Journaling Pinocchio

On October 10, 2012 By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, faith, spiritual formation6 Comments

I’ve tried many ways to be faithful to this idea. That is, the idea of “morning pages” that so many friends have engaged in for some time. Since 1985 I’ve been an avid journaller, earlier if you consider my voracious note-taking at any opportunity. They are now in stacks on various book cases throughout my home and act as reminders that life was even as life is. What was before may well come again. But, if journalled, it comes with warning signs. “Caution”, one’s history calls out, “you’ve seen this before, and didn’t do so well then. Let’s do better and learn from this.”

Now, unfortunately, life is anything but this cut and dried. I can count on one…finger the number of times I’ve actually gone back to dig, mine, learn, hell, even read old journals let alone allow them to guide my present course.

That is, until this year. Some particularly challenging summer events and subsequent darkness have forced me back to those journals. In fact, in a Herculean effort toward self-knowledge and understanding I have now finished reading my second book on the Enneagram. Am I a FOUR? A NINE? A TWO? A combination of these? How am I moving toward or away from integration?

Secondly, I am seeking to organize and codify these journals to help me reconstruct a cogent timeline of my life complete with possible patterns, trajectories, ideas, mistakes, etc. I’ve affixed post-it notes to the front of each journal indicating the start and end dates and then giving them an overall number: 1, 2, 3…all the way to 14. It seems I, like most, get easily stuck. Ruts like those left behind by Oregon Trail wagon wheels have made their indelible marks in my life and insistently make their reappearance at every turn.

But, I suppose, as frustrating as that is, to see one’s “ruts” is at least to become more self-aware. And, to see more is to have the smallest chance at changing more. We must see before we can move. As a recovering alcoholic this is a foundational truth. Step one is to admit to God and others that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable. Many never make it to step one. Subsequent steps never happen without the first.

Therefore, as I sit writing in yet another forum for such self-discovery, I’m left to consider: will this be the magic place that sees actual transformation take place? Or, will this be just one more futile attempt at writing away my sins? Broken places have a way of remaining broken unless outside forces come to bear upon them. That’s God’s job.

My life task is to see; to look and recognize where those broken places might be and then, write them out. Pray them out. Cry them out. Scream them out. Swear them out. Whatever it takes to find that place of epiphany, of breakthrough when the compassionate hand of God, with one simple touch, makes all things new again. This is annoyingly easy for God, impossibly difficult for us. For me. To follow the path of self-contractor in matters of the soul is a sure recipe for disaster; for madness.

Nope, for me just to read these old journals is a breath of stale air that is becoming fresh and invigorating in the workshop of God’s grace. There it is that God is taking this spiritual Pinocchio and fashioning flesh from wood; bone, sinew, blood and skin – what I am becoming – from splinters of old trees spun and pressed into something I am not. That was Pinocchio’s single desire, to be a “real boy.”

Then, with this Disney picture firmly in mind, seated beside the recurring pictures gleaned from many old journals, this becomes my prayer:

“Gracious God, who fashions something out of nothing, life out of death, real out of unreal, take this wooden boy, made in love but inanimate, solid, unmoving and give the abundant life that is you. Grant your fluidity for my immovability. Grant your warm-blooded passion for my wooden heart, cold and hard. Grant your joie de vivre for my dour, sad, self-directed life. Cut the strings that pull and manipulate and make me dance a dance I am familiar with but hate. Replace them with the unction of your life-giving spirit that draws instead of pulls, leads instead of manipulates and loves where before there was only death. Lord, make me into a real boy. To your glory.”

Glimpses VII: the blessing of obscurity

On September 23, 2012September 23, 2012 By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, faith, music, sacramental living, spiritual formation, the arts12 Comments

I’m a musician. A fairly good one I suppose, if I believe my own press. I’ve had at least nominal success at performing, writing, recording, arranging…the gamut really. It feels good whenever someone notices my ability. Really good. I have learned how to revel in a good compliment without either sidestepping it to the embarrassment of the one offering it or, by contrast, basking in it to the chagrin of those who then have to live with me.

