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.

Eyes in the Alley – What If God Met You in the Hallway?

On March 9, 2014March 15, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, Lent 2014, Lenten Guest Blog Series, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation8 Comments

God speaks to me in images a lot.

It’s hard for me to share that openly, especially with an audience that might think that’s weird. But it’s true. When I’m praying, God often gives me pictures, symbols, images — even whole scenes — that unfold in my imagination.

But maybe you can relate to this. Maybe you’ve had vivid dreams, where you woke up and just knew it meant something important. Or maybe you’ve had moments when you just knew something came to you from a source other than yourself —something that felt like God, the universe, or something cosmic or otherworldly speaking to you or showing you something or answering your prayer.

Maybe it’s not such a far stretch for you to believe God can speak through our imagination.

It’s true. God can. It happens to me a lot.

So, here’s a story of a time that happened that maybe will mean something to you. Maybe you’ll see yourself in it. Maybe you’ll see God.

You know how sometimes in a dream, you just know someone in the dream is a certain person? In this image, my experience was like that. I was walking along a grassy hillside, and I just knew the person walking beside me was Jesus.

Then we got to the crest of the hill, and he stopped and turned, drawing my attention to a scene below us.

A dark and rundown city.

The city was surrounded by a high concrete wall, and over the wall I could see buildings upon buildings of all shapes and sizes.

The next thing I knew, we were standing outside the city wall, getting ready to walk through to the inside.

Once inside, I could feel the soot. All the pollution, filling up the air. Buildings towering above us. People hurrying along the streets, scuttling from one street to the next, not catching a single eye, not saying one word, just hustling and bustling to get where they needed to be.

Do you know what that’s like — rushing along the street, not catching the eye of a single other person? It’s rather lonely.

—

Then we were in a dark hallway of a dingy apartment building. A lone light bulb hung uncovered near the door. At the far end, against the wall on the ground, huddled a lone dark figure.

I couldn’t see the figure’s face. A hoodie covered their features.

But Jesus walked toward them. Approached them, quiet but sure. Knelt down beside them. His shoulder touched theirs. Leaned his back against that same wall. Pulled his knees up to his chest, sitting just the way they were.

Jesus in the dark and dingy places.

Jesus in the places we’re alone.

Jesus with his back against our wall.

Jesus in the same posture as us.

Jesus a quiet presence.

Jesus a sure pursuer.

When people talk about Lent, this is one part of what they’re talking about: the belief that God really enters our experience,that God actually comes to us, that God meets us where we are, that God even experiences what we do.

It’s a 40-day walk toward Easter, where we meet upon the idea that God entered the human experience so fully, God even experienced death.

People talk about “giving up” something for Lent. Some give up eating chocolate or meat or soft drinks or coffee. Some people give up Facebook. It’s a way of letting go of things we might normally use to cover up our pain, just like God gave up avoiding the pain of human experience and death.

What if we practiced giving up loneliness? What if we chose to look people in the eyes when we walk those city streets, rather than scuttling along in silence? What if we let ourselves believe Jesus is right here, sitting in the hallway in the darkness, next to us?

What would that be like for you?

____________________________________________________________________________________

Christianne Squires is a writer and spiritual director who lives in Winter Park, FL, with her husband and their two cats. She has a pretty imaginative prayer life, but God uses it to change her life — and she’d love for you to experience the ways it can change your life too. Learn more at www.stillforming.com.

Still, and again this garden of song

On March 7, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic2 Comments

Still,

and again this garden of song,

this palace of ground, bewitches me with her gaze.

I sit, befuddled in the ridicule of a sky, sadder and

more miniscule than she earlier hinted.

No matter. Sing little clouds, hum your movements

lightly, and don’t commit to more than

you’re ready to say. This lyric only pretends

to be finished. You’ll have so much more

to sing when the squatting creatures,

alive and aloof and stretching,

rejoin your blustery repast. Maybe now

break down for us your new composition,

fugal and off-center, like figures of speech,

hunting after understanding. Like inside jokes

seeking audience with the uninitiated. If sing

you will, then sing you must. Pitch out your best pitches

still dripping with notes muted, buried and forgotten

but now tied to a syncopation, meant for dancing.

Direct us, oh choir of mismatched muses and bring

a good crescendo to boil where once there was only

silence.

