Turning up the lamp – the joys and dangers of self-correction

On February 16, 2015December 15, 2022 By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation5 Comments

It is a relatively common occurrence for self-correctives to follow the theological-ethical-liturgical life of the Church. Such things have been part of our corporate spiritual journey since Pentecost. What’s more challenging to pin down is what exactly is being “corrected,” why, and into what. And, more importantly, whether any current push toward that correction is considered right, wrong, or even advisable by those on opposing sides.

For example, one of the greatest “correctives” in Church history was of course the Reformation. Arguably, it brought some of the most central tenets of our contemporary Christian faith into sharp relief against the abuses of a Catholic church, run amok. Protestants celebrate this corrective. Catholics decry it. Those like me who straddle it, do both.

As I make my way forward with this blog, it has often been challenging how best to engage with the topics most at the head of our ecclesiastical-cultural parade. Since Innerwoven is intended primarily as a place of reflection and consideration of the inner life – the life of God in me and others – does this mean I should remain silent on hot topic matters? Wouldn’t it be best to keep things more corralled for the purposes of our own solitude? In the interest of attaining a sense of inner balance and proximity with God, is it more advisable to avoid the stress of incendiary and divisive talk that denies such balance? Is that always to be the case? When does interest only in contemplation without its corollary of redemptive justice become an exercise in narcissistic stasis birthed of fear?

Paul, in addressing the Romans offers the following advice: “Let us then pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding” (14:19 NRSV). He advises an avoidance of matters most poisonous to the fellowship of believers and the common life of faith. Jesus, too, makes clear time and again that it is not our ideas that matter as much as the end and reason for those ideas (for example, see his 7 woes to the Pharisees in Matthew 23). He blesses the peacemakers who themselves are blessed. But he also tells Peter that, in faithfully following the Way, a time is coming when he will be taken where he does not want to go. It is now and has always been more about who we are becoming than what we should be thinking; about righteousness more than rightness.

About love.

With such a long set up, here’s my punchline: sometimes we must rouse ourselves from the beautiful silence and push out into the dark once more with light gained from those places. Armed with the Christian spiritual tradition that in every corner teaches an active contemplation along with the hermeneutic of Jesus: love the Lord your God utterly and others as oneself, let us set out into that dark night and with hope and faith begin a conversation about…gulp, human sexuality and the Christian Way.

To help me do that is a wonderful new friend, colleague, and a rather formidable academic, Dr. Michelle Clifton-Soderstrom. Dr. M as I’ll call her, has written a series of close-to-the-vest pieces on this very topic published at Sojourners online. She writes not from behind a professor’s desk. She writes as a faithful follower of Christ, who happens to be a scholar, about her personal struggle with our present lock-horns topic of “LGBTQ inclusion,” specifically as it relates to faithful Church ministry, and unity in diversity. The context is also of commissioned and blessed involvement under present Evangelical Covenant Church protocols (a denomination we both share and love) on the subject and what “faithful dissent” might look like. Her first submission is my starting place. As such, I leave you in her more capable hands.

With this hornet’s nest awhirl around us, are we in a time of ecclesial self-correction? Just sparring over the issue-du-jour? Both or neither? This reblogged series is evidence of my own yearning for a place of love and commonality wherein all might land and still call one another sister, brother, friend. To that end, I send you here. I humbly encourage you to engage her there and me here, or both. Either way, let’s seek to engage for the purpose of common understanding and love. Why? Because out of the deepest inner silence come the most convincing voices of compassion.

Even so, come Lord Jesus.

Dr. Michelle Clifton-Soderstrom is Professor of Theology & Ethics at North Park University in Chicago, Illinois where she has served since 2002.

When runs the time

On February 14, 2015 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

For my wife on Valentine’s Day (insert goofy emoticon here_______).

Something indefinite defines you whenever the sun shivers.

It speaks in whispers, whittling down uptown talk to you and me.

Leave the world alone I say, with its backdraft of naysayers,

too pale to know they are shadows.