I am (or so I’m led to believe) an Enneagram FOUR. The Individualist. Fours, when describing ourselves, are compelled to do so with more articulation, wit, sophistication and joie de vivre than the last FOUR who just described herself. We have to make a splash, an entrance of swishing haberdashery, groove, and devil may care cool that at once attracts attention but with just a hint of nonchalance to avoid inauthenticity or scorn. That way, we get both the notice of the entrance and the respect in spite of it. I call it the spirituality of swagger. It is the spiritual equivalent of the hip, there-to-be-seen, Starbucks cultural attaché. And it is temptingly indispensable for we artsy types.

Professional music ministry has figured into my journey for a number of years now. And, despite frequent boatloads of stress, they have been a gift beyond all telling. They have not, however, been the shiny, mist-around-the-edges trip to bountiful I’d hoped they might be. Probably for the best since, to know the truth ahead of time would pretty much empty the ministry of other foolish mortals such as I.

Since I’m waxing personal here, I am forced to admit that, rooted deep in much of my early ministry, was ambition pure and simple; a lust for high profile face time (places everyone, jazz hands, show me some sizzle). Of course, I would choose other language to describe it (I’m humbled to use my gifts in praise to God, and yes, I’ll sign that CD). The paid ministry gig would often pose as a front for whatever ambitious projects I was hungrily involved in that might otherwise guarantee even greater notice. In retrospect, ministry, at times, laundered my budding recording-performing career. That’s not to say that I was some kind of narcissistic monster. I performed the tasks of my call to the best of my ability and with as much love to which I was then privy.

While I was busily involving myself in as many satisfying ‘yeses’ as I could, God was pulling back the covers from my spirit, hitherto hidden and insufficiently tended. I was exploring my talent for music, creating, writing and leading alongside of God, insistently laying bare the deep wounds of my soul, a process yet ongoing.

The last few years have been (not entirely unwanted) a descent into obscurity, deconstruction, geographical isolation, and, to quote Henri Nouwen, “downward mobility”…and a boat-load of healing.

This has meant many things; concessions of a sort to the broader context of God’s work on my interior life. For example, I love overcast skies, rain, damp, shiny streets on dark mornings when, jogging, I can see my breath and smell the biosphere.

We live in the desert.

I love to gig and have done so for decades. Yakima has a tiny, struggling Indie music scene barely within anyone’s peripheral vision. I love all things eclectica; the strange, the eccentric, the anything wannabes and the rigorous interplay of opposing cosmo-political entities. We dwell in a town with few international restaurants of note and a rather simple demographic of whites and Hispanics.

I love the jaunty tête-à-tête so readily available in more left-bank Bohemian locales. I live and move among honest, hard-working, conservative, salt-of-the-earth types who could care less about my recent forays into metaphysical ontology, apophatic theology or Dostoevsky (apparently, I’m a socialist, a moniker I only half-heartedly deny). They have served me and my family tirelessly, supporting me in spite of my innumerable eccentricities. That is better than all the fame one can own.

(A few precious friends)>

That which has postured as my life – panting, and out of breath – is slowly giving way to the more subtle, softly glowing embers of God’s gentle fire. I cannot in good conscience suggest that I no longer strive after validation or acclaim. Any shreds of real confidence, lasting relationships and consistency in my life have been attained through profound pain, multiple failures, (I add for emphasis: multiple) and forgottenness. These have been God’s preferred tools in adding leaven to the dough of my expanding soul.

Ambition and notoriety are deadly to the spiritual life. Exaltation is never to be our goal. Jesus promised it only through the more difficult way of humility, a path better defined by wood and nails than monitors and stage make-up. The restfulness and routine of life in obscurity I have embraced these days, gratefully. Nowadays, I’m plenty happy reading, writing or composing in my living room chair than I am anywhere more grandiose. For from here, I can hear…sacred whispers, most of which make no sense to me, but which shadow me everywhere and, rather strangely, guide me. I can honestly say that, this blessing of smallness has revealed the face of God and it is horrifying in its beauty.

Now, I must excuse myself. I need to check my blog stats…; – ]

Glimpses VI: peering into the abyss

On September 4, 2012September 16, 2012 By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, faith, sacramental living, spiritual formation7 Comments

A truth many of us would rather not face is what I will call “lostness.” St. John of the Cross speaks at length of the dark night of the soul in his classic by the same name. But, since I’m not St. John, or perhaps saint anything, and my understanding of such things is limited, allow me to share my own rudimentary gleanings.

