have you actually slept with? An interesting article from England.

Apparently I am techinically a busker, not a professional musician. I stand corrected. Actually as an Orthodox priest, bassist, and busker I just stand alot.

I’ll be back in Woodville, WI, this time as part of a trio “Ross, Martin, and John” (the bassist always seems to get last billing) because we don’t have another name yet. We have a five song set and the crowd, if there is one, will probably determine how many of them we play.

There’s something about night in a small town. Mostly dark, with streaks of light wherever people gather, the shadows are cool and inviting and so are the sounds that greet you when you step indoors. Playing at these small places is like beautiful noise in the middle of quiet and when its done everything returns to silence again. The first step out the door is always the best.

I may forget to take the interstate on the way back and take my chances with the small highways and the villages strung along them like irregular pearls. Its the smell of the outdoors as it speeds past your window and the sense of home as you pass through into the night. There is a romance in the dusk that day dwellers never seem to understand.

I have many lives all wrapped up in one body and this life, the life where music flows from my fingers for two or two hundred as night settles into the countryside is one of my favorites. I never tire of it and tomorrow as the sun sets I’ll be heading east into Wisconsin to sample the menu.

that in a crazy world the Church would be an anchor, an alternative, something better and higher. February 24th of this year changed all that. It turns out that Orthodoxy, like everything else, like me, has its moments of weakness.

So what to do?

I could descend into bitterness or cynicism and dwell on the betrayal of it all. Believe me the thought has occurred. I could pretend, from the safety of my parish kingdom, that things aren’t as they seem and just bide the time until folks go away or pass away. I could get up and leave for greener grass on the other side of some fence.

Only one thing seems certain now. I have to do my best to stay faithful. The rest is in God’s hands.

the man in the cowboy hat and his wife who stopped by and dropped a $5 bill in the guitar case where we were playing. I’m now a professional musician!

that everyone makes it to heaven in the life to come.

Now I’m not a universalist. I know people choose to be away from God and in the life to come God grants them their request. That’s hell, it’s real, and the thought of it is harsh, worse than the whole red devils and pitchfork thing of medieval paintings. Yet I still hope.

The Church keeps a list of the Saints, those we know by virtue of their faith, holiness, and intercessions are in the presence of God. The Church, however, does not keep a list of the damned, those we know are outside of God’s presence and until it does neither will I.

we’ll go quiet in my family as we think about my brother Paul and life that passed too soon.

I can remember it quite vividly, September 11, 2006, the call to my work. Something was wrong at Paul’s hotel room, paramedics, 44, gone. Mouth open, no words. Mind in full acquisition mode, no reasons. Drive to his wife’s, or is it his widow’s home. What can we do? Here’s money to help out. God, he has kids, why? And the sky is silent.

Tonight I’ll go to his grave and light a candle. This Sunday, as I always do, I’ll pray for him and his family. Yet the words still do not come to me and the sky, at least in this matter, refuses to answer.

and the main street is quiet. A cluster of cars, like horses in time past, are angled nose first around the Wildwood Bar and Grill. There are a thousand Wildwoods in Wisconsin, shelters of a sort, where beer is served by the the better looking women in town, or some guy named Frank, and you can laugh until the evening forces you out into the cold.

Passing through the bar the door opens to the stage at the front of a building, attached but separate, with a Budweiser poster as the backdrop. The seats themselves are empty but on the stage a local is already singing. The local has the long gray hair of a man who star has already passed, but so have we all, the people who wander in to sing on open mic night in Woodville.

There’s the former boat mechanic who lost some of his hearing plying his trade in the bottom of tourist paddlewheels but still finger picks with passion and sings old country songs to a nearly empty room. A lady with a willowy sweet voice who somehow found her way to the rump of Wisconsin from New Zealand fills the air with minor chords and songs of lost love. A few people drift in and out while the local plays master of ceremonies as a ceiling fan with fluorescent bulbs wobbles in the rafters.

We were the first to get up, my partner and I, three songs prepared and a towel for sweat. Fifty years ago and a thousand miles south our music would have been in the thick of things in a room full of men with red arms in overalls dancing with ladies holding their hair up with bobby pins. That’s who we are, a band out of time that’s grabbed onto music from people long gone and plays it for others who talk while we sing. Yet that’s how it goes and three songs became seven and then a call back that made it around ten doing whatever we could, on the fly, unrehearsed but alive.

When it was done they clapped for us and we for them when they played and all of us vicariously for the people who should have been there, who would have heard us had not our star passed in the night. Somewhere out there a caravan of semis and buses full of performers and roadies and “people” will drive through to the next place down the road and thousands will pay for three hours of being in the presence of the famous. That’s okay, we’d like to be there too.

But tonight we’re in Woodville where we pack our own gear and no one asks for an autograph. There is a kind of music here as well, the freedom to play with our hearts, the freedom to be two guys combing music’s cemeteries in hopes of a Lazarus worth bringing back and playing even if the audience is talking and the beer drinkers next door have their gaze fixed on the lovely behind the bar.