Category: faith

Reading the Bible as Scripture-part 2

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

As the Word in the word slowly transforms us we come to live in kairotic ways; the time behind time, the spaces between the words in which God works mystical wonders in us. In abandoning ourselves to this encounter we become incarnational shadows of Ultimate Reality. This cannot be the case if we approach holy writ as mere text; God reduced to a subject of textual dissection. In so doing, we deny the Spirit in the text access to an available and willing subject for the healing scalpel of God. God wants not to be a concept for us to master. God invites to submit ourselves to the revealing light of the Logos, witnessed to in Scripture, whereby we are laid bare before the One with whom we have to do.

If, as Bob suggests, the Scripture is to be approached as a place for transformative encounter with God this presents a most baffling dilemma. We must place ourselves before the text as we would our spouse, in utter love, humility and surrender for understanding. As Wesley insisted, we must come to the text in the same spirit in which it was inspired and recorded. It can then do its deepest work as a living entity; alive because of the Life dwelling both in and outside its pages.

Experiences like a January Residency would feel more sterile and less dynamic were it not for the communal context in which we may, together, seek. It is one thing to speak of love. It is quite another to see it at work and be the object of the same. Such mysteries beg description like setting to words one’s first kiss or hearing the needy cry of one’s newborn child. Few things feel so jarring to the soul as the dislocation one experiences in the shadow of the Mount of Transfiguration. The memory of fellowship, still ripe with nuances and hope-filled déjà vu can seem a mockery when trying to retro-fit ourselves for life in the low places. Says the Psalmist, “I think of God, and I moan; I meditate, and my spirit faints. You keep my eyelids from closing; I am so troubled that I cannot speak.” Although spoken in a spirit of anguish, the Psalmist here outlines the bemusing distress of his own spirit before Yahweh.

This perfectly describes my post-Residency anguish. It is my fifth; my third as a student. In none of them have I walked away so utterly undone as this one. Was it the fact that, for our cohort at least, it was the last one? What was so different this year than other years when all of the elements that make these residencies so magnificent were just as present? What were all of the intersecting points between who they are to me and who I am becoming?

Reading the Bible as Scripture

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

As mentioned in a previous entry, I am enjoying the rigors of an online Master’s program in Spiritual Formation and Leadership through Spring Arbor University. My next few posts will be reflections on our annual January Residency requirement. What follows are the beginnings of my thoughts from our most recent one. To wit…

It has been a rare occasion indeed when I have walked away so wrecked from an encounter than from this year’s January Residency. All of the reasons for this will, quite possibly, never be totally clear to me. What I can unpack with any sense of intelligibility is what follows.

Particularly appropriate to, and ironically illustrative of, our time with Dr. Robert Mulholland was a 2-day spiritual retreat under the leadership of Dr. Wil Hernandez. The inner nourishment provided by means of silence, community, liturgy and prayer served as an ideal foundation, the soil as it were, into which words about the Word might be planted. And that was the essential point of the entire week: how the word is ever the Word or Logos to us, God as text, the place of transforming encounter with God. My continuing reflections seek to answer some of the questions posed to us in a communal song, “The Summons”:

Will you come and follow me if I but call your name?

Will you go where you don’t know and never be the same?

Will you let my love be shown, will you let my name be known?

Will you let my life be grown in you and you in me?

Like millions before me, my initial introduction to the Scriptures was welcome, warm and winsome. Words fell effortlessly off the page to meet eyes lusting after more truth than I could possibly understand, let alone live. Jesus seemed alive in the gospel narratives. Paul’s careful exegesis of life, church, Jesus and their interrelationship was at once intriguing and alluring. The Psalms whispered or shouted in turn their voice of blessing, comfort, anger or woe and the Prophets proclaimed loud and clear God’s desire for holiness of life and faithfulness in worship.

Numerous study Bibles and countless marking pens later and I was neither appreciably closer to God nor to God-likeness. In fact, it was actually starting to become boring and stale. I found reading Shakespeare or Gerard Manley Hopkins more satisfying, theoretical physics more challenging and novels interpreting Arthurian legend more engaging. It seems that I had fallen under the same spell as any other post-Enlightenment, rational, Western individualist and treated the Bible much like the DVD Player or X-box instruction manual. What happens when I get it mastered? What then? Should I move on to more “difficult” material than God? When all the pieces are finally put together, as is the intent of such an approach, will I be more like Jesus? More fulfilled? More?

