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.

The bricks in our walls, chapter 4

On By robertalanrifeIn bagpipes, Beauty, celtic music, Christian spirituality, life together, music, sacramental living, spiritual formation, the arts1 Comment

brickwall1She was slightly chubby with a pinkish, round face, and dancing eyes that squinted a bit when she smiled. She had a way about her that was at once bracing and dangerous while at the same time hospitable and kind. She felt…comfortable. Our afternoons were often spent talking about all manner of shared interests: music, art, nature, beauty – often while lying side by side under our crabapple tree in the backyard gazing at the summer sky. It was heavenly. We held hands. We kissed. Often.

 

We were ten.

 

I was elated. It was summer. It was hot, and I was slicing through cool, choppy wake churned up by the boat behind which I was waterskiing – upright – for the first time in my life. My friend Darrin was driving, his dad beside him, and his younger brother watching me in case I came into difficulty. Silly, thought I. What could possibly go wrong? As is often the case with cocky, self-assured fourteen year olds, with over-confidence I over-compensated for over-reaching and found myself suddenly bouncing headlong over waves (surprisingly hard while cheese-grating along their ragged tops at forty miles an hour). By the time I finally pulled myself up from under the smug water, I was out of breath, bleeding from my side and completely naked.

 

It was exhilarating.

 

I saw my ever stoic and unyielding father cry only three times. Once during a heated exchange with my younger brother in which he loudly proclaimed that dad was an imposter (all three of us were adopted). Once, when my mother screamed at me so violently it made me cry out all manner of things I now wish I hadn’t. His hand, placed over mine at the kitchen table, is etched forever in the not-to-forget section of my memories. And once when he got back his biopsy results. I had driven him to Rockyview Hospital so that someone was with him should the news not be good. It wasn’t. At all. He came out of the room, face a pall of grey, and trembled out a few words in his roughneck Saskatchewan farm boy manner, “well, looks like I got a touch of the cancer.”

 

I miss him still.

 

I looked out the airplane window to a sight I’d waited seventeen years to see. The tightly woven, ancient and ragged hills of Scotland, huddled together in green beyond imagination danced a jig before me. If there’d been a seat on the wing, I’d have taken it in a heartbeat just to be that much closer to the land of my soul. Although Canadian born and raised, I have always been Celt to the core. My genes are kilted, my blood tartan, and my chromosomes play bagpipes proudly, up and down the hallways of my DNA. Best of all, I was there with my Welsh-Canadian wife of less than a year. Two Celts touched ground in Prestwick on a chill April day in 1989 and have never been the same.

 

“O flower of Scotland…”

 

The din was almost deafening. Bagpipes everywhere. It was August, 1991. Bellahouston Park in Glasgow. It was a “second first” related to this place. A bagpiper from the age of eight, I’d dreamed of making my way there to compete with the world’s finest since barely in double digits. Now, as head instructor for an up and coming junior pipe band, I was again on old country soil. This time, for the World Pipe Band Championships. To say it was dreamlike would be understatement akin to calling Mt. Everest a quaint, country bump. We were called up to the line. The pipe major barked his command, “by the right, quick march!” Two three-stroke rolls from the snare drums, drones, chanters, then – seven minutes of music, practiced and polished for two years.

 

Ask a bagpiper to define heaven.

How?

On By robertalanrifeIn Words...always wordsLeave a comment

How does one begin, grace withheld, to keep,

with thunderous nonsense floating out

on nature’s blundering step,

one’s native senses stout?

 

How does one’s song, pretentious to the end,

regale a hall of witless whim,

and never reach what ne’er was sent,

the places best it’s warming, trim?

 

How long there lies within us all,

lies within us, all tightly tethered;

a mirror’s mirror to boon, enthralls,

while hearts lay scarred and feathered?

 

How still, the talk of soundless wind,

can still the talk of sound, less still,

and draw from death a life to find,

when all but hope has had its fill?

Advent III

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic1 Comment

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.

 

Advent II

On By robertalanrifeIn Words...always words3 Comments

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

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic, Words...always words2 Comments

poet's 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

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic2 Comments

SONY DSC

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

On By robertalanrifeIn Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formationLeave a comment

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.

lily-padsAdvent 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?

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

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

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

 search

 

 

“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

On By robertalanrifeIn Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental livingLeave a comment

brickwall1

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