Sometimes it’s okay to let the clock shrug off its own anxieties –

it disarms the passing minutes while the sky changes.

The breeze pins hair to cheek and, with collars turned up,

we become convinced of our own slow presence.

Let’s just lisp whatever poetry stumbles out of our footsteps,

finding their rhythm on this uneven road.

Love is like

On February 4, 2015 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Like a head, severed and featureless,

are those times too far from your scent.

Like limbs reattached, sutured to the blood,

is your silhouette in the doorway.

Like the dream after the waking,

is the smile of your skin.

Like the hours of insistence, drenched in purple,

is the declaration of your place.

Like a fish, drowning and drunk on its own world,

is the yes at the end of your fingers.

Like a poor man’s breakfast, waiting and ravished

is the moistness of your remembrance.

Like secrets in a barrel, floating high up to grasp,

is the welcome in your eyes.

Like turns in the park, the yielded path unknowing,

is the sound of our falling steps, together, sighing.

For Rae, my wife of nearly 27 years.

For Uncle Tom

On January 31, 2015January 31, 2015 By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation3 Comments

There are precious few in every generation to whom the forces of transformation and awareness may credit their shifting and change. Women and men whose singular focus, ideological clarity and personal courage helped guide them to be the salmon spawning upstream. They inspired us to become who we already are, to shine more brightly, think more rigorously, love more passionately, die more readily.

For me and countless others, Thomas Merton was one such person. Today marks the one hundredth anniversary of his birth. Rather than offer biography, retrospective or ideological dialogue, I’ll let him speak in the language he knew best: prayer.

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

Uncle Tom, for this and so much more, thank you.

Signed, a disciple

Good from regret

On January 21, 2015January 21, 2015 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic, Words...always wordsLeave a comment

There was always enough time to dodge and weave among the silences where words hid themselves under innuendo It was a metaphor for communion drank from empty cups with stale bread crumbs Teeth never chatter in the heat of tall clear days except when one hasnt looked up yet to notice A thirteen year olds wishbone summer is no match for the real world It chants and whirls itself into rock star memories where pretend gets truer in the telling I guess one could say she should have known better All the signs said the same thing with different words So many taps on the shoulder whispers in the ear the kind you feel the need to silence with voices louder still But once water gets poured into the brown earth the satiated ground is loathe to give it up That is until heat and time force it back out bringing with it the green goodness of even better stories

The bricks in our walls, chapter 5

On January 18, 2015October 19, 2015 By robertalanrifeIn Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formationLeave a comment

Polio had left him a garbled mess, wheelchair-borne, twisted and gnarled. But those ropy hands pushed faders, gain controls, EQ settings, among other things for a band I toured with in the mid-eighties, wait for it…Sonshine. Yup. No metaphor here. Just git ‘r done with classic cheesie Christianeasy. We spent most weekends traveling among the tiny wheat and cattle, grain elevator towns that dot the Alberta prairies. A dozen songs, a thousand laughs, and one almighty potluck at a time, Gerry guided us, gear and all, to wherever was next. He and his wife, Rose, hosted my fiancee and I for dinner, fellowship, Bible study, and prayer once a week. As is my pattern in everything I took copious notes, which I have to this day. I lost touch with Gerry many years ago.

I could use his voice these days.

1979. Halifax, Nova Scotia. I was on tour with Clan MacBain Pipe Band of Calgary. I’d been the youngest member in the band’s history, taking my place among the ranks at age twelve. My stage-parents, ever eager to secure my quickly expanding horizons, thought it a fine idea to let a twelve year old kid who looked nineteen sit among hardened whiskey ‘n beer maniacs in places too dark to see clearly the shenanigans of such ne’er do wells. Although unwise for personal reasons, it was one of the best opportunities afforded this pre-teen bagpiper for, on this particular day (I was then sixteen) I participated with the massed pipes and drums put in place to appropriately welcome Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother as she presented the colors to Canada’s Maritime Command. She later opened the International Gathering of the Clans of which our less than stellar collective proudly represented the MacBain Clan. I was barely sober enough to remember.