Eyes in the Alley – Beauty from Ashes

On March 5, 2014February 13, 2021 By robertalanrifeIn Beauty, Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, Lent 2014, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation6 Comments

She fumbled through her purse for her phone. Its unnecessarily loud wring matched the other bells and whistles blasting in her head. They were the kind that told her old lies, played old tapes.

Lipstick, business cards, flash cards for her Spanish class, gloves, make-up mirror…where the hell is that damn thing? she cursed. Out loud apparently. The pastor, full-robed, full-throated, and in full-sermon, rebuked her with a glare. She’d seen it before. Often. It would have been less humiliating to slap her.

She was flustered and wound up tight as a bedspring. And, she was frustrated at her own lack of discernment. Why the hell didn’t I turn this thing off? Who’d be calling now? It’s Sunday, they shouldn’t even be open today she thought, half angry, half relieved. After dropping almost everything, she fingered the noisy culprit. Sliding sideways past her pew neighbors, she answered just in time to catch the call she wished she hadn’t “Your test results are in, ma’am. Can you meet with the doctor tomorrow?”

Ashes.

He fell backwards against the brick wall, his guts, freshly emptied of the remains of fish-dinner-a-la-dumpster. His head, swimming in too much shit wine, conspired with his stomach against all lucidity and balance, let alone self-respect. He smelled of piss, puke and pain. These days, only shame kept him alive and the dull remembrance of a life once lived, once alive with the common promise of…well, promise.

Was it only yesterday that he’d felt the warm body of a wife sleeping next to him? She had stayed with him through the final merger, the one he’d promised would bring them financial freedom. She muscled through his two affairs and the drinking that bridged them both. Now, two years, a foreclosure, divorce, and bankruptcy later, he thought he smelled her hair, the fragrance of mint intermingled in aching reminiscence. But it was only the smell of loss mixed with dog shit on his one remaining shoe. He’d lost the other earlier that day foraging for what was left of his meal, now part of his concrete pillow. And, as it began to snow, he blacked out.

Ashes.

She was desperate. It had been too long between hits and her most regular but equally violent trick had just buzzed to be let in. She frantically ravaged through her regular places searching for her small bag of white, powdered courage. If she could get high enough quick enough, perhaps he would get enough soon enough and leave her just enough to start the whole process again.

He pounded on the buzzer. Now, he wasn’t just horny but pissed off and, most likely, more violent as a result. Her lust to forget competed with his to be remembered and a battle ensued as to whose needs would be met first. She gave up. This time, a paying customer in person overruled her quest to be absent. After safely shoeing her daughter away in a back room, yelling for her to lock the door, with quivering hand she buzzed him in.

He stormed and swore his way up the four flights of stairs. It was a distance not her friend when it came to her chances of getting through this unscathed. Her door flew open, along with his zipper and a stream of obscenities. Everything aligned in a perfect storm, conspiring against her and sealing her fate. She lucked out this time and suffered only one punch before he got down to business. Through a left eye, now starting to swell, she toughed it out through one more indignity.

Ashes.

Ash Wednesday. Ashes indicate something. They tell us something has been used up, finished. There is nothing left. Any fuel that had provided light or heat no longer exists. It is rendered useless. Ashes are basically meaningless and, at one level, can provide a bleak picture of what many of us feel about our lives. Sometimes, life offers little more than the used up fodder of someone else’s fire.

In the Gospel however ashes become something more than foul smelling carbon. Jesus reveals to us how the ashes of death are turned to the fertilizer of new life. In his name, we trade our ashes for God’s beauty. Death and dying for life and living.

An anxiety-ridden woman receives the call; a washed up businessman is now one with the streets; a hooker walks a tightrope of addiction and fear to survive the only lifestyle she knows

All of us are only a hair’s breadth away from ruin or reward, disaster or dream, life or lies. We’re in this together. And wherever our lives may be in ruins, God can bring about beauty from our ashes.

May it be so.

Pictures from here and here

Catching up with her shadow

On February 28, 2014February 28, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

For a friend, lost, but soon to be found…

Catching up with her shadow

Her mornings started with the same walk

she took from back door to fence and out to

the field that rimmed the property. There she met

herself on the return and never spoke more than

the simplest of hellos. She left that to the meadow,

slowly sun-soaked and ready for feet and the hamstrings of early day.

She’d walked this way before,

aloof, spendy in compliments mirror-bound.

It helped her face a faceless day, reflected back at

her, nose in her face.

