish the four of us squirreling around in the back seat to quiet down or -- ultimate threat -- "I will have to stop this car!"

On our drives, Mom would comment on the clouds -- Texas has fantastic cloudscapes -- or on the flowers in someone's yard. She loved hearing about my garden, so every Saturday, I would walk the garden making mental notes of things to tell her about at our Sunday lunch. She especially loved hearing about the plants that I had moved from her garden. If she were still here, tomorrow I'd be telling her about the pink plumeria that finally bloomed after three years and showing her the photos I took with my phone.





The only thing she loved hearing about more than the garden was news about Daniella, or about her great-grandsons, Curran and Gavin. As she did with all her great-grandchildren, she thought they were perfect and among the most intelligent beings on the planet.





On our drives she would talk to me about things she had read, or been thinking about. These were precious times to me, because as she got more frail, she got quieter, less inclined than ever to join into the boisterous conversation that characterizes our family gatherings. She was never one to talk a lot, so when she did, we all listened, because it was always a pithy, cogent observation. She didn't miss a thing.

It was on these car drives that she began to talk to me about how ready she was to die. Not that she didn't love us, but she was just tired -- and lonely. She missed my dad so much.

She told me she had had long conversations with God on the subject of her death. She told God how ready she was, how she was sure we would be OK if she left us for awhile.

I would listen and assure her that, yes, we would be OK, that she knew we would miss her terribly but we would be OK.

I lied.

It's not OK.

Mom, I saw this butterfly in the garden the other day.

It was still functioning, still flying from flower to flower, but it is missing part of one wing.

That's how I feel. I'm missing part of one wing.

Sweet Gospel

Another in my continuing series of sermons by my friend, Bruce Coggin. A good sermon on some hard lessons. Enjoy.
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A Sermon
Preached at All Saint’s Church, Wichita Falls
Pentecost 15, 2010

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, even his own life, he cannot be a disciple of mine.

I don’t know about you, but I am so glad the weather has moderated. Mercy, you wake up on a morning like this one, and you think, “How lovely it would be today to join a throng of worshipers in a great nave, God’s lovely light streaming through jeweled windows, a great choir’s supernal anthems echoing in the vault, all that. Well, it’s just gonna be us, of course, in this little room with no windows at all, so we won’t fantasize. But at least, you say, let’s hope there’s something wonderful from the Bible for us to ponder. Yeah? And then you get Jesus telling us to hate Mama and Daddy and Bubba and Missy and the missus and the kids and even ourselves. Lord. Where’s the sweet gospel in that? But you can at least be thankful you’re not the preacher! I think I’ve told you that I go every week to a little gathering I call the Monday Morning Quarterback Club where a handful of clergy sit down and talk about the lessons we’ve got to preach on the next Sunday, and I’ve become a bit of a bore because I always insist on finding what I call the sweet gospel—and that’s not some saccharine something to cross-stitch on a cup towel. I just think that since God is sweet, the gospel must by nature be sweet, else it’s somehow skewed gospel. And I think there’s sweet gospel here, but it’s gonna take some work. So sit up. We gonna play godball.

In the Old Testament lesson we’ve got Moses laying down the law—and not the first time. He laid down the short form at Mt. Sinai back in Exodus, but some centuries later he reappears in Deuteronomy and lays down just a whole bunch more law, five or six hundred more just in case you didn’t get enough on the first go around. Mercy! I don’t know about you, but I don’t much like getting the law laid down to me; I don’t even like laying down the law myself—not that I get to much anymore, but I used to lay it down to my kids, for all the good it did me. I knew it put up all kinds of tripwires where their will and mine were bound to cross, but I did it anyway. All parents do. And it’s not a bad thing. I mean, a lot of laws work pretty well. In this country, people still pretty much obey the traffic laws, and the laws still pretty much work—although some of the cowboys and cowgirls up in this neck of the woods keep a feller on point. Rules are not a bad thing, necessarily. They’re meant to enforce and habituate good behavior aimed at securing the common good. The same rules don’t always apply to everybody everywhere. The ten years I lived in Mexico, I learned to change gears more ways than one when I crossed the border. Over here, you drive by the rules; over there, you drive by the rules, and you’ll get killed. They work it out a different way—but the surprising thing to me always was that they don’t have any more wrecks than we do, maybe fewer in fact. Here’s the point: the very fact that we have laws indicates that we need laws. Something about us does not work for the common good by natural reflex. Natural reflex says Me first! The common good says Maybe you first, maybe him, let’s see. The fact that we need rules indicates something about us and our place in the Great Order of Things—and religious rules tell us something about our place in God’s order. The only one of the Ten Commandments that’s anything unusual is the first one; all the rest are pretty ordinary stuff. What decent society doesn’t think it’s wrong to lie and steal and murder and mess around with somebody else’s wife or husband? The only one that’s really unique is love God with all your heart, soul, and mind—to which Jesus added, and your neighbor as yourself. Now, that one, that has legs, as the teevee reporters say of a story. It’s gonna come up again here in a minute.

