Going Home, and the Way There

On By robertalanrifeIn celtic spirituality, Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation3 Comments

It was 1989. My wife, Rae, and I had just completed a call of duty as mission workers to youth at Granton Baptist Church, Edinburgh. We enjoyed our first anniversary on Culloden Moor, near Inverness and were now enjoying a few weeks to just explore. I recall quite fondly the first time we stood together within the ruins of Tintern Abbey, not far from her birthplace in Wales. The mystery of belonging, and the sheer weight of home was overwhelming.

Tintern Abbey, Wales
Tintern Abbey, Wales

A Celt at heart, I think and write a great deal about the spirituality of ‘home‘ and the ache it engenders. The human heart is uniquely designed to yearn. It knows what it wants and diligently seeks it out – sometimes in unsavory, even desperate, ways. Our sacred procurements can quickly become what derails us from procurement of the sacred. But God knows our heart and the passions to which it is given, both good and bad.

What do you think of when you think of ‘home?’ A family room, lavishly bedecked with Christmas finery? A dining room table around which sit the people who grace your life? A certain place to which you return for solace when life goes south? For Rae, my wife of twenty-seven years, it is Britain. We both grew up in Calgary, Alberta on the uneven foothills that slowly crawl their way up the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. But the ancient Celtic hillsides, grey and mournful skies, and songful souls of Wales are for her, home.

Calgary, Alberta
Calgary, Alberta

We met while in mutual mourning. I had just lost my father to cancer a few months earlier. She was a girl in the throes of anguish, watching her mother waste away with the same plight. Rae is an only child, not because that was the desire of her parents, but because she was the only one to survive of numerous pregnancies. A survivor she remains to this day.

Only-children learn to be self-sustaining, imaginative, and scrappy in order to live their lives outside the interdependency of other kids in the family. With the lack of siblings, they often grow deeply independent, and extremely close to their parents, taking on signs of maturity well before others. All this is true of Rae. 

She lost her mom in August of 1986, almost a year after I lost my dad. She and her dad, now alone, forged a new life together on their own. In a sense, Rae took over many of the aspects of care and mutual friendship that previously existed between her parents. They often spent evenings simply crying together. Her father was lost without his partner, and the many tendernesses known only to lovers. His habitual journey from kitchen to bedroom every morning with tea and toast for his wife was now enjoyed by Rae. In honor of this tradition, I bring her coffee every morning. These little things help keep the big things in place.

The friendship born of the mutual bond of grief has lasted to this day. Since losing her parents, any family of origin are gone. In a sense, she is alone on this continent. To help her contextualize this and many other competing voices within her, she started writing a novel a little over three years ago. It is, of course, based in the UK.

Rae, my writer, wifey pal
Rae, my writer, wifey pal

Because I so keenly identify with her longing for home, and because, as a writer myself, I am her biggest fan, it has been my desire to help her return. I have developed a Giveforward crowd-based fundraising campaign to assist in getting her back to Britain where she may visit her remaining relatives, and finish research for her book.

If you feel as pulled toward home as we do, please consider making a donation, however small, to help her feet once again touch her own hallowed ground. You may do so here.

Diolch yn fawr iawn (thank you very much in Welsh)

Picture of Calgary found here

Kathleen Norris, acedia, and uncorking the wine

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

I suffer from an all too common writer’s ailment. It is an elusive demon, refusing easy corral, and lives on in spite of my best efforts to subdue it. Kathleen Norris, a favorite writer of mine, stakes a claim on this little inner hurricane of acedia, well-known to the 4th century desert monastics, and suffering from much needed exposé in books like her bestseller, “A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life: Acedia and me.”

This thing is attacking me where it hurts, writer’s blah. Frankly, there are times when writer’s block would be the better option. Better to write nothing than derivative bullshit, right? At least that’s what the self-pitying artist might be tempted to say.

