Author: robertalanrife

I have spent the better part of my life as a professional musician. Primarily, that has meant the fun and challenging world of church music. Most recently, I have transitioned out of my role as worship and music director for Yakima Covenant Church, Yakima, Washington to global service in Edinburgh, Scotland. I'm a singer-songwriter, liturgist, poet, and writer. I love words. I love to read them. I love to write them. Most of all, I love the many intersections, like a sacramental tapestry, of life, liturgy, literature, the arts, and spiritual formation...oh, and I love haggis.

Spring on Ash Wednesday

On By robertalanrifeIn Words...always wordsLeave a comment

I should probably just write a new Ash Wednesday piece. But, hopefully there is still some charm and comfort in the old as well…

robertalanrife's avatarRob's Lit-Bits

Ash Wednesday has come round again to spill forth her penitent goodness. I first posted this last year on Ash Wednesday. Let’s walk the Lenten road together.

 ash wednesday

 

 

 

 

 

Begins again this Springward journey;

rebirthing all that once lived.

Trickle again once fickle brook and stream

sickle sighs yet in repose, sleeping still.

Earth, sore and Winter-stiff, seeks, sighs

stretches out skinny arms of want.

Her cold, hard bosom births not what soon will come

e’er the Sun’s hungry mouth suckles,

fills his lusty gut on hopeful barrenness

feasting on milk of timeworn, weary passage.

* * * * * * * * *

She forgets not the suddenness of late

and sooner dark, splayed upon a fine, greenness

come for to spite the buds of transforming light

bidding death where life has yet to emerge.

Warmly insistent she speaks, sharing her story

poured out over…

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Back to the Bible We Don’t Know, part 2

On By robertalanrifeIn Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation2 Comments

KJAV.JPG

Last month we began a conversation; a tête à tête if you will about our relationship to the Bible – something we may not know as well as we think we do. And, because so much is riding on our relationship to this library of writings, it behooves us to dig as deeply as we can.

With the help of Glenn Paauw’s masterful book, Saving the Bible from Ourselves: Learning to Read & Live the Bible Well, I have sought to make the case that, in seeking to make the Bible “approachable” we have instead neutered it, making it less transformational. The Scriptures call us to faith, not certainty. Modernity has sought to erase the unpredictability of faith with scientific verifiability. “The bare text is difficult to control. The modernist turn in culture led the keepers of the Bible to transform it into something precise, punctual, calculable, standard, bureaucratic, rigid, invariant, finely coordinated, and routine…This is a Bible that needs to be saved” (p. 37).
 
We have all heard the adage that “less is more.” It holds true in many areas of life. For example, my wife tells me that much of her editing process involves carving away the literary dross from her manuscript in order to leave the best kernels of story that will keep the reader engaged. She wrote her book in under a year, but has spent over three more in the arduous task of proofing, hacking, chopping, and honing. Michelangelo stated that his masterpiece sculpture of David was “discovered” by simply chipping away all that was not David. It has been scientifically proven that the clutter of too many road signs and instructions cause drivers to disengage, the very thing such signs are designed to avoid.
 
Less is more. With the many additions and “improvements” to the Bible, aimed at helping us pay attention, we have ostensibly removed its beautiful “surface simplicity that [could] open up for us the inherent and immensely interesting good complexity that lies deep within…The Elegant Bible will reflect the wisdom that form and content always belong together in God’s good creation. Form is part of the content of things” (p. 39).
 
We must always begin with the questions, what is the Bible and how can we honor what that is? Paauw suggests that we are badly in need of an “extreme Bible makeover” wherein we can undo its fractured format that only leads to fractured reading and commensurately fractured lives. Part of that process will be to learn how to adopt the practice of referencing passages by context and content rather than by isolated chapters and verses.
 
As is apparent in the rather unique Covenant Community Bible Experience in which our fellowship is presently engaging, Paauw advocates for a Bible less encumbered by the artificiality that has been foist upon it by means of chapter and verse numbers that pull us out of a narrative and broad reading of its contents; section headings that are ultimately interpretive by nature; page layouts which hide from us the diversity of literary forms employed in our original manuscripts; and, particularly, study Bibles that can actually mitigate against the deep, transformative, non-agenda-driven reading that can best draw us into the dangerous place of spiritual formation rather than mere information.
 
We need to view the Bible more as poetry, which demands exactitude of form as much as content. What a poem “looks like” is intended to speak as loudly as the words themselves. Form and content alike form our understanding of a thing. We have inherited more of a cultural creation than the Bible that was originally intended.
 
Says Paauw, “to save the Bible from ourselves, we must begin to trust once again its ancient ways of saying things…The path to restoring our Bible begins with chipping away at everything that doesn’t belong there” (p. 50). Our love for God demands no less than an equal love of the Scriptures as they were first delivered.
 