Now that gospel. Jesus kicks it right off telling us that unless we hate our parents, our mates and our get, our siblings, and even ourselves, we can’t be his disciples. Gotta tote that cross. Then a couple of tiny parables about people who weren’t up to this or that job. Great way to start the day! Well, right off the bat that word hate just rings false in the mouth of the man whose every other word was love, whose two Big Orders were both to love, to love God and love each other. Something must be wrong here. Hate? When I was in the kid raising business, we raised ours not to use the word. When they’d say, “I just hate so-and-so,” we’d come back with, “Hate is a very strong word. Say, it displeases me a lot or I wish it were another way or something else. Hate is a strong word.” And they listened. Either that or they didn’t say it in front of us. In any case, hate in Jesus’ mouth stops me cold in my tracks, as do all the instances in the gospels when Jesus is credited with saying something so inimical to the voice of the Good Shepherd I’ve learned to listen for. And there are a good many.

Well, whaddaya do when you hit a stump like that? It’s not fair just to skip over it; and any word from Jesus, no matter how opaque, is precious. So I use a couple of tools to help me out of the ditch. The first, let’s call problems of transmission. Keep in mind that the earliest of the gospels—and that’s not Luke—first got onto paper at least twenty years or so after Jesus’ death and resurrection, and it was second hand. Luke comes along ten, twenty years later, and he adds a bunch of stuff that may have been taken down nearer the fact—but all the gospellers arrange stuff one way and then another. Who ya gonna believe? If I told you something fairly complex right now and then you told her and she told him and he told her after supper and then she called me, I’d have to and say, “Now, no, that’s not exactly what I said.” Y’know? I figure what Jesus said in today’s gospel has been problematized in passage, so I’ve got to allow for some latitude in the written words’ precise meaning.

Second, I try to contextualize the pericope, ahem. A pericope is a chunk of scripture, and at church we get a chunk this Sunday and another chunk the next Sunday and another chunk the next. We have to connect the chunks. If you’ve been good and have been in church the past few Sundays, you know that Luke is presenting a long teaching by Jesus on getting ourselves in the right order relative to God, the world, and our neighbor. We spent a couple, three Sundays on storing up treasures in heaven instead of on earth, all about false gods. Last Sunday we learned about not me-firsting our way through life. Go and take the lowest seat, and then if the master of the feast and so on. For today we skipped a pericope, ahem, that tells of a man who gave a banquet and invited his buds—and all of them said, “Oh, I’ve got to do this or that. I’ve got to go check out my new car. They need me at home. I have something to do that’s more important than your tacky old banquet. I, me, my.” So the host says, “Okay, cheat yourself!” and invites people whose egos don’t get in the way of their blessedness. And now, today: hate yer momma! What do you guess is going on? I think we’re hearing a very refined version of getting right with God, figuring out our place in God’s order and ordering our behavior to suit it. Can we go on from there?