I’ve often mused that, if a person can say with confidence they are in a dark night, they’re not yet in a dark night. Nasty and ghoulish perhaps, but not what I mean by lostness. Dark means just that. Light has gone. Dark has come replacing sure steps with foundering ones. A way forward succumbs to guess work or less. Destinations become forgotten in a haze of bumping into walls not of our own choosing and which we cannot see anyway. As such, we lose not only orientation but the reasons for our non-whereabouts. Soon, we lose hope that light will come again and, at its worst, lose the desire and ability to see life as anything but one’s present bleak experience.

I am told that in situations of torture, people will sustain terrible beatings and then are placed in dark cells for weeks at a time. Painful sensory overload is replaced by unspeakable deprivation and loneliness. The non-existence experienced in these holding periods becomes even worse for the victims and they literally yearn to be beaten again. At least something is happening. Besides, even bad company means we’re not alone, the worst of all punishments.

Such is the lost-ness of lostness. Ostensibly, this is where God does God’s best work on the soul. When the senses have vacated their steadying influence and only a hollowed out vacuum remains, we are left with but one choice: believe anyway…or not. The sheer pointlessness of it all needs to sink into our being in order for us to be stripped of our need for pin-point accuracy in all our dealings. God alone rules here for, alone, there is only God. For we do not exist. Or so it seems. It is both the worst and the best thing God ever does in the human soul. A sweet cruelty, the pangs of which remain indelibly etched within.

A particularly poignant biblical picture of how best to weather such places of struggle is the aching repartee of Jesus with his Father in the garden of Gethsemane. The king of the ages, a long way from anything that was home, has just gotten comfortable with this broken, mortal coil. He loves us but is now asked to give it all up. For something even far worse. Perhaps with little idea of what “to be raised on the third day” might actually mean.

What is the intended result? In time, an eternity to us, a wink to God, we become shining trophies of grace. Not shiny like cheap flea market brass trinkets. But the rich, robust pewter and silver serving trays fit for royalty. The fickle fetters of sense and emotional agility that throw us under the bus when we’re not looking have now bowed to a deeper well. Unseen, but oh so quenching.

But not before we do a lot of fist shaking, weeping and finally giving up. That’s when rescue is sweetest.

Prayer of one who is lost

Hello…anyone,

can I call you God? or god? or what?

I am sick. My soul is sick and I am crushed.

Are you there? If you are, are you good?

Are you to be trusted?

Are you the one I should be looking for or do I wait

for someone else? something else? somewhere else?

How much does guilt, shame, blame

fortify this place of thick, impenetrable walls?

Am I wise or even smart to hope when all I see is

blackness; sorrow draped in the sickly posture of dreams forgotten,

of light full shaded?

Do not speak to me of Job like the others.

He is a fairy-tale, a mockery to me,

a dream of dust and ancient woes

far removed from this Halloween of hellish delight.

He does not speak anymore and,

unlike his, my book has an ending yet undecided,

murky, unmoving like a lake long dead.

Perhaps no ending will come at all?

Perhaps there is no book?

Picturesque dreams no longer peek into sleep otherwise uninterrupted.

A mind instead, in broken time, refuses better context,

mocking lost memories of what I once thought was life.

When a heart bitterly refuses whatever comfort felt like,

to what do I cling? Is this to be my rebellion? My condemnation?

Am I headed for hell because of these questions?

Because, frankly,

the questions are hell enough.

For what it’s worth,

help me through one more day, this day,

if indeed there still is such a thing.

* * * * *

Is this you right now? What practices might be helpful as you and God seek to navigate this dark time?

Do you have a support system in place? Others who can be co-sojourners with you?

Share some of your own dark night experiences.

This Holy Skin

On August 28, 2012August 28, 2012 By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, literature, poetryLeave a comment

Since dividing up my writing into two separate blogs, my other blog: www.robslitbits.com has received all of the poetry. I think that unfair, don’t you? Hence, I give you…

We stand and crane our necks

reaching for heaven’s bright smile,

upon shoulders of brown and moving green,

and in the act forget ourselves as one and there and good.