Now, to be clear, I’m certainly not in a huge doldrum necessarily. I still love to write. I think I’m fairly good at it. But, at times, I wake up in a cold sweat and realize that I just read a collection of poetry by a 17 year old more intriguing, probing, and disturbing than anything I recall writing.

This poem is offered from such musings.

* * *

Uncorking the wine

Breathless like wine, still corked and waiting

in its darkness, sits that one, a one, this one.

 

Wheezing and sick, that soul, a soul, this soul,

like leaden clouds coaxing out un-fallen rain.

 

Sometimes bitter is a sky, unwilling to cough up

her best stories and wait for an audience.

 

What little disturbances, these sagging wits,

trying in vain to see into the sap of things.

 

What small crescendo to so great a symphony,

the song-less word, peals back upon itself,

just enough to pair with a mind in domino.

 

What a blunted song, gutted and safe,

lost in its own impotence, a flaccid regale.

 

What a forgetful space, its shape insufficient

to bear the weight of dents and denials.

 

What fraternity of the inconsistent, sparing nothing

in pursuit of everything, to gain nothing.

 

What a pale sentence, well-intentioned illness of

the crouched and waiting, waiting for anyone to come

 

and speak.

 

 

On the eve of memory

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing Poetic1 Comment

On the eve of a memory,

when the daylight streams through

old clouds, carried in the bucket

of yesterdays, there comes

a clarity. A bidding of dues

in clues from tiny feet,

now braking for beer and girls

and the particular geistlieb that

only says hello to newcomers.

Severed as one gets from

the possibility of possible, of eventual –

of always – it’s never really

too late to ensure what little time

remains to pour out the slop

from the bucket that once held

our best intentions.

These two, grasped from out of

hands held tighter still

to our deepest dreams.

I’ll Carry You: Companions On the Dark Journey

On By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality3 Comments

Just recognizing how utterly dependent I am on the companionship and wisdom of others.

robertalanrife's avatarinnerwoven

He no longer knew the day. There was no more separation between the sweet, calm of morning light and the creeping fingers of night. All had turned to the grey ooze of nothingness. For him there was only the long, unending dark of time’s unwieldy march onward, onward, ever onward – the relentlessness of burning necessity. All that once was had thrust its long, oily arm down his parched throat and wrenched from him all remaining strength. Hope was but a word, void of substance, reality’s parody of happier men in better days.

Or so it seemed.

There was another; a soul knit to him not by mere chance, but by sheer devotion. It was the kind of centripetal friendship known only among the angels and those about to face their doom. The lostness of his friend only served to drive deeper the tent peg of determination into the heart…

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Prayer of the Blind

On By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality4 Comments

“There are none so blind as those who will not see” – attributed to John Heywood, 1546. A response to the Umpqua massacre of September, 2015

 

I pray, O God, for those of squandered chances,

(if mine remain available and plentiful.)

I pray for those with withered hopes,

(if mine remain consistently fresh.)

I pray for those without the means to self-sustain,

(as long as I remain winsome and productive.)

I pray for lives, untethered,

(if mine blissfully carries on.)

I pray for the lonely and un-gathered,

(while on my iPhone, among friends.)

I pray for hearts in atrophy,

(as long as I remain emotionally nourished.)

I pray for he whose place is gouged, whose work, ravaged,

(if I remain safe among the secure and blessed.)

I pray for a church, united,

(if it doesn’t cause me discomfort.)

I pray for the addicted,

(as long as no one checks my history.)

I pray in gratitude for my wife,

(as long as she stays pretty and polished.)

I pray for the poor and emaciated,

(while eating prosciutto and gruyère in my car.)

I pray for others to “find Jesus,”

(assuming I don’t have to forego anything.)

 

Most of all, God of life,

I pray for an end to all the killings,

(if it doesn’t ask me to quit worshipping the means of their demise.)

 

Thanks be to God.