I think figuring it out is at least part guess, so I look for a clue. Look at the scene Jesus chooses to make the point: the family. Where else are things any more intense? Where else do loyalties get across each other harder and faster and longer and fiercer? Families are where everything we say we believe and believe in eventually gets put to the test. Jesus, let me hazard, instead of telling us to hate each other—transmission—is saying that our promise to love God and each other will at times even bring us into sharp conflict with our families, our dearest and best. Yet we must always choose God’s love first among all the options—and that prioritizing doesn’t have to be ugly, just absolute. God before anybody, before Mama or Daddy or Bubba or Missy—or even (gasp) me. “His own life.” I think when Jesus says that, he means the day will come when every one of us will have to go down into that little room inside us where nobody else can go and have a meeting with himself and say, “It’s not me first. It’s God first, and then somebody else, and me last. Dang it.” And I think that’s more than just being meek and mild. I think it reflects the nature of God’s love. God’s love wants to be loved back—but only after it has been shared by its objects. That is, God’s love radiates from itself to me and from me to another and then back to God. If I am right with God, then I let that love flow through me to somebody else and then back to God—and maybe even wash a little back up on me from my neighbor. Isn’t that the way love works? I mean, I can love a Rachmaninoff symphony and sit by myself and love it; but give me a choice between spending the evening with Rachmaninoff and with somebody I love and who loves me, and there’s no contest. Love, especially God’s love, requires sharing among God and you and me. Me last. And it always has to be that way; otherwise we ain’t right with God, we cannot be Jesus’ disciples.

Jesus says we must bear the cross. Which cross? I know for sure that the heaviest cross I have to bear is me, myself, and I; and that cross forms every time my will goes against God’s will—which it does every now and then. If you’re anything like me, and I think you are, you know what I mean. I mean, none of us has had to suffer much for the gospel, not in any material way anyhow. There are places in the world where confessing faith in Jesus will get you shot. If I lived there, I think maybe I could justify keeping my mouth shut—unless, of course, I saw somebody else being mauled. Who said it about the Nazis? Niemöller, I think. “First they came for the Jews, but since I wasn’t a Jew I said nothing. Then they came for the communists and the socialists and the homosexuals, and I said nothing. Then they came for me, and there was nobody left to help me.” I hope I’d have the guts to speak up. Can’t say, haven’t been whipped into it. But since we don’t get tested that way, by rule, can circumstances require us to suffer by putting ourselves last? I know personally of a woman who starved herself during the Depression so her children could eat. Would I do that? I hope so. Or less dramatically, will I give up something I want to buy a mosquito net for somebody I’ll never see? Whatever’s the case, I don’t think Jesus meant for us to hate anybody but rather that we must let nobody and no thing come between us and God’s love.

Does that leave you a little dissasfied? Well, me too, so let’s move on to Philemon and see if we can improve the situation. Philemon’s a surprising little book. Not a word of doctrine or theology or teaching, no argument, no threat . . . well, maybe a very subtle threat, an implied urgency. Paul, an old man and way experienced, is in jail, and he writes to his friend Philemon. “Guess what? Remember that slave—that slave—you used to own—own. Well, they picked him up here, and he’s been in jail with me. And guess what? He’s been baptized and is our Christian brother now. Your Christian brother.”

(Time out for a story. This reminds me of Bishop Saucedo. He was bishop of the Mexican church for thirty, forty years. When he was consecrated, there were about six thousand Episcopalians in one diocese, most of them rich ex-pats; when he retired there were about sixty thousand in five dioceses, most of them dirt poor Mexicans. Since in those days, the bishop owned all the church’s property—Mexican law, don’t ask me—a priest in Acapulco sued him over something, and the police picked him up and put him in the slam. He spent over a year there. Bishop Davies helped get him out. And by the time he got out, he’d converted half the prison—baptized, confirmed them by the dozens, though I don’t think he married anybody. Weren’t doing that in those days.)