Made from unmade to make again,

these arms outstretched with fingers hoping

to touch the air and the unseen,

we hope for less than our skin suggests.

And yet, in this, there is no shame

since we ourselves are of the dust – rooted,

embranched and gnarled but numinous and whimsical

as the clouds and rain.

To escape from this is not as good

as other fingers poised to touch,

to show what we weren’t looking for…

ourselves, God’s fingerprints smudged

on the pane of humanity,

in the humanity of our pain-

on us.

Glimpses V: learning self-love through self-knowledge

On August 21, 2012September 6, 2012 By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation2 Comments

“You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.”

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

-Jesus

* * * * * *

The most genuine love we can show those around us is to nurture self-love. If this sounds narcissistic, hold your judgment and read on.

I’ve been forced lately to consider some rather disconcerting truths about myself. I often feel a little squirmy stopping to glance in the soul-mirror longer than the space between songs on my iPod playlist. But, to crack our spiritual eggs, God has to play hardball before we smell the omelette of his presence wafting through our life’s kitchen. And, let’s be honest, we generally don’t learn any other way.

The twelfth century French abbot, Bernard de Clairvaux, believed self-love for the sake of God to be the highest of all since it is the best revelation of God’s fingerprint in us and guarantees we have no projections toward or pretensions against which we might wrongly see God. My point is this: self-love develops from a basis of self-knowledge. Lately, one tool God has been using in this process is the “Enneagram” as developed in two books on the subject, The Wisdom of the Enneagram by Riso and Hudson and The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective by Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert.

For years now friends have suggested, either openly or subliminally, that I take a look.

A close look.

It’s alright, we’ll wait…

Isn’t it funny how those we know best actually know us better than we do ourselves? Nosy buggers. Obviously they’ve seen something I have yet to see or just haven’t turned to face yet.

In recent years I’ve adopted a greater willingness for such loving intrusions into my psychic space. Why not? It’s going to get dealt with one way or another, right? Why not do it through the more supportive way of loving community? As Rohr makes clear in his book, how we interact with others will contribute to and be impacted by those incremental movements toward union with God.

Let me try to unpack this a bit. For those unfamiliar with the Enneagram, it is an ancient, pre-Christian tool used by the Desert Fathers, medieval Sufi mystics and a host of others in determining the nine primary “Essences.” In Christian spirituality, it was used to help identify our core sins; those pitfalls in each of us that deny wholeness and integration.

The authors are careful to point out that there are bits of all of these in each of us. The freedom comes however in discovering which number, and its accompanying “capital sin”, that best describes our struggle toward self-awareness and it’s end, self-love.

In my case, not one, but two numbers did a brazen Fosbury Flop off the page and down my throat with hurricane-like insistence. I seem to be both a glittering, off-the-charts FOUR (defined as “the need to be special”, or The Individualist), and a cozy, kumbaya NINE (“the need to avoid pain”, or The Peacemaker). Either way it has forced me to address my overriding need to be everyone’s center of attention but not so much that it messes with my “chi.” Whenever I’m not the dinner table centerpiece I will force my way there or look for better prospects.

The flip side however, or my NINE-ishness, denies me full entrance into that hallowed place since, to be there, means the potential for failure, or worse…success, neither of which I care to deal with. Avoidance is my chosen modus operandi. I am good at it.

Very good.

Want to come live with me? Didn’t think so. I wouldn’t either.

It is particularly challenging for guys like me to be “just a part of the pack” when we crave peaceableness, beauty, balance and blustery goodness everywhere we go. How, then, do I also ensure ample amounts of praise, attention and pats of approval on my needy crown? God forbid that I don’t stand out somehow; that I’m not just a little hipper, a little funnier, a little more talented or good looking or profound than the rest. When that happens I ratchet it up a notch to achieve the desired result, often with disastrous consequences. And, to complicate matters, the peacemaker in me loves to live vicariously through whoever happens to be the most interesting or inspiring person in the room, the very person I’m trying to be! Aah, just the way I like it, a confusing nightmare of complexity!

Thanks to the Enneagram, among other things, I am inching closer toward self-knowledge. The self-love part? Not so easy. People tell me they’re not mutually exclusive. At times I have my doubts however as my eyes open ever wider to my blatant inconsistencies and shameless coverups.

