Right now, heaven smells like hell,
a sensory overload for a confused girl,
now a shivering mother. A calloused tradesman –
now second-fiddle father to a waking dream.
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.
Advent II
Ah, little God, in an instant long in coming,
you broached to us this breachless veil,
bearing its weight in sullen flesh, and pulled aside
the cancerous curtain. Here, where once
we hid from the balm of healing touch, now
you lay fresh hope in scattered hay into which,
breathing lightly in cherubic light, has come
to rest, new life in an infant’s deep sleep.
From the poet’s ready pen
From the poet’s ready pen comes the
yawning stillness, leaking out
from linen thoughts, stretched
tight upon the hungry loom.
How dear these words come, dear soul,
trading green for our grey.
Like the pastiche of a late morning sigh,
our tough and torrid skin oft forbids
your trim veracity, always enough
to root it all in the insufferable lightness of song.
Tease out the rising tides,
their turning waves run amok.
Oh ready writer, graft our branch to seed,
your root to leaf and banish
all the rotted soil to its brown eternity.
Winnow out from worn whimsy,
with your willow-throated pen, our
long-faded hope. You set about
your task, anonymous to none but
the unseeing ears of deaf brutes.
Letters, cast adrift to their watercolor
harbors, dive down, down,
down from brushes, pinched
tight in fingers that point
with precision to everything that eludes.
Paint wide the foraging colors of
dimpling fragments of forest, new.
Tease out our trembling days, and release
what hides itself in the obvious.
Advent
The day before the days
before winter’s satin gloss,
driftwood glimpses neatly hide away in
a gathering pageantry.
Tightly tucked in folds
of ancient wind with pockets out-
turned, falls the Fall,
fallen…and begins a new tale.
Heaven’s sudden smile, casts
a long and shattering light
on the darkening days –
bringing the iron-gilded hope
of dawn’s new Dawn.
_________________________
Picture found here
Advent – God’s gift of longing
Undue significance a starving man attaches
To food
Far off; he sighs, and therefore hopeless,
And therefore good.
Partaken, it relieves indeed, but proves us
That spices fly
In the receipt. It was the distance
Was savory.
These words of Emily Dickinson remind us that the longing for someone or something is often an experience even richer than the person or object of that longing. The college-age love affair forced to endure the insufferable distance of educational geography. The retired man or woman lost in a fog of non-identity yearns for earlier times when it was more clear who they were and why they were here.
My mom used to tell me that as kids we were “full of piss and vinegar” around Christmas time. Although the exact nature of this chemical mixture is unknown to me, I think I get her point. Those of us fortunate enough to have access to Christmas morning consumer delights may recall the unbearable pangs of waiting for it when that certain item we’ve been harping about might just be waiting to greet us.
Advent is the liturgical equivalent of communal yearning. It is a time when, together, we enter into the much deeper waiting experienced by our forebears in faith for the fulfillment of a promise; a promise made to those long dead and far removed from our present reality.
There really is no better time than Advent to talk about the mystery of waiting. If we are willing, our connection with the Divine throbs most insistently at such times. Waiting can be nothing more than a feat of drudgery, accompanying oneself on the frustrating journey of unsatisfied desire. Or, it can be the mist-heavy pond upon which float, blindly but lightly, our lilies of longing. One leads to fear, hatred, anger, destruction. The other to patience, quiet devotion to duty and persons, to the delicate wonders of the unremarkable that grace our days.
Advent acts as a centuries long foreplay to the main event through which sweet relief is found. In that long foreplay we learn to live, move and have our being while often blind-folded or lost altogether. In it we learn to trust our silent dance partner whose subtleties on the dance floor leave us breathless but a little baffled at times.
Advent forces a kind of slowness to things. As it becomes clear that immediate satisfaction is nowhere on the horizon, we learn the joys of nuanced living; of faith in a person rather than facts and plans and possible outcomes. We learn journey more than destination.
With the advent of Jesus we learn that God remains annoyingly carefree in his use of timelines. They belong to God alone. However, in that same advent we learn just how good it can be to wait with the intentionality of longing – spiritual foreplay – than pacing the floors of our constantly incomplete lives. For, to miss even the tiniest detail of all the manger meant is to miss everything else as well.
Enough?
Bequeathed to me are quill and quine,
a thousand hillsides’ worth.
No greater gesture could, for mine,
elicit thanks, henceforth.
So stiff the hand to wrench and grab
so stunted, feet, to trudge;
the weary eye’d think all life drab,
one’s paradisal grudge.
When hope is stirred, not wit or whim,
a fire, too, is stirred.
‘Tis then the soul her nurture finds,
ahunger’d less for food than word.
