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.

from Cal Thomas.

lost their job yesterday one of those things where they pack you out that day with your stuff in a box and no explanations left behind.

I knew who it was, a competent employee but an unhappy soul with personal skills like gravel in the gears. I know what its like, too, to have that conversation where a boss somewhere tells you that you don’t fit into the plan, or the future, or whatever is next and today is the end. Whether you think it’s coming or not there’s still no good way to walk out of a building with your personal life in a cardboard box.

And in these times there may be no going back. It’s not like the days when you could get dropped from one place and scooped up by another and sometimes even do better then before. Now you wait with a hundred others, people younger, people cheaper, people better prepared, and hope you can elbow someone out of the way and avoid getting the skinny envelope from HR.

Two things cross my mind at this moment. I feel sad for yesterday’s unemployed. This morning when he wakes up and the day is just filled with hours he either starts to see the horizon or starts to see the living room walls. From what I know of him it may be the walls. Selfishly, of course, I think of myself, simultaneously glad that it wasn’t me and dreading the day it could be. What would I do? Where would I go? How would I feel? Having made it through before could I do it again?

If not for faith, who knows?

how strong spider webs are until you try to hose them off your house. Tis the end of summer and the clean up begins.

and with it the summer begins its departure. The daylight is already shorter, the temperatures cooler, and children are thinking of school.

The older I get the more the charm of winter fades but autumn has retained its hold on me. The heat of the summer disappears yet warmth remains. The days are shorter but the colors compensate for it in their vibrancy. September is the best of months, the only one I wish would last the year. October has its moments, the month when you can wear your best sweaters, but then the long wait begins.

Darkness settles, snow falls, the cold descends and refuses to loosen its grip until some time in March when life again will not be denied. We hibernate, if not in fact at least in spirit, our horizons constrained by the chill just outside our doors. The only sign of hope is the calendar on our wall, a tropical scene for each month, a reminder that somewhere what is all around us is not all there is.

But this morning is sunny and cool, the best kind of day and I’ll store each and every one of these days in my soul like a battery to power me through the night to come. It’s time to be outside, to move freely, to absorb the sun, and take care of chores. It is the season of drawing all things together so that spring, when it comes, will find a remaining spark of life, an ember that its gentle winds can once again restore to flame.