Those with ears to hear, let them hear…

Perhaps I sat

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic2 Comments

Wastin' Time.jpg

Perhaps I sat too long, feet dangling

from the troubled wharf as the gulls

committed their noisy intrusions?

Perhaps I drank too deeply

of the preening dew, her skin

stretched wide upon the grass, wanting?

Perhaps I met my match

in the atrocity of a Herculean day

held up beside my pallid, frayed self?

Perhaps I gawked too lightly

into a pinafore sky, turned inside

out against the paling hours?

Perhaps I missed the voice

of shadows winding, deftly

pointing out the obvious?

Perhaps I was surprised

at how easy it has been

to see nothing in everything?

 

Perhaps these questions merely distract

from the gift of just sitting here?

_____________________

Photo by D. Legin

 

Back to the Bible We Don’t Know

On By robertalanrifeIn Christianity, faith, spiritual formation3 Comments

KJAV.JPG

With this new series of posts, I am entering a conversation. I do this for several reasons. It is partly in celebration of a journey recently embarked upon by our fellowship (Yakima Covenant Church) into the Covenant Community Bible Experience. It is an initiative of our denomination (Evangelical Covenant Church) to help rattle our scripture cages a bit by placing in front of us a New Testament compiled chronologically and without any of the customary headings, chapter and verses. I trust some of the reasons for this shall become clear over time.

Secondly, it touches on a topic of fascination to me personally: my love for the written word. That, combined with a growing love for the God who could never be contained by it, compel me to share these things.

Finally, it is in answer to various queries following a sermon I preached on this topic a few weeks ago. In these conversations, I’ll be utilizing ideas, and materials spanning decades. Specifically, I’ll be referring often to one particular book from which I’ve gleaned much of late, Saving the Bible from Ourselves: Learning to Read & Live the Bible Well by Glenn R. Paauw. The topic? The Bible of course. More specifically, the terminology, ideas, misunderstandings, projections, additions, expectations – both false and otherwise – that have arisen around it and from which it presently suffers.

The week of my “conversion” I quickly became fascinated by the strange and enigmatic words on the wispy pages of a Bible given to me by my grandmother. For years, it sat, neglected and increasingly dusty, on a shelf in my bedroom. My senior year it began to grow in my mind as something much more significant than that which I had hitherto attributed to it.

The first verse I ever memorized? “The grass withers, the flowers fade; but the word of our God will stand forever.” (Isaiah 40:8 NRSV)

If we are to give to the Bible the love and respect it deserves we should experience no small discomfort with the words “back to the Bible.” It belies a naïve, even whimsical view of it that has the potential to diminish its depth and complexity and, as such, its impact.

As we shall see from looking at Paauw’s book, we commonly approach this ancient library of texts with a truck load of preconceived notions, pet ideas, personal preferences, cultural parameters, and less than informed expectations. Paauw believes that we have “over-complicated its form while over-simplifying its content” (p. 16).

He makes the case that, over the course of many centuries, Bible scholars and publishers have increasingly added to it what is thought to be helpful – chapter divisions, verses, subheadings, notes, etc. – all in an effort the “make it easier to understand.” The result has been the opposite however and, in the process, we’ve been led to sample rather than feast deeply on the Scriptures. It has led to a narrow, individualistic and escapist view of salvation. And, rather “than being a culture-shaping force, the Bible has become a database of quick and easy answers to life’s troubling questions.”

So then, let us enter a conversation together. Let’s talk about the Bible. What it is. What it is not. The purpose? To develop a truly broad, deep, informed, and appreciative view of this enigmatic collection of ancient writings. Because much of what we understand about God and one another comes from it, I think it wise to do so. Don’t you?

Let’s go!

 

 

China-cup chats

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

I’d thought about this once,

maybe through lakeside footsteps in dreams.

Maybe when stride met stride with yours

and we studied the smile of blue hours.

We grew fat with the memory of tabletop

teas over doilies and the speech of saints.

Would it have meant as much

to begin each sentence with as little

common understanding as possible?

Or are we just better at

straining China-cup wishes

through soundbyte chat,

writ large on Tupperware souls?

Whenever we were brave to upset our apple carts

at street-parties, temple gates, church halls, downstairs rooms,

full of happy smoke and sure-talk,

we made for ourselves cider from apples –

handshakes from hellos, initiatives from invitations.

In the dimness of the post-potluck hallway

we had the best things to say.

Things left until after we’d crystallized our consciences,

codified our spaces, tallied our victories,

counted the offering;

edited our truths –

things best left in the hands of friends.

Those without agendas, solutions, or any big ideas –

 

only names. 

 

d.j.t. and the language of impudence

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic, Words...always wordsLeave a comment

you carve away your slabs of inconvenience with silver spoon,

handed to you in confidence that you might

earn your own pottage.

through flared nostrils, you billow and bluster. 

a pall of disagreeable swagger

posing as fortitude – your aftershave.