Dr. Mulholland set out to address this among other issues related to the role of Scripture in the process of spiritual formation. He was tacitly engaging, consistently interesting and a model of the interplay between keen intellect and deep faith. How could this not be a challenging experience!? In the words of Thomas Merton (a favorite author of Mulholland), “it is of the very nature of the Bible to affront, perplex, and astonish the human mind. Hence the reader who opens the Bible must be prepared for disorientation, confusion, incomprehension perhaps outrage” (Thomas Merton, Opening the Bible, pg. 13). Mulholland sets out to address why this is so.

Of particular interest to me were Bob’s (see how I did that? I waited before being so presumptive) stories and analogies which richly illustrated his thoughts. As a Presbyterian church music director I appreciated his analogy of Scripture as a symphony – in this case the Third of Beethoven – by which we might come to understand the heart and intentions of a God made “real” in a musical score. It is not a dry, academic exercise. It is the evocative dance of lovers set to the music of heaven. God’s heart is best seen in poetry and art than prose and mechanics. As Bob describes, the Scripture is iconographic in that it provides for us a living, multivalent window into the sacred.

In a sense, rather than having our nose pressed to a book for study we were taken high above the Scripture to see it as birds see the ground. The knowledge we seek is not a factual mastery of text but the relational subtleties of experiential knowing. To “know” our spouse in a biblical way seldom seems to translate to our knowing God in a “biblical” way: a visceral, sensual, vulnerable reality between two lovers in communication.

Part 2 later…Rob

Life as a canvas

On By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, liturgy, sacramental living, spiritual formation1 Comment

I, like so many others, am one on a journey.  As a man who, at best, is in a state of constant spiritual curiosity, ever thirsty for knowledge and, at worst, indecisive and flippant, I am always on the look out for organizing principles.  However, as a poster child for the post-modern milieu, I have at times had an aversion to the codifying of faith and life into a non-integrated, linear set of theological propositions designed to classify my place in the big picture of Christian dogma.  Statements of faith, as needful and helpful as they are merely portray details of the tapestry; those main threads that bind the tapestry together and create a pattern. The beauty in the context of the body of Christ is that these statements, non-integrated though they may be, can provide the basic threads of the faith – the common threads – that unite all Christians.

Taken as a whole and seen from God’s perspective, this tapestry is a portrayal on fabric of one’s essential “picture” to the world.  Threads of differing colours and weights for different purposes are woven at ninety degree angles to one another, providing multiple cross-roads at each meeting place.  Lacking meaning by themselves and lacking the creator’s perspective, these threads can quickly lose hope, finding themselves at crossed purposes and conflictually related.  At micro level each thread travels a continuous forward road sometimes above its perpendicular counterparts perhaps with an accompanying sense of pride, accomplishment and clear vision.  At other times, life is submerged and “under the surface” as the creator allows other colours to predominate.

Life is a canvas.  Broad brush strokes upon newly prepared canvas provide the ethos and essential feel of the finished work.  The predetermined size of the work allows the canvas to be stretched and prepped for that which is to emerge.  Location, location, location – as in real estate, so in art, the placement of the canvas ensures adequate light pragmatically to the artist as well as proper light artistically for the ensuing endeavour.  The artist works quickly at first seeking to get on canvas the basic structure of the vision which prompted the painting in the first place.  As the vision unfolds, smaller, more painfully intricate strokes occur leaving vast portions of canvas untouched for long periods.  No brush stroke is less important than the other.  Each one a promise fulfilled toward the unfolding masterpiece.

Contemporary Christianity with its love for the corporate America constructs of vision statements, leadership gurus, definitions and strategies has sometimes fallen prey to “we are our vision statement” reductionism.  In other environments lacking the redemptive pressures of the gospel to the contrary, these become designs for “getting everyone on the same page” – a bottom line for the bottom line so to speak.  The unfortunate ramifications of a purely rationalist paradigm in such matters (clearly the love of post-Enlightenment humankind) is a lusting for unanimity rather than a move toward diversity in unity.  After all, homogeneity is easier to control and quantify.