For Emily Dickinson
“Hope is the thing,” she said,
that one thing most real for one who looks.
Her lips, so full in Heaven’s unmeasured smile,
speak outward still to a land more rich for the kiss.
“He ate and drank the precious words,” she intones –
a wiser breath slicing through the caustic
din of monoxidic madness. Someone sees
what, in its dim appearing, shows itself bright.
“If I can stop one heart from breaking,” we hear
her moan, the pained and paining alike her cast.
Though hell would be her suitor, more suited
to Heaven the language of this child.
Let us then lean into the dawning day, delight
our closest friend and, as she might urge us,
look East where all is birthing and good is free.
For “none can avoid this purple.”
Image found here
The bricks in our walls, chapter 3
I had never played this game before. I was just fourteen at the time and was apparently comfortable with the fact that I was doing so not just with new friends but also with my older, female cousin. Boys will be boys as they say. To add further daring-do we were playing this dangerous game in their kitchen, mere feet from aunt and uncle’s bedroom. Perhaps it was the adrenal rush of knowing that, to be caught out here in rural Nowheresville, British Columbia, meant no one would hear the screaming.
Strip poker is fun.
Jim played blues and ragtime guitar. I’d never before heard Maple Leaf Rag, The Entertainer or The Heliotrope Bouquet played on a six-string. It was a lunchtime folk club at my high school hosted by a friend, Barry, who also happened to be my guidance counselor. Jim was our guest performer that day. It was an hour of seventeen-year-old musical bliss as we enjoyed the most effortless guitar acrobatics I’d yet encountered. With my natural expertise at charming flattery and acerbic wit, lightly salted with otherworldly humility (translation: bullshit), I sat in his living room as his guitar student less than two weeks later. Only after apprenticing under this demure genius could I say with some level of honesty…
I play guitar.
It tore me apart. It was a toss-up what was worse – the insult of my best friend holding hands with this girl, or the salt-in-the-wound – only days before, she’d been my girlfriend. The sense of injustice was overwhelming. For matters of suitability I’ll refrain from the Old Testament metaphor of freshly plowed fields for another’s enjoyment. But, I digress. My heart couldn’t decide which was worse, the jealousy of seeing him next to her, or the pang of longing self-pity. Is anything more insufferable than such a friend asking relationship advice with the previous participant in that same relationship? Eventually, the melodrama subsided and was replaced with a delicious vindication when, mere weeks later, she was engaged to yet another man with whom she’d been “friendly” right under everyone’s noses.
Relationships are so easy and uncomplicated.
Terry was the extravert in our musical partnership. His effervescent personality, literally brimming with electricity, always overshadowed my quieter, albeit charming, demeanor. We made a great team, both as performing duo, and as life-of-the-party tornadoes. Through Terry I was introduced to what is actually possible as a player of strings. His deft mastery of guitar, mandolin, banjo, and ukulele made my own growing skills seem elementary at best. Hence, I was the singer. More important however was the easy, hospitable faith of a man six years my senior, lived out among the strange, ne’er-do-well ruffians who were our nightly audience. It taught me that those rough-‘n-tumble souls were under our care.
Terry is still my best friend.
Picture found here
The heart that John heard
Many times and seasons pretend to sway our way,
and drop their hints of monotony – but fail.
Few are the banks of shuddered-down snow
on pathways already hidden from our feet.
Many are the pedals on wayward flowers
refusing a lesser share of their own song.
Few are the words ill-spoken from lips
more accustomed to smile or kiss.
Many the moving notes from the still page,
to still the ravaged breast will come.
Few, or none, the children, playground-found,
whose voices, loud and ardent, disappoint.
Many weary eyes are pointed upward where
hills, apart and distant, croon.
Few there be to quell the wish of
night-fallen star-gazers seeking.
And altogether, met and threaded down,
in aching stillness from the heart that John heard.
Remembrance day
O dear page, waiting and empty,
could there be a day better suited
to the recollections of a soul, overripe and
forgetting its light? Those things that once were
a willing fountain of refreshment have become
the sublimations of tired whimsy.
Sparrows only frolic where there is the bidding
of happy water, the promise of baptismal song;
the welcome of Maundy-feet in shared coolness.
When pools freeze over they are
fit for nothing more than a crystalline table
for airborne detritus, the gleanings of
the woeful. It mirrors itself, parody of warmer times,
more reflective but less refreshing.
Let no more the satisfactions otherwise suitable
to the salubrious spirit be hidden among
mournful weeds of forgotten bounty.
Rich the soil into which dreams are buried.
Light the step of the grace begotten.
Still are the waves of the undying.
Yet we call this to mind and
therefore have we hope…
Photo by Stephen Elliott
innerwoven 