The answer came when she looked and, for the first time, saw

only smoke, a haze of unknowing.

It perplexed and fascinated, stunned and silenced

the breath yet to draw. Then she turned away

just long enough to guess at what she’d seen.

Enough time had passed to make return possible.

Now, the smell of time in her nostrils, the caress of grace

under her feet, she returned in time to

catch up with her own shadow.

From the late John O’Donohue

On February 26, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

_________________

Fluent

I would love to live

Like a river flows,

Carried by the surprise

Of its own unfolding.

__________________

You stood, heavy, on my chest

On February 25, 2014November 18, 2015 By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, poetry, spiritual formation, UncategorizedLeave a comment

You stood, heavy, on my chest.

You asked me to breathe more deeply,

but I couldn’t breathe at all.

You were too heavy.

Your feet felt hot with purity

and singed my skin with perfect love.

You stood, heavy, on my chest.

My eyes grew heavy, my breathing labored and shallow.

You asked me to breathe more deeply.

I grew afraid, having become accustomed to

the trusted rhythms of easy breaths, drawn quickly.

My head swam, my thoughts ran, my chest ached.

You stood, heavy, on my chest.

Through winsome gaze and trenchant eyes

you asked me to breathe more deeply.

Feeling myself near the end,

my heart beat angrily, demanding more.

I gasped in, and there rushed in a fullness of

breath more sudden, more round, more living than ever.

You stood, heavy, on my chest.

You asked me to sing what you were singing.

Breath renewed, thoughts ablaze in the fire of life

I joined your song. But your voice was too perfect.

I thought I knew the words for you had sung it before –

many times. Still, my joy, still shy

waited for something more.

You stood, heavy, on my chest.

Then, you bent your head low, listening to my heartbeat.

It matched your own. To my fading words. They had

your accent. For my faltering voice.

Finally, words came and, as effortlessly as my last memories of breathing,

I gasped out the song.

I had been full of breath, longing to appear.

I had known the words all along, the melody’s true bearing

found tracks in the blood-worn pathways of

lungs newfound, air fresh-breathed, songs bright-lipped.

I sat, singing, upon your breast.

Picture found here

Eyes in the Alley – A Lenten 2014 Guest Blog Series

On February 24, 2014February 24, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation4 Comments

Lent isn’t just a gift for us convinced “churchy” types. It is the Church’s gift to underdogs, renegades, spiritual deadheads, and cultural hoarders, too. Historically, during Lent (which means quite simply, Spring), God’s rag-tag collective has willingly chosen aridity above over-watering, penitence over pride, self-sacrifice over indulgence, broken interiors over shiny exteriors. It’s the John the Baptist trailer before the Jesus main event. Is it any wonder it has precious little publicity? I mean really, who in their right mind would want a specific period of time considerably longer than the obligatory 30 minute happy ending wrap-ups during which one doggedly pursues the dark, not so pretty parts of our souls?

Actually, quite a few.

Lent is not generally the holiday hot spot of the liturgical calendar. It bids us come and mine our shadowy interiors for soft spots needing stronger foundation, or sinkholes needing to be filled in with something substantive. It’s a bit more like a dentist appointment than a car wash. Both are necessary, but one isn’t as much fun; is a little less sudsy, and creates greater discomfort.

What is the broader invitation of Lent however? In our pursuit of her riches we will use a lot of insider language: repentance, centering, seeking, lectio divina, true self/false self, contemplation, etc. It is wonderful, time-tested language descriptive of something known, experienced and at least partially understood – by the convinced.

There is a very real danger in the Christian spiritual formation enterprise that we become comfortably cloistered in the safety of recognizable, “insider” language. Our shared assumptions, ideology, emphases, personalities, experiences, and ethos almost guarantee some gargantuan hurdles for interested onlookers.

What would the spiritual formation enterprise say to the thrice-divorced Mom of four, without alimony, presently working two jobs, one of them prostitution, just to survive? To the middle-aged businessman who has just lost his business to poor management and embezzlement? He’s trained for nothing else, his self-esteem and confidence are in the toilet. He has mouths to feed. To the fifteen-year-old girl, kicked out of her fundamentalist home minutes before thumbing a ride to obtain her second abortion? To a man on death row, guilty of killing an entire family, including a little child? To the frat house full of “dudes” intent on bagging and bragging their next unaware, likely unwilling, virgin?