With all of that as precursor I must say that writing a personal mission statement has been one of the most meaningful undertakings of my entire adult life.  Although not a complete picture of the tapestry unfolding, it has acted nonetheless as an important organizing principle for my life in general terms. It has also acted as a helpful guide in my own spiritual formulation.

I’ve often questioned whether spiritual formation can ever be “offered” as such, believing that it can only be “encountered.”  However, I am pleased by the resurrection of the terminology in post-modern thinking to describe this goal of the redeemed life.  It is a classical Christian perspective on one’s continual conversion, incarnationally, into the person of Jesus Christ.  Unfortunately, “discipleship”, has become its modernist, Descartian counterpart, by contrast more suggestive of a mental assent to universally agreed upon systems of thought and doctrine birthed in rationalism.  It, for me, has often been the clearing house for “believe this and all shall be well” data-driven Christianity.

God’s personhood and redemptive action (and by extension, my own) work both in and through the worshipping ecclesia. As God’s physical voice in the world, we are, clearly and hopefully, to state God’s loving intentions without the typical “mighty speak” rhetoric which can have the effect of bull’s eye Christianity loudly declaring who’s in and who’s out.   A progressive orthodoxy, diversity in unity, and holistic sensibilities are what encourage me. If that is what the church is about, count me in.

God with skin

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

Christianity is a lived reality, not just an idea.

It is also something shared. Faith is a communal notion. It was never intended that we be individual ivory towers of righteousness. Rather, we are made strong in community with others whose gifts and strengths augment our own; where our weaknesses are rendered small and insignificant in light of the strengths of those around us who also name the name of Christ. This is about that – the Body of Christ, or as Ronald Rolheiser says, “God with skin.”

At times, our bodies work well. At other times, not so well. For example, we may be on the mend from a broken leg but still suffer migraine headaches. Or perhaps we suffer from rheumatoid arthritis but our minds are keen and sharp, providing clarity and wisdom for others.

When two friends know each other intimately they share life and joy even when they hold to very different views on topics. A husband and wife will often finish each others’ sentences. They think as one. They act as one. They live as one. Two old lovers can sit silently in front of the fireplace, he with pipe and paper, she with pillow, knitting and the cat on their lap and say everything that needs to be said without speaking a word. They say everything without a sound. Their relationship has been forged in the crucible of life and experience and suffering and overcoming and failure and time. Its richness is seen in the ability to simply be in the presence of the other without pretense or embarrassment or expectation.

At certain periods in our relationships, be they childhood friendships, a husband or a wife, or spiritual kin in the family of Jesus, there will be times of celebrating newness. A child is born – we celebrate a new life. What kind of parent would we be if we never rejoiced in the little successes of our children? Two people who, unknowingly perhaps, sought for each other for many years finally meet, fall in love and are united in marriage – we joyfully celebrate their new union. What kind of spouse would we be if we never voiced our appreciation and love for the one who shares life with us? A close friend whose chronic disease is finally brought under some measure of control and we see them laugh for the first time in years – we celebrate new life. A young woman dogged by years of career failure finds her niche in a new job discovered “by accident” – we celebrate her newly resurrected self-awareness and pride of place. What kind of local church would we be if we never took time to champion the selfless efforts of our brothers and sisters?

What indeed.

In the name of the “God with skin”…

Hippolytus or Willow Creek?

On By robertalanrifeIn Christianity, faith, music, sacramental living, spiritual formation, worship3 Comments

It seems to me that, wherever one hears conversations about worship and music, three words rise to the top of the lexicon: contemporary, traditional, and blended.

“Blended”. Hmm, what a strange word! It sounds so…, well…, grey and porridgy to me; kind of like a colorless mush which leaves nobody happy, everyone confused, nobody satisfied, and everyone wanting more of what they call contemporary, traditional, or this or that, or…whatever.