But, there it is, my present journey toward self-love. It is coming with the help of the Enneagram and at the expense of a good spiritual chainsaw. Like the Orcs’ insidious intentions in Fangorn Forest, God and I have together hacked and burned and burned and hacked at the forest in my eyes. It is an unwelcome process however necessary.

As I said at the beginning, I’m slowly understanding what self-love can actually mean; the benefits so to speak. Those with whom we must share this life are best served when we work on our own stuff first. After all, nobody wants to be another’s eye-forest lumberjack.

Glimpses IV: the spirituality of home

On August 11, 2012August 11, 2012 By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation9 Comments

With this topic I enter through a small door into a big room. I do so on tip-toes so as not to awaken any sleeping giants. Home, like love is a word deceptively larger than its meager 4 letters suggests. In my 48 years post-womb I have been many people to many people with many people. A social chameleon, I guess I thought it best to live vicariously through anyone other than myself. Their stories were better, more invigorating or inspiring, or more inclined to win female attention or male praise.

As a result, home, both as place and idea, hasn’t always had the centrifugal force it is supposed to have. From time to time, life has felt a bit disjointed, like a balance with an ill-positioned fulcrum. It’s always a little off. Move it enough and one forgets where the center was to begin with.

Most folks enjoy at least a minimal sense of who they are and when their boundaries are breached. Whenever something foreign or unnecessary storms the walls of their identity they have a means of objective detachment whereby to judge their suddenly unfamiliar surroundings. I, apparently, lack this essential characteristic.

Why?

Is it my artistic, non-logical, non-empirical sensibilities? Perhaps the fact that I’m adopted? Could it be my “progressive” sensibilities (think protest songs, Kumbaya group hugs and flannel shirts), my piss poor memory or some unseen psychological malady(s)? Bad gas? It is as baffling and frustrating as it is intriguing.

The result is the fact that home needs redefining for me – renaming even; something broad enough to encompass my complexities (annoyances to those who know me best), focused enough to provide sufficient context for who I am becoming and “Jesusy” enough (thank you, Anne Lamott) to be honest, self-sacrificial and have lasting trajectory with ultimate meaning…oh, and perhaps a hint of compassion.

(The 950 square foot bungalow in Calgary where I grew up)

A recent trip to my home-turf of southern Alberta left me with these thoughts:

Home is not geographical as much as spatial. It involves an awareness, a familiarity as it were; that place “where everybody knows your name.” I know it and it knows me. There is no awkwardness or second guessing. I understand the politics, the inside jokes, the acceptable or unacceptable faux pas. The prevalent bigotries, hip views, “in” restaurants, “now” looks. The shortcuts and back roads to places only I know or care to know.

In other words, home is where we know and are known. It is about who we spend our lives with and why. We are most home when surrounded by those with whom we share life, both good stuff and bad. We are home when someone cares enough to be pissed off at us or play practical jokes on us. Or cry with us.

Here is the challenge however. As good as all that sounds, it’s still an unsure footing for something as untamed and uncertain as the spiritual life. It makes a ton of assumptions, many of which grow from our home-grown, Western world, Waltons mentality. What if I’m blind and cannot see the above gifts? Deaf and cannot hear the words of familial comfort or humor? Comatose and cannot experience them? Mentally incapacitated so as to deny full involvement in it all? Incarcerated or worse? Where, then, do I find “home”?

If anyone stood well outside the comfortable, normal or expected, it was Jesus. His was not a simple move across the country or even the globe. The journey he undertook landed him amid the harassed mass of fallen humanity of which he was now a shareholder. Where once he enjoyed the benefits of Trinitarian dwelling and the benefits thereof, he passes through a birth canal into the cold world, created for, through and by him. Jesus’ example and presence makes home possible even in the least likely locations.

Why?

He gave up his “home” in order to give us ours. And that’s good enough for me.

Glimpses, part III – thin places

On July 28, 2012September 1, 2012 By robertalanrifeIn Beauty, Christian spirituality, Christianity, sacramental living, spiritual formation4 Comments

Two people stand on either side of a white bed sheet suspended from a clothesline. As it billows and blows this way and that, you are given a passing glimpse of someone standing on the other side. The image never stays long enough for you to determine its shape or identity. Your curiosity is piqued enough however to move closer to the sheet. The breeze stops momentarily and you place a tentative hand upon the sheet, now still and waiting. Your hand feels cool fabric, thin and light to the touch.