Anyhow, that’s what happened with Paul. Onesimus was no longer Slave Onesimus but rather Christian Brother Onesimus. And Paul puts the question to Philemon with tons of manipulation. “Philemon, you are the man! Your Christian witness awes me. It awes everybody. You are a light to lighten the Gentiles, dude! Now show me what you can really do. Put all of it behind you. Forgive it. You don’t even have to admit what a sin it was to think you owned another human. Just . . . gut up and take Onesimus back as your Christian brother. Not because you have to, but because you want to.” Funny thing about the lectionary today, they left off the last two, three verses. In them Paul adds, “And get my room ready, because I’m getting outta here too, and I’m coming straight to you!” He does not add, “to see if you’re up to the job I just laid on you.”
In this story, we see a man, Philemon, who has to confront himself and make a decision in Christ. He had the legal right to own Onesimus. Challenged, he would have defended that right with everything his upbringing—his family—and his circumstances—his culture—taught him, told him was meet, right, and so to do. He had to deal with his anger, his sense of outrage at the slave’s escape, cheating him of what was rightfully his. He owned Onesimus, dadgummit! And the ungrateful little creep ran off, no doubt leaving Philemon in various kinds of fixes. Philemon likely had hoped the cops would snag him and string him up, the sorry wretch! And now this. Paul asks him to shoulder the cross of his own wrongheadedness and wrongheartedness and tote it up the hill and nail himself to it. For Christ. For the sake of his baptism. For the salvation of his immortal soul. I can’t help thinking that Paul’s letter rattled him to the core. I wish I knew how it all turned out!

I don’t think Jesus wants us to hate. I don’t think hate is part of the nature of God, so that just about rules it out for Jesus in my book. When Jesus was . . . vexed . . . he spoke, acted pretty abruptly. Ask the moneychangers. But hate? I can’t imagine it. Nor can I imagine Jesus asking you or me to hate. I can, however, sure hear him saying, “It’s all or nothing at all, friend. Make up your mind. I’ll be right here when you do.” Sweet gospel? Yeah, I think so. Hard but sweet. He just leaves it up to us: either we put God first all the time, even when it hurts like the dickens, or we do not. So, which is it gonna be? For me, I’m the only who can answer that, and I don’t always get it right. When I know I’ve gotten in wrong, I have promised dozens of times to “repent and return to the Lord.” And when I do, he’s always right there. I can’t find any hate in that. Just sweet Jesus and sweet gospel.

Grace & Gumption: The Cookbook

Here it is. Grace & Gumption: The Cookbook.

It is a follow up to Grace & Gumption, Stories of Fort Worth Women, our history of women in Fort Worth.

That I have edited and contributed to a cookbook will amaze and astonish some people, particularly my family and friends. Certainly anyone who knows me can tell you I am a much better story teller than I am a cook! My husband is the one who earns stars in that category. Luckily, Judy Alter -- who is a fabulous and fearless cook -- agreed to be the food editor, because I have no business editing recipes.

All the contributors to the original G&G had more stories to tell about fabulous Fort Worth women, so we had been tossing about a lot of ideas about how to do that. And we did this tossing of ideas mostly over food, because we are a group who likes to eat.

Judy is the one who came up with the idea for a cookbook. I admit I was a bit dubious at first, but I have enough faith in Judy's judgment that I was willing to try it. And soon it became clear that working on a cookbook gave us a fun way to look at the more intimate homey parts of women's lives.

A couple of contributors who worked on the first G&G couldn't work on this book, so we had the added pleasure of having Brenda Sanders-Wise and Joy Donovan join our ranks. It has been fun to get to know both of them better.

And guess what? Grace & Gumption: The Cookbook is listed as one of 8 Hot New Releases in the West Regional Cookbooks by Amazon.com. It's also available from PBS store online under the same category. Of course, the Library of Congress will have it, and the Austin Public Library has ordered it. Some book dealers have it under cookbook and biography.

Here's what the TCU Press said about it:

TCU Press publishes Grace and Gumption: The Cookbook

TCU Press announces the release of Grace and Gumption: The Cookbook, the follow-up book to Grace and Gumption: Stories of Fort Worth Women. The book’s fourteen talented and engaging authors have once again mined the personal papers of women in Fort Worth to create a fresh look at life in Cowtown, says Rebecca Sharpless of Texas Christian University. Readers will gain glimpses of pantries, kitchens, and dining rooms of the past and learn about the women who presided over them.