“Contemporary”. Hmm, whose contemporary I wonder? How contemporary does it need to be to attain “contemporary” status? How long before that contemporary is traditional, neo-classical, neo-traditional, or God forbid, retro?  If I play a U2, Coldplay, or Metallica song on flute, cello, and harpsichord, is it still contemporary? Ask my 14 year old what he considers contemporary and you will receive a vastly different answer than if you ask even a classmate with whom he shares a lunch table!

“Traditional”. Hmm, what traditional I ask? Presbyterian traditional? Reformation traditional? Augustinian traditional? European-post-Enlightenment-Victorian-dead-white-guy traditional? Grandma traditional? What if I sing a brand new song in a old style? Is it contemporary or is it traditional? How about singing an old song in a new style? Is it traditional or is it contemporary? What do I call it when I sing the folk songs of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, or French Canada? What if I sing them with a Beatles style backbeat? Where does contemplative music fit in to the picture?

As you can plainly see, I struggle with the terms of the equation as much as the next person. As I continue to wrestle through these matters, I’ve come to believe, increasingly, that personal preferences, consumer mindset, the commodification of Christianity, our love in the West for arguments based on logic, and a certain sense of entitlement all play a significant role in how we think of worship these days. In the present milieu traditional often means “I know it. I’m comfortable with it. Don’t mess with it.”  Conversely, contemporary generally means “it’s hip, user-friendly and asks little of me.” It is culture-driven with the inevitable result of dumbing down the great universally stretching themes of the gospel.  Blended can sometimes mean that we struggle to pull both together into one stew often at the expense of authenticity or believability in either.

Imagine if we were neither traditional nor contemporary? These are linear terms born of a pendulum mindset. What if, as the post-moderns like to say, we discover the future through the past?  Writer and preacher, Tom Long, refers to a methodology of convergence worship. That is, the creation of something entirely different utilizing the tools at our disposal. He suggests that most church-goers see worship life in one of two categories: The Hippolytus Factor (looking back; for us) or The Willow-Creek Factor (looking forward; for them).  How incomplete each of these are on their own should be self-evident.  Stoic, elitist, naval-gazing, versus white-bread-‘n-apple-pie-Ken-‘n-Barbie worship.  Both offer something while not being complete in and of themselves. The late Robert Webber, utilizing the language of ancient-future, suggests that we can best approach a blended-contemporary model as contextualized through ancient liturgical formats.

One of the reasons I understand worship in more liturgical these days is that it pre-dates our musical preferences by quite some time.  It also helps to remove us from the prevalent ideology that worship=music.  Moreover, in liturgy, whether our music be contemporary, traditional, or blended we become completely involved rather than sit and soak in the presence of incessant “talking heads”; pursuing an incarnational Christianity versus a merely presentational Christianity.

It is much easier to simply divide and conquer – split everyone up on the basis of consumer preferences so that one can say, “I go to the ‘retro-post-hippie-progressive-emo-goth-industrial-death-metal’ service for the 18.5-22.25 year olds”. For better or worse, Westminster Presbyterian Church whom I serve is seeking to bring everyone under the same roof, at the same time, to worship the same God, in the same hour, using all the best, most excellent, most diverse, and most life-changing elements we can find to deepen souls and build the kingdom of God.  Everyone sacrifices something to be together on a Sunday morning.  Albeit we live with a higher base line of discontent, we believe this to be a more accurate picture of God’s kingdom.

Essayist Annie Dillard likens worshipers to children.  She states, we are “children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.”  Regardless what position we take on matters of worship, we need not be oblivious to the fact that “the One whose presence we so casually invoke summons the creation out of nothing, commands the moon and the stars to sing, shatters kingdoms and brings tyrants to their knees, shakes the foundations of the world, and causes the earth to melt at a single word.” She continues, saying “ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.  For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense.”

When all is said and done, “we need to remind ourselves”, states Tom Long, “that even when Christian worship is at its best, it is…always the work of amateurs, people who do this for love, kids in the kitchen overcooking the prayers, half-baking the sermons, and crashing and stumbling through the responses on the way to an act of adoration.” These days, I’m much more interested in discussions which revolve around the philosophy of ministry and Trinitarian theology than about music preferences in a worship service; questions of ethos or style or appropriateness or whether something is glib or elitist. Let’s keep talking about the WHO and WHY than the WHAT and HOW.  Beloved, herein lies the rub; irrespective of where we are on any worship pendulum, we need to turn our eyes inward toward self-abasement and upward toward heaven’s unspeakably glorious but eternally forgiving God.