 

middle-pack crow at best, your squawking tenor

makes ears bleed that otherwise wouldn’t bother.

but loudest means best when the bleating flock is

only a cover for the finish-line break away.

 

child-wound-daddy-talk, shoulder-chipped, posture-power

harumphing with front-seat view, proxy-driving

from the back-seat limo of puppet-kings,

where you learned your craft.

 

too big the metaphor

for too small a man

so big a tongue

for so small a deed

a borrowed empire built

         on a ground of smoke and lies and bones of the poor

it makes bad wine from old grapes your gardeners never drink

carve away the dross enough to secure your shiny tale

but never let them see the fear you hide through shinier grin.

 

mirrors, over-polished, well-lit, world-weary, familiar,

you cannot look away – an honest pairing, your truest friend –

they always stay quiet when you gloat;

at least they wouldn’t deny your rightful place

among the great, the dress-for-success, self-made (apparently)

emperors of steely resolve and art of the deal.

 

the golf course cathedrals where gods of industry

find reprieve from the weight of their own misdeeds.

the art of misdirection, sleight of hand, deftly removes

what others need, replacing anything too easily overlooked

while we look the other way.

 

stuffing faces in your pockets, names under your lapel,

souls with dirty fingernails and hungry bellies

whose sweat fattened your wine cellar

whose tears fattened your belly while you robbed theirs.

whose unsightly color and ungodly language

builds your fortune

justifies your hatred

explains your anger

baffles God.

 

scratch and sort, smile and sign away the lives

of the lesser than

those too insignificant to see, but dangerous enough  

to uncover your tiny horse-blinded life

dripping with Babylon pipe-dreams

Caesar’s gold pajamas –

Herod wiping out a generation for fear he’s not first –

the screams of mothers to drown his madness.

 

her glance was never a look in your direction

she had no choice given her job

she feared your hunger for pussy and the shamelessness

required to step lightly with a conscience that weighs nothing.

 

and for all that the world is still too small

the job’s in the bag

but the cat’s out of the bag

and your hand is overplayed

masks are wearing thin

time and truth tether themselves

drawing the rope across the chasm

between your rainbow of lust and a bog of emptiness

just in time to speak the one dark word

still hiding stubbornly in your closet –

 

insignificant.

Broken stalemate

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

“So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go, first be reconciled to your brother or sister…” – St. Matthew’s Gospel

* * * * *

There they sit, back to back

shoulders slumped in denial

of the frozen but not dead.

A light-year stalemate

mocks the freshness

of stolen stares

and words, a little too free.

Mouths, sealed from the inside

like jail-cell bars and chicken wire

remain closed to avoid

rusty words unfit

for newly rustling souls.

Sing the familiar songs

but not too loudly

lest the wind drown out

the blurry shape

of growing melodies.

Coax the buds of festive fare

bloated and waiting,

waiting to return

green for their grey.

Straw horses and gravel roads

offer their backs to lost

and awkward travel companions,

now, once again, stepping lightly

on sure stones.

Swapping lovers

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Murky headwaters, streams too brave to sit still.

A fish moves heavily, drunk on taunts of demise.

Today, there is taste to the line-worm.

Lacerated horizon the quicker meal.

 

Blackout, shrugged-shoulder

dangers buried in clay pots; a potency

of Providence-offered sight in

a living room of thought. 

Patrolling unwelcome proximity between

competing aches of shame and loneliness.

Chance builds a bridge.

Love (is it?) fords a stream.

Choice, rushing, floats the river, watching.

 

Welcome mat at the door of happy reconnaissance(?)

No. Too frail,

unrecognizable against blood-iron door

loosed on hinges of an un-frantic passion –

(the only love worth loving).

Denouement of false desire wrapped tightly

in iron embrace; kiss of an angel king.

 

Then, when dust drinks rain, at least

it will know it can.

 

 

Toward a Rule – The Beginning

On By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation5 Comments

So, with subtle indirection, the toolbox of yearning

wed to oratory, wed to a cloud of unknowing,

expecting nothing more than a tale well told,

comes the bard and we are given –

a road for our story.

Historically, patterns of prayer and devotion that would later evolve into a “Rule of Life” grew out of the monastic tradition dating back to the Desert Abbas and Ammas of the 4th century CE. There, in the blistering heat of wasteland, they faced down demons, drank deep from hidden wells, prayed unceasingly, listened for the deafening whispers of God, and taught others to do the same. They owned little, but possessed the universe. Over time, their lives, lived small and yielded, but writ large upon the heavens, were lassoed into usable fragments of a living reality.

StAnthony.jpg
St. Antony of Egypt

I suspect most are like me, living pugnaciously crammed lives begging for the breath and space.. But, unless one’s name is Antony, or one of his eremetic contemporaries, one has experienced little in the way of solitude.