Without falling back into another insider language of North American evangelicalism, how would the language of the soul speak to them? To others? To those who have never even heard the words ‘Lent’ or ‘spiritual formation’ or ‘centering’, or ‘apophatic’ or….

Would this be “contemplative evangelism?” If not, then what?

I welcome all of you to a Lenten blog series entitled simply, “Eyes in the Alley.” I have assembled a crack team of bloggers to help us struggle through this a bit. They will engage head on with the places of need and the places of disconnect which keep much needed spiritual nourishment from making its way into the bellies of the least of these, the last, the lost, the shat upon, the hopeless, the frightened, the trapped, the hated, the screwed-up-with-little-recourse among us. I’ll kick it off on Ash Wednesday with an opener and a blank page upon which we may all work.

I…we, heartily welcome you to this series. I’m truly excited about this little venture. My own hope is that our collective voice may offer a probing look into to a topic of increasing interest to many: Christian spirituality for “the rest.” That is, the language of the soul in the grime of the streets; trying to understand ways that our spirituality becomes for us…eyes in the alley.

Ash Wednesday: Yours truly

Lent, Week I: Sunday, March 9 – Christianne Squires

Lent, Week II: Sunday, March 16 – Bob Holmes

Lent, Week III: Sunday, March 23 – Valerie Hess

Lent, Week IV: Sunday, March 30 – Dr. Elaine Heath

Lent, Week V: Sunday, April 6 – Tara Owens

Palm Sunday: Sunday, April 13 – Giff Reed

Easter Sunday, April 20 – Valerie Dodge Head

Pictures from here

November Stars and a Silent Voice

On February 18, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, sacramental living, spiritual formation1 Comment

This was my offering to Conversations Journal blog for November of last year.

Calgary, Alberta. November, 1974. I was eleven years old. I began the ten-minute walk from our small bungelow on Hyslop Drive to St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church where I would meet up with my fellow Boy’s Brigade troop as I did every Wednesday evening. It was for me, a well-trodden path. From time to time however it had proven perilous. Twice I had been attacked by dogs, once I was accosted by a group of puffed up ne’er-do-wells intent on the scaring the hell out of me (mission accomplished) and once I had injured myself trying to leapfrog the numerous green posts that disallowed vehicle traffic down a pedestrian walkway.

Inasmuch as I understood what it was, I often prayed for God to be with me as I made the relatively short journey. This night was particularly cold, even by Calgary in November standards. The deep, night sky boasted her cavalcade of winter stars in unabashed glory. I began my journey and decided to sing. The only song for which I could scramble together any words was Great is Thy Faithfulness. The words then, as now, tasted like Jesusy hot chocolate on my trembling palette.

I lost myself in the comforting words letting them buoy me up in the starlit dark. A short time later I stopped, the church directly in front of me. Then, something happened, something truly unexplainable; something outside of me that has forever shaped my shallow understanding of an eternal God. I can only describe it as a…knowing. Whoever God was to me at eleven years of age “spoke” silently reassuring words to me that intimated, “I am with you tonight even as I have been so since before you were born.” I couldn’t move. I could hardly breathe. I was at once horrified and blissfully happy. I was…awake. The only thing holding me to the ground was a tractor beam of grace, a mystical awareness of something so far beyond my ken that I am drawn to tears telling it again a lifetime later.

That night so long ago I was confirmed as a mystic. I cannot explain in any rational terms what occurred. No Bible verses flooded to my mind. I didn’t really know any. Nobody’s sound God-advice came to replace my fears. Instead, God somehow shone a spotlight of holy epiphany into my young soul in a way that was far beyond the telling. God gave me my own “I guess you had to be there” moment.

It has nourished me now for almost forty years; God’s wordless invitation into mystery.

Probably the least romantic thing one lover can offer another is to confidently parade, with clinical accuracy, their attributes. If you can easily describe your first kiss, the birth of your first child or the loss of a loved one, then you just might be a prisoner of rationality. You are suffering from a dearth of unknowing in the harsh glare of mere facts. When gazing into the eyes of one who has captured your soul on the film of eternity it’s probably best not to open one’s mouth at all. Just kiss her, you fool.

That is the mystery of God.

An unexpected invitation

I have hidden my head

in the cloak of heaven, singing.

I can smell a fragrance

and watch an evening unfold.