On the journey together, Rob

Welcome.

On By robertalanrifeIn bagpipes, celtic music, celtic spirituality, Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, liturgy, music, sacramental living, spiritual formation, the arts, worship3 Comments

Welcome to innerwoven, a place to discuss matters related to the Christian spiritual journey. Specifically, my interests lie in the many places of intersecting dialogue among worship, the arts, liturgy, and spiritual formation. As both a church music director (Yakima Covenant Church, Yakima, WA) and a graduate in spiritual formation and leadership (Spring Arbor University, MI) these are for me, increasingly, matters of genuine excitement. More selfishly, it is a place to share my circuitous journey of faith and the ways I’m seeing God in my world. In the world.

This is a safe place to be where all discussion is good discussion inasmuch as it strives unto mutual respect, love and understanding. Denominational baggage…please leave it at the door upon entering. But when you do, do so with my warm invitation to share this journey with me.

Pax Christi, Rob

A longing fulfilled

On By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, liturgy, music, sacramental living, spiritual formation, the arts, worship16 Comments

On August 28th, 2008, I began a journey 20 years in the making – I started my Master’s degree. What am I studying? I’m glad you asked. I am taking a Master of Arts in Spiritual Formation and Leadership. It is an online degree through Spring Arbor University in Michigan. Responses I’ve received have ranged from mild curiosity to deep fascination to turned up noses! So, why that and why now? Again, thanks for asking.

A favorite Rife family rock band, U2, wrote a chart topping song in the 80’s called, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”. Since Bono, their lead singer, was widely known to be a Christian, they received much bad press from the church for not speaking in more definitive terms about their experience of faith. However, it was something deeper that he was singing about. Like Bono of U2, ever since I can remember I’ve had a similar unfulfilled longing. You know that gnawing ache inside when you are standing in front of the refrigerator eyeing all the possible ways to deal with it? You can’t sit still. You’re bored but don’t know why. Nothing you do makes any difference. Augustine called it a restlessness. Ah, I knew you were going to ask that…yes, I do know and love Jesus Christ and his loving presence is everything to me. Then, why this “unfulfilled longing”? Let me briefly try to explain and in so doing describe why I’m studying this stuff.

I love the Church. But it makes me sad as well. I believe that we have abdicated our role as “God’s skin in the world” (see “The Holy Longing” by Ronald Rolheiser). Our mad dash toward relevance has squeezed out significance. Our insistence on just the right doctrine has left us with all the wrong lives. We’ve traded in righteousness for “rightness”. We have exchanged transformed lives for informed heads. Often, what passes for faith is a “notebook Christianity” where, with pen and paper, we learn God rather than love and live God. We study and memorize Scripture trying to control and tame God rather than being read by Scripture, thus being brought under its control. We have taken our risen, ever-living Savior and boiled him down to an idea or a worldview. We have a theology divorced from spirituality.

Says Dallas Willard, “we live from our heart.” Jonathan Edwards, the great 18th century Congregationalist pastor and theologian spoke much of “religious affections” which provide us with a “spring of action.” Willard calls the lack of real spiritual formation in the Western church “the Great Omission..  THAT is what I am studying.

I love Jesus Christ. I love the church. I love the rich and varied tapestry of Christian history and I love classic Christian spirituality. I have a longing to help all of us who are victimized by a materialistic, consumer society but who hunger after deeper realities to find wholeness and the re-integration of our fragmented lives. My own life mission is “to draw others to God through my life and work which strive to meaningfully communicate God’s beauty and truth.” Through worship, spiritual disciplines, liturgy and the arts my goal is to become the very Jesus we sing about and help others do the same.

Writer and theologian M. Robert Mulholland defines spiritual formation as “the process of being conformed to the image of Christ for the sake of others.. May God lead us to discover all the riches of Christ in order that we are conformed to God’s image for the sake of others. THAT is what I long for.