To your surprise at first and then to your delight, a hand presses against yours from the other side, the side that hinted at an image impossible to confirm with your eyes, untrained for such visions. Two hands touch, finger to finger, palm to palm and there is recognition. It is the realization that something holy is transpiring. The sacredness of it hangs in the air like a heavy mist. You stand, breathless, waiting, uncertain – yet somehow…sure.

That is what the Celts have called, a thin place.

Peering out my hotel window onto the suburban Portland landscapes, a collaboration of grey sky with green horizon conspires against my equally somber mood and confirms that this overstatement of beauty is underrated. It is a melancholy scene uniquely designed for creatives and mystics like myself. It doesn’t parade itself, shouting in one’s face like the endless, overly peppy summer days my fellow Yakimanians insist upon.

No, this multilayered beauty lets me seek for it. There is the obvious beauty one sees immediately with the eyes. But there exists an indirectness, hinting at something still deeper, under the skin, as if to say, “if you think this is beautiful, just keep looking…” Here it is that Hopkins’ “dearest freshness deep down things”, for me, makes the most sense. One feels that to plumb the depths of one level of this spongy flora is merely an epidermis covering the heart of the matter many floors down where every living thing converges, colliding to become itself all over again.

See the following poetic inspiration from this same journey from Yakima to Portland.

The green of Oregon. A thin place.

I always say in such heavily wooded areas, as I do near the ocean, that the air has a finished quality to it. It lacks for nothing. As a family, we loved to spend a great deal of time on the beach when we lived in Oregon. Along with our two boys, our dog and a Frisbee, it was not uncommon for us to take lawn chairs and a host of reading materials, planting ourselves confidently on our tiny plot of sand. From there the wind, waves, body surfers, gulls, joggers and beachcombers would teach us of the God who makes sense of the small and great, loud and quiet, still and quick. One of those many times garnered the following poetic triptych posted elsewhere.

Thoughts from the beach…

To commemorate a beach walk with my wife.

Beauty. Random squalor in effortless

wave deposits her treasure.

In our efforts to build that which

hand could never grasp we trade

Quintessential. Queer. Quiet for

Quantifiable. Quick. Casual.

Oh, such grand wordless words-

wonder, world-watched prayers

waiting…waiting.

That which is unseen – now

I see.

Wind-soaked beach-stained

dark; darker still where waves

kiss the sand of my imagination.

Flat boards float on round earth

playing with my finitude and finer still,

fill my earthen breath with

deeper wind.

Dare she flit on so light a wing,

fading into vastness, blue-

the sky and water, one;

where one defines what much cannot

in so many syllables contain-

the vast smallness of it all.

May 12, 2003

The ocean. A thin place.

Glimpses, part II – the spirituality of place.

On July 16, 2012July 13, 2012 By robertalanrifeIn bagpipes, Beauty, celtic music, celtic spirituality, Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, music, sacramental living, spiritual formationLeave a comment

Where a person is can be as important to one’s spiritual development as what they believe. Long have spiritual masters proclaimed the benefits of sacred places. The Hebrew scriptures are replete with God’s directions to Israel to mark out territories prescribed by God that would both demonstrate God’s faithfulness and Israel’s special role in God’s redemptive economy. From the irrigated, verdant hills dotting the landscape around his hometown of Galilee, Jesus would spend countless hours with his Father. From such wilderness haunts he would find nurture, tenacity, strength, succor, and, frankly…answers.

So much of who we are and what we are becoming is directly attributable to the places that have graced us (rhyme subliminal but entirely intentional). In the comparative spiritual laissez faire of Constantine’s newly Christianized Rome, Abba Antony of Egypt started a mass exodus into the deserts of Egypt, those who would become known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers. The barrenness and desperation of the desert mimicked a similar cry deep within the hearts of these enigmatic souls. What is the obvious lesson? When there isn’t anything to titillate the senses, one might as well deal with the soul!

As a result of their foray into geographical nothingness, they became everything. They became the fullness that lies beneath the surface of what one misses when only seeing the desert sand.