Such an exercise, as useful and meaningful as it is, necessarily leans upon an accompanying acquiescence on the part of the pilgrim – namely, me – to its regularity, rigour, and influence. Frankly, I’m more concerned about that than the Rule itself. Over the years, I’ve developed a deeply satisfying practice of contemplative prayer, gradually learning the benefits of housing shalom in the confines of a thirsty but unpredictable soul. I’ve spent days alone at any number of monasteries, growing and learning with monks and nuns of various ecumenical stripes. I write extensively on the spiritual life, a blog of my own (www.innerwoven.me), and for numerous others as well. In 2011, I graduated with a Master of Arts in Spiritual Formation and Leadership from Spring Arbor University, Michigan. Since then, I’ve undertaken the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and was anointed with oil as a lay Jesuit. I’m writing a spiritual memoir. I have studied the life and spirituality of St. Francis (because I’m a hippy at heart) and the Rule of St. Benedict (because hippies lack structure).

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Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey, Lafayette, Oregon. I’ve spent countless hours at this place.

Why do I boast in such Pauline fashion? Because, after years of ardent pursuit of the Christian spiritual enterprise, and already possessing a not inconsiderable Rule of Life with more than a few years of practice, I am less skilled in it now than I’ve ever been. Without hesitation, I enjoin myself to Paul whose boast is always in weakness about weakness, and leads to his exasperated proclamation, “I am the chief of sinners” (1 Tim. 1:15).

Whatever Rule is forthcoming will be more about my openness to what that Rule represents. It must be more a means to an end than the end itself. Like the rudiments I’ve practiced for decades in pursuit of musical prowess, I construct and practice a Rule of Life to forget it. Musicians play scales without thinking about playing scales. They play music, in which rudiments have formed and buttressed, shaped and evolved that music.

Saints live a Rule that is at all times thinking about union with God, which is the end and the beginning of it all.

…in my dream, I looked out over the rocky embankments

still holding my thoughts and, over the tomb where

recently someone left not long after arriving, a placard read:

“Beware, those still trapped in a life safe, and un-ruined.

You won’t get to enjoy the looks of incredulity from those

who’d prefer you stay here.”

____________________________________________ 

All poetry ©Robert Alan Rife, www.robslitbits.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toward a Rule – Eschewing Truancy

On By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, sacramental living, spiritual formationLeave a comment

In early November, I was a participant in a class toward my ordination entitled “Vocational Excellence.” This is part 4 of the paper I submitted, aimed at constructing and presenting a Rule of Life.

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Calgary sunrise…apt metaphor

Eschewing Truancy

In every life, there are (mis)guiding voices. Inner recordings, as it were, play loudly and insistently, often dictating how one goes about the tricky task of living.  Put another way, all of us live from somewhere – fear, suspicion, self-aggrandizement, false hope, willing blindness, ass kissy-ness. They cast long shadows upon our spiritual landscapes and pull us away from the perfect centre of our circle.

Every time I drift from my centre, I cease trusting in the glacial process of transformation at work within me. My trust gets misplaced, landing on anything quicker and easier to a perceived end of satisfaction. The shortest distance between two points can become the broad road to ruin the quickest means of personal misanthropy. 

Something inimical of the human heart is its apparent willingness to be anywhere other than where it should. The place most required of us is where we least show up. And with so many competing allurements to our deepest allegiance and passions this is a bit like crossing the freeway naked and blindfolded. It seldom ends well.

Better might be the comparison of grade school students. Some, like myself, adored school and never missed a day (I skipped twice and was caught both times…another blog perhaps?). Others reveled in the delicious naughtiness one experiences in going to the mall, or simply hanging out behind it smoking untoward substances (again, what could I possibly know of such shenanigans?).

A rule of thumb for fellow Christ-followers, prone to wobbly wheels but who yearn to embody their Rabbi is to pay heed to Stan Smith’s words from American Dad. When pressured as to why he keeps rubbernecking women other than his wife, he responds: “my eyes may wander, but my heart comes home.” 

Instead, I am being directed to return to the quiet, contemplative life, planted in the Benedictine moniker: ora et labora – prayer and work; contemplation and action, inner and outer life wed as one. To care for the centre is to care for everything else at once.

Although not a word one might use in everyday life, truancy pictures a life on the edges of things. It is uncommitted – wayward, as in a constant insistence upon finding any path other than the one presently under foot. In gospel terms, to show up is to find oneself amid the delight of Holy Spirit constancy and the hope of a future that will never be cut off.

To eschew truancy in the spiritual life – to abide in the vine, as it were – is to embrace the promise of a rather adept gardener of my soul.

* * *

“God cannot be found by weighing the present against the future or past, but only by sinking into the heart of the present as it is.”
-Thomas Merton