Grace and Gumption: The Cookbook combines the history of Fort Worth and the city’s brilliant, innovative women with their recipes. For some of the women cooking was a joy, for others it was just one more chore to complete so they could get on to more interesting things, which means that some of the women didn’t leave cooking trails. The contributors have been inventive in finding “related” recipes—some of them wonderful, some so complex you may not want to try. Some attempt was made to standardize the recipes but it was not possible in all cases—they would have lost their charm, says editor and one of the authors Katie Sherrod.

In Grace and Gumption: The Cookbook, we learn a great deal about what the people of Fort Worth have eaten over the past century and a half, and so we discern much about what the people have been about. The cookbook takes a new approach to American culinary studies, recording the lives of Fort Worth Women as well as discussing the food that they prepared and ate. Sharpless says, in her forward to the book, that while many American women, particularly Anglos, remained within their homes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Grace and Gumption tells us about women who set aside those boundaries and spent their energies in works charitable and for profit. These women taught about food, and they cooked to create businesses of their very own, some of which, like Pulido's Restaurant and Mrs. Baird's Bread, endure.

Grace and Gumption: The Cookbook is a book to cook from and to read for pleasure, although there are some recipes that Sherrod recommends readers not try at home. This book provides a window into the lives of Fort Worth women that will engage readers and explore an even more intimate aspect of the lives of these outstanding women.
The contents include:
“Cooking on the Frontier,” by Joyce M. Williams
“Cooking at Our Lady of Victory,” by Brenda Taylor Matthews
“The Modern Woman,” by Ruth Karbach
“Ranch Women, Cowgirls, and Wildcatters,” by Judy Alter
“Pig in a Pit, Stagecoach Kisses and Eating Heaven: Food and Philanthropy in Fort Worth,” by Ruth McAdams
“Serving the Children,” by Sherrie S. McLeRoy
“Cooking in the Barrio,” by Sandra Guerra-Cline
“Let My People Eat,” by Hollace Ava Weiner
“Colorful Palettes Make Colorful Palates,” by Joy Donovan
“Stirred In with Lots of Love, a Little Drama, and Duncan Hines™” by Jan Jones
“Regal Women in the Garden of Eden,” by Brenda Sanders-Wise
“Braving the Smoke—in the Back Room and in the Kitchen,” by Cindy C. Smolovik
“Cooking for a Living—Lucille Bishop Smith,” by Carol Roark
“Balancing Facts and Food in the Newsroom,” by Katie Sherrod

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And here's what a reviewer for the local magazine 360 West said:


Book for Cooks

TCU Press had a nice little hit a couple of years ago with its book Grace & Gumption, Stories of Fort Worth Women. Here's a smart idea for a follow-up, Grace & Gumption: The Cookbook. Editor Katie Sherrod and food editor Judy Alter have compiled essays from 14 local authors about women and food cultures throughout Fort Worth history. The story goes way back: You'll read about pioneers making coffee out of acorns when Cowtown was still more fort than city, and the first recipe here is for squirrel, dipped in buttermilk and cornmeal, then fried -- not every recipe is destined for your kitchen.

Indeed, the book is as much academic-style history as recipe book, although most recipes are appealing. There are excellent ones from contemporary cooks like Jon Bonnell (whose mother and grandmother, philanthropist Mary D. Walsh, were prominent local women with grace and gumption), but the older stuff is arguably more fun, and no slice of life was forgotten, from Thistle Hill to the barrio: There are recipes here for schmaltz and matso balls from Jewish women's Passover tables, tortilla soup from the Lancarte family of Joe T. Garcia's fame, as well as Edna Gladney's own "reducing mixture," a diet drink that combines grapefruit and lemon juices, cream of Tartar and several spoonfuls of Epsom salts ("do not try this at home," we're told). But you'll see why Gladney needed that if you make her family's recipes for Uncooked Fudge or German Hot Potato Salad. Grace and Gumption: The Cookbook will be released in late May: paperback, $19.95; http://www.prs.tcu.edu/ -- Marilyn Bailey.

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And here's a note from Ruth Karbach, one of the contributors:

"Just for fun, I looked up the original Grace & Gumption on WorldCat and am thrilled to see it at Harvard University (two libraries there), the Bibliotheque de l'Universite Loval in Quebec and The British Library in London. We can celebrate that Grace&Gumption is in 109 libraries in New England, the Mid-West, the South, the Southwest and the West. "

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So enjoy the reading and the eating -- we certainly have.