Could this be the dance

of saints and sinners,

women and men,

soldiers and satin,

frail and overpowering,

wise and unstable,

sick and perfect,

praise and calumny?

They swoosh and dance and mingle

with heads up and eyes wide

hands clasped and hearts raised.

Listen for their whispered shouts, loudly silent,

heard only by those

with a need to hear something

they did not expect –

“Come.”

Alone in the Rimming Moon

On February 16, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic6 Comments

Sometimes we sit, alone

in the rimming moon. Our sighs move upward,

quelling cares that rise like smoke and buffeting our hands

with the bones of night.

Sometimes we sit, alone

in the startling dusk. Light-profusions

scamper like wayward souls and tickle our bones

with tales of mourning love.

Sometimes we sit, alone

in the meddling dawn. Mid-sentence laughing

from brooklet stars too shy for dancing

when noon arrives, shirtless and boasting.

Sometimes we sit, alone,

together in maudlin midnight’s tepid kiss, too quickly

passing to pass from view without leaving

her mark of satisfied leavings.

Sometimes we sit, alone

in the rimming moon. We compare eyes

and glance knowingly beyond

what they normally see: the other.

Painting, “Anam Cara” by Lynn Weekes Karegeanneas

Conversing Through Conversations, (October 2013): Fear Fears Love

On February 16, 2014February 16, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation2 Comments

I am petrified of stray dogs. I’ve even been hospitalized by “friendly” dogs. It’s like they pick me out of a humans line up as the quickest distance between two points: dinner and no dinner. I’m not particularly fond of spiders, either. I have a scar on the back of one hand from a small, but vicious spider attack (well, I was only 10, it felt like that). Those are the easy ones. The rest get pretty complicated.

I am an adoptee. I am told that fear is the one characteristic most endemic of adoptees; specifically fear of rejection. I enjoy both the status of adult adoptee and the distinction of being one who could be voted “most likely to love you to death to avoid being unloved.” Fear is something in which I am well trained; fear of rejection, of change, of failure, of success, of loneliness, of______. Decision-making, my single greatest fear, has been a nightmare for me whose primary default button has two questions written above it: “Is this safe?” and “Is this easy?”

To add insult to injury, this is not exactly promoted as an approach for the average male with the expected fearless jungle grunts that are to accompany our thrashing foray into the wild, blue yonder. Also, we live in a culture that, on the one hand supports it’s well-oiled machinery on the ethic of “fear of the other” while preaching the gospel of courage in overcoming all obstacles to become the successful, corporate citizens God meant for us to be. It’s confusing to say the least.

Three of the best words in the Bible are “do not fear.” Right around the corner from these are another four of the best, “fear of the Lord.” Huh? How exactly does that work? How is it that I am encouraged to live life without fear on one hand while on the other to seek it out? To further add to this conundrum, we are told in John’s first epistle, “perfect love casts out fear.” So, which fear is that now? Even to the untrained eye, a cursory reading seems to suggest that perfect love doesn’t belong with fear but does belong with Fear; that is, the fear of the Lord. Therefore, if I seek to be trained in the art of divine love, fear gets squeezed out. They cannot dwell together in a soul designed for one but not the other.

This has worked well for me. At those painful crossroads moments where I’m asked to take a deep breath and, with less than adequate light, jump out of God’s moving train into a dark, forbidding…something, I’ve come to trust the architecture of faith. That is, to lean into the idea that, no matter what, something, Someone, will be there to catch me. To fear God is, in a sense, to believe without the aid of 20/20 vision, that God is whom God says in the scriptures and through the lives of God’s people. Over the years I have developed an healthy awe for the ways in which the all-wise God is able to construct my life almost entirely out of crummy decisions, bad alliances, short attention spans, shorter spiritual memory and lack of community discernment.

Like guilt, fear can be self-perpetuating and the gift that keeps on giving. It chases its own tail in an effort to catch itself and propagate. We live amid an epidemic of phobiastica; a world so rife with fear (no extra charge for the bad pun) that when we meet someone truly fearless we think them unsophisticated or naïve, even delusional. That person, I believe, is one who has learned two things: Fear of the Lord and divine love. They are two sides of a highly valuable coin not to be lost. So, if I am not to fear, seek perfect love and the result will be a better fear – a trembling awe of God – that, in itself, is the way to perfect love. I like that equation.

It scares me to death, but I like it.