The Celts, well known for their keen kinship with their environment, made much of this desire. Not unlike the Native populations of the US and Canada, not a feather of wing-ed bird, nor bark of tree, nor single trickle of rainwater escaped their notice. All carried within it some morsel of meaning for them. Because everything received notice, nothing got wasted and this outer kinship found expression through inner resolve and great spiritual creativity.

My own holy places, the cairns of my wanderings, are generally old, rather solid, often drafty and poorly insulated, but full of the memory of stones that have long cried out to their Maker. Long have I had an historical and spiritual affinity for those stuffy, rarely air-conditioned chapels that never cease to draw me elsewhere…to the great Other. Let me share just a few.

St. Saviour’s Anglican Church sanctuary in Nelson, British Columbia where for a number of years I taught at a Highland Bagpiping School (a place where other strange souls like myself learn to tame a five-legged creature designed to rouse neighbors and destined to arouse suspicions). Connections in the community opened the door figuratively and, in this case, literally, to spend as much time as I wanted in the church sanctuary after everyone else had gone home. I was given a key and carte blanche run of the place.

Most evenings after a long day of bagpipe students, some whiny, some lazy, all of them noisy, I would retire to the sanctuary with my pipes. For an hour or so I would simply play, enjoying the epic reverberance of the sound bouncing off the hard stone walls, and finding no sonic respite from the hardwood floor. It was, for me, the closest I had yet been to what I might have then described as heaven. At times it was 2:00 am before finally getting back to my room.

The hospital chapel in the same city was another such place. I was falling apart after a recent break-up with a girl to whom I had been engaged. My shattered interior was gradually reintegrated in that little chapel where I would weep and pray for hours, listening to John Michael Talbot, or the Monks of the Weston Priory sing beautifully doleful refrains. It was for me, through gallons of heart-crushing tears, the perfect requiem to my stubbornly elusive peace of mind. It would become the Introit to a new place of healing and restoration, albeit gradually.

Tintern Abbey in Wales, the place I believe could be boasted by angels as heaven’s waiting room, the lobby to eternity. My first experience of this roofless wreck of holiness was following a six month sojourn as a missionary to youth in Edinburgh’s rough Pilton district with my new wife of a year. We were tired and needed time to traipse about the land of our ancestors (and her relatives) before returning to Canada, unsure of what awaited us there. The warm, lazy day infused with the angular light of Fall caressed the ancient stone walls easily visible from almost anywhere. The pointed gables of apse and nave bespoke a darker but simpler time. All we could do was sit and pray.

Less than two years later a picture of Tintern Abbey would help pull her through a terrible first pregnancy with our son, Calum. The same photo performed this function five years later as our second son, Graeme, reluctantly succumbed to womb-ed pressure and left his humble abode to make his premier. However, it is difficult to compete with William Wordsworth whose words best complete this picture:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things…

And somewhat of a sad perplexity,

The picture of the mind revives again:

While here I stand, not only with the sense

Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts

That in this moment there is life and food

For future years. And so I dare to hope…(Wordsworth on Tintern, 1798)

Everyone can point to at least one place where something important, even seminal occurred and they sense something is different. There it is that our life has been forever changed, perhaps only incrementally, but transformed just the same.

I believe it is God’s way of playing spatial peek-a-boo.

Think deeply of a place or two that have been places of rest and reconstruction. Picture that place in your mind. Now let that picture juggle your heart.

As you do so, re-member the pieces of you that may have been broken or lost in that place. Quietly give thanks to the God who loves to find us where we’re least looking or at least looking the other way.

Glimpses, part I: awakening to the indescribable

On July 9, 2012September 1, 2012 By robertalanrifeIn celtic spirituality, Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, spiritual formation2 Comments

I want to take a stab at describing what cannot adequately be described. As a contemplative and a musician, I have met, from time to time, with mystical experiences that beggar explanation. I do not have anything close to adequate categories or temporal understanding for such things. In seeking them out, I must simply share and hope for the best.

I will be doing so in a short series of posts under the general heading, “Glimpses.” A little unoriginal I admit. However, I trust that my faltering attempts at self-revelation will prompt your own journeys of inner discovery and that, together, we may find God’s deep reservoir of grace.