But I was there.

Later that same year I was on staff as bagpipe instructor for the Fort San Summer School of the Arts in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan. The Fort as it is called is the closest thing Saskatchewan might boast as a “resort” village. It was my seventh consecutive summer at the camp and my second as instructor, the youngest they’d ever had (illegally so, since I was too young to receive a “salary”). What made this year so unique was that I had the honor to sit under the tutelage of one of the greatest bagpipers in history, the late Donald MacLeod, M.B.E. It was like taking voice lessons from Freddy Mercury but someone half his height and twice his age. A two pack a day guy and hard drinker, Donald was also a man of genteel demeanor and humble affectation, despite his cosmic reputation among highland bagpipers. To sit in the audience and listen to this little giant perform for us was akin to sitting on Santa’s lap as a kid.

But with much deeper rewards.

Even before we’d been married a year, my wife Rae and I spent a few months living and working among a hearty and devoted group of Scottish Baptists in Edinburgh, Scotland. The year was 1989. We had barely managed to figure out how to live together under one roof let alone successfully navigate the complexities of hormone-crazed teenagers beside a large body of water. For, on this cool, blustery afternoon we decided it would be fun to be outside rather than stuffed in our flat. A couple of suburban Calgary kids who grew up in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains were no match for the beloved hooligans now under our charge. Things fell apart quickly as a deplorable lack of communication between Rae and I regarding game rules left us shouting “fuck you” at each other. So, while half of them refused to follow the confusing rules of a made up game, the other half were tossing each other into the ocean. What started as a delightful Baptist youth event quickly became a free for all wet t-shirt contest. Bouts of seawater-induced lung infections, allegations of inappropriate boy-girl interactions, and numerous angry phone calls later and…lesson learned.

I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Under construction

On January 17, 2015 By robertalanrifeIn Words...always wordsLeave a comment

Ice-ridden river

Match-making in shared moments

the winter’s broken promises

feel so effortlessly serene.

–

There is a rapprochement in

the submarine sun, submerged

and safe as a summer sonnet.

–

But unwieldy and withered

like grandma’s warm hands,

one hour grasps another.

–

So, I chuckled to myself,

author and beneficiary to

my own private joke.

–

And, with trickles and trembles,

thoughts crawled impatiently beneath

the ice-ridden river.

–

Maybe this is a good time

to tell this pen of disconnections

requiring a poet’s attention.

Become

On January 16, 2015 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

In those moments most resigned

to their own solemnity, another’s lips

sip the freeing drafts of good, and are

once again wetted with a taste of new days.

I won’t just topple from this

tower of precarious teetering

when someone else is waiting

to drink what remains of

cold and distant promises.

Instead, you scope out my limits

and find them insufficient

to hold all that has yet to come. Trickle

becomes flow

becomes gush.

And I become.

3 Core Values of a Future Christian Faith

On January 10, 2015January 10, 2018 By robertalanrifeIn Uncategorized3 Comments

In this excellent post, Mr. Dooley addresses some foundational thoughts I’ve been wrestling with for years now, many of those here on this blog. However, I do it with more ostentation, presumption and perhaps a touch of self-deception! He does so succinctly and with simplicity. I share his thoughts here.

Where truth and beauty meet

On January 8, 2015January 8, 2015 By robertalanrifeIn Words...always wordsLeave a comment

I’ve always been fascinated by all the intersections between truth and beauty. That exploration takes up much of my creative time. However, I give this one to a poet who says it better than most, Emily Dickinson.

I died for beauty, but was scarce

Adjusted in the tomb,

When one who died for truth was lain

In an adjoining room.

–

He questioned softly why I failed?

“For beauty,” I replied.

“And I for truth, – the two are one;

We brethren are,” he said.

–

And so, as kinsmen met a night,

We talked between the rooms,