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On May 14, 2014May 23, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation2 Comments

May 14. Our Anniversary. This time last year I posted the most popular piece this blog has ever seen. Thank you. This year, it’s my wife’s turn. After all, she’s more the real deal than I’ll ever be, as writer…and human. To wit…

Our epic romantic comedy begins in a High School English Class in 1982, when I (possibly the inspiration for Bridget Jones but with more klutz and better hair) switch high schools in my