At the foundation of Christian spirituality (and others) is the very basic principle of awakening or awareness. It comes in many different packages, under numerous ideologies, representative of a host of approaches, all with practices that lend themselves to one’s emerging spiritual life.

To become aware is to wake from some form of slumber, sleep or sloth. One of the mysteries of spiritual awareness is that one does not awaken naturally. We are prodded awake by the loving work of God upon the sleeping soul. It requires this nudge from God upon our shoulder before any meaningful process of receptivity and relationship can occur. In order for us to embrace this work, basically to ‘awake to our awakening’, we must intuit God’s whisper, speaking grace into the spiritual ear of our understanding.

I do not speak so much of the prophetic proclamation to “arise, shine; for your light has come.” No, before we can be so attuned to the prophet’s voice calling us to faithfulness and righteousness, we must first hear the voice of the Lover calling us to succumb to this wooing for which our only response can be, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”

As comforting and romantic as that sounds, however, upon awakening to the first primal strains of the song of God, there comes a dissonance amidst the lilting notes. We awaken to beauty and begin to see that for which we have always yearned but of which we were unaware; blind. This, however, can often be a fearful and groggy experience. Cobwebs invade our minds unaccustomed to such sharpness of color. Ears that have been plugged up suddenly pop as our inner altitude changes. It is as disorienting as it is invigorating.

I remember places, glimpses into…something; an awareness that hints at a proximity to the indefinable, numinous presence of God. These are never easy things to describe, but there is a delight in the attempt for, in so doing, I am taken back to some of those places. For me, it was often some old, stone church or monastery; most often at night, alone.

Yet, not alone.

As I have since come to believe, they were, as the Celts called them, thin places where a barely perceptible sheath surrounds the holy otherness of God and where comes a mystical awareness of God so immanent that one feels she can literally smell God’s breath, touch God’s skin. These experiences have often made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Ironically, they used to happen often when I was a boy, long before I had any faith lexicon or tidy systematic theology with which to scrub them up and describe them away. I recall one particular time as I lay on our living room floor. I was probably eight or nine years old and, as I did every year, was watching the first snowfall of winter. Enormous frozen flakes dove in random, disciplined lines, dancing past the streetlight that stood outside our home. The glistening goodness provided a panacea against which the world was complete and all was one, if only for a time. In those moments, gilded and encased in childhood wonder, I became curiously aware of a haunting peace that arrested my sensibilities and held me spellbound in what I can only describe as ‘rightness.’ The cosmos and I were one. God, as I now understand God, was lying beside me on the living room floor that night, whispering wordless words to me, convincing me of my place in it all, be it ever so miniscule.

This is a story best left unfinished…

This week, consider quietly and prayerfully, the ways in which you may have heard these awakening whispers of God.

Journal them. How did they occur? Under what circumstances? What, if anything, changed in you as a result?

What are ways you may be invited by God to enter even more deeply into these places of awakening and transformation? Agree, humbly and with resolve, to enter into them with the God of grace to guide you.

Feel free to share what you and God have been up to in your journey together.

Jars of Clay – A Prayer

On June 25, 2012 By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation5 Comments

Lord, you have exalted your name above the heavens.

Your name means grace and peace and wonder to all who speak it in faith and love. You have chosen to use weak and broken vessels to be your eyes and hands and feet in this world. It seems, Lord, that you love to pour out your glory through

the ordinary, the fragile, the imperfect.

In this, Lord, we are honored – but humbled.

You ask us to mirror grace, love and faithfulness to the world – the very grace, love and faithfulness so eloquently portrayed in Jesus Christ. Through him, you promise to give us all we need to live rich and holy lives in our communities, our families and in this world.

Mysterious God, so great a salvation!

We sinned, you forgave.

We turned away, you gave chase.

We rebelled, you paid for it.

We forgot, you remembered.

We are often faithless, you are ever faithful.

We complain, you are patient!

Lord, do not allow us to make excuses for ourselves, hiding as we do in the limits of our humanness. Although we are perfectly aware of how inadequate we are to the task, help us to see ourselves as you do, as reconcilers, as peacemakers, as redeemed kingdom builders. If we are dull, make us shine.