Redheads RULE!

Here's a story from ESPAN. Note the part about two young redheads -- emphasis added below.

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FORT WORTH, Texas -- Andy Dalton has nowhere to hide on the TCU campus, what with his red hair being a dead giveaway.

But Dalton is not the type of guy who would hide, anyway. Not when there are basketball games to watch and road trips to take. Not when there are kids who need some help, or a dog that needs a simple drink of water.

To put it simply, the 6-foot-3 senior quarterback is a TCU everyman.

He sits in the stands at volleyball games, jockeying for T-shirts like everyone else. He piled into a car with teammates and made the drive to the College World Series this past summer to watch TCU as it helped close down Rosenblatt Stadium.

"I'm a college student. That's what's fun," he says.

He counseled two young boys with red hair who were getting teased at school because only a star quarterback could convince them that red hair is, you know, cool. He still gets ribbed for a story that keeps growing in legend, when he helped a dog drink some water after it passed out on a run with its owner.

What you see on the field is what you see off the field.

Read it all here.

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Well, here are the two young red-haired boys referred to in the story:

They happen to be my grandsons, Gavin Judge, 6, and Curran Judge, 8. And they do indeed have gorgeous red hair, as do their mommy and daddy. Needless to say, I am an Andy Dalton fan.

The Simon Chronicles troisième partie

It has been over 100 degrees outside for more than three weeks.

This is not comfortable for a person who is covered in fur, even gorgeous silken fur like mine. I know one must suffer for beauty, but there ARE limits.

So I have devoted much of my time in the last few weeks to monitoring and inspiring my Chief of Staff as she works at her computer.

Sometimes I am joined by Ms. Wiggles in this strenuous work.

But most often I am left to tend to this task by myself. As you can see, it is quite exhausting.

But my Chief of Staff insists on going outside to water the garden, which she has to do every day while it is this hot, so of course, I accompany her. By now I know all the coolest spots upon which to recline while I supervise her work. Occasionally she "accidentally" sprays me with the water hose. She thinks this is funny.

I am NOT amused by such juvenile water play.

But, sterling cat that I am, I do not abandon her to work alone. Unlike the dogs, who venture out into the heat only when forced outside to take care of bodily needs, I guard and protect her.

One never knows when a predatory squirrel will attack.

Although it's been so hot even the squirrels aren't moving much.

This one sprawled out on the brick walk that had been cooled off by the sprinkler. Brazen hussy.

The only things that moved at all in the garden -- besides my Chief of Staff -- are the butterflies, the dragonflies and the lizards.

My Chief of Staff really likes these big blue, gold, and black butterflies.

This bright orange butterfly likes the pink pentas. Ugh. Clashing colors. Butterflies have no taste.

This teensy butterfly likes the impatiens.

This little green guy hangs out on the pot of pentas near the front gate. He's a quick little thing. I've tried to play with him several times, but zip! Off he goes. Spoilsport.

This bright red dragonfly likes to pretend he's a flower.

This blue dragonfly hangs out around the greenhouse, I suppose because the blue paint on the window matches its blue body. Who knew dragonflies like to be color coordinated with their surroundings? I thought only cats did that.

It is so hot that this dragonfly didn't even move when my Chief of Staff took this closeup with her phone. Obviously bugs do not have the finely honed instincts of cats. But then, who does?

Eventually I am able to persuade my Chief of Staff to come inside where it's cool. This takes some nagging but I eventually herd her to the door.


Then, as soon as she opens the door and stands there waiting for me, I, of course, being a cat, take my own sweet time about walking through the door. This always seems to irritate her, for some reason.


Sometimes she says rude things to me, like "Simon, get your catly butt into this house right this minute!" Really!

But eventually we are both inside, and I can relax and catch up on my sleep. Sigh. It is SO exhausting trying to teach my human how to behave.

Thank God it's supposed to cool down tomorrow -- the highs will be only in the mid-90s.