Passaging well

On By robertalanrifeIn Christian spiritualityLeave a comment

On the occasion of my fifty-second birthday, I repost a few thoughts I had just prior to my fiftieth. Those thoughts remain the same, even if the numbers do not.

robertalanrife's avatarinnerwoven

Our lives are a series of passages. One tributary leads to another, which in turn yields to something else on its way to waterfall or harbor, estuary or eddy. At times we are stuck, unmoving. Or so it seems. To be stuck can actually be a decision not to decide something. Perhaps it’s a slow, deep spot before being sucked back out into the rapids where we easily lose our sense of direction and the not unreasonable expectation that we’ll fly ass over tea kettle into the frothy spray. There are even times when our boat slows almost to a crawl and we find ourselves in the enchantments of a Pirates of the Caribbean style rendezvous with delight. DSC_0019

Whatever the case may be it should be our goal to passage well. That is, when faced with life’s bone-chilling decisions, we learn to listen for the most gracious, compassionate means by…

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10 Ways American Christians Are Compromising Our Own Testimony In The World

On By robertalanrifeIn Christian spiritualityLeave a comment

Nothing to add. I will let his words do the talkin’.

johndpav's avatarjohn pavlovitz

Not listening

If this were a prize fight, organized Christianity wouldn’t quite be knocked out yet, but it would certainly be on the ropes and we’d be way behind on points coming to the bell.

It’s no secret that people are leaving the Church in record numbers and although they may not all be rejecting Jesus, they are surely saying no to the faith that bears his name—and for many good reasons.

I spend a great deal of my time each day listening to many of these good folks and they educate me. Based on what I see from where I am and what I’ve learned from nearly two decades in church ministry, here are some ways we Christians are obscuring Jesus and hurting people, and severely damaging our testimony in the world in the process:

1) Vilifying non-Christians.

In the face of attrition and growing public ambivalence, too many Christians and Christian leaders lazily lean back on attack language…

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Chasing fire, feeding smoke

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

First drops, like navy-seals, tease out of

their smoldering burden the wheezing

lungs of the forest, barely breathing.

Into the steaming chaos they fall,

teeth gnashing at carbon vomit, leftovers

from Lucifer’s meal.

Into the quiet orgasm of their poetry,

straight-shouldered, whispering

the old stories, not soon forgotten.

And the forest inhales again

her dawning frailty.

But, wait, there’s more –

From the attic

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Forged in the the magma of numberless sunsets

they dance lightly with butterfly footprints.

There, after the moon rises and hangs loosely

in the boneless night, they shine like new, red

carbon, back-lit to the moisture of ruby lipstick.

Floral-patterned dresses and scent of lilac

perform their ritual of sensory recall. He still

remembers what she smelled like that first time

in the back of his 1941 Buick.

She glowed and he burst. Sixty years

and many grandchildren later,

and he still cries when he sees her picture.

Forget about the rippling gifts of

the chatty stones, bellies rubbed and flat

from so much time dancing with the river.

Just point me toward the places where

the wise ones still dance with the expectation

of getting lucky – lucky enough

to hold her hand just one more time.

Feast of quotidian delights

On By robertalanrifeIn Words...always wordsLeave a comment

I reblog one of my most popular poems in celebration of my new blog theme. Bon matin, mes amis!

robertalanrife's avatarRob's Lit-Bits

 

Swollen palettes, satiated on mystery meat, bread and corn

husked beside the red swing-set after splish ‘n splash at noon.

Summer’s silly sprinkler dance anoints the day

with laughter fit for kings’ tables finely festoon’d.

 

Checkers played with pennies and monopoly pieces,

and, later, fake dollar bills found buried in the car seats.

Dinner table taunts from Mom and Auntie June

to remove from there our sad and smelly feet.

 

Now when moon and sun compete for sky,

I chuckle one last sigh before I hit the hay.

My buddy’s fresh, new farts remind me

how soon, in restful sleep, he’ll pay.

 

Sometimes, when pompous stars have fin’lly come and gone,

and, creeping on the ledge beside my window, at this height,

I wonder when, once more we might revel in  

this feast of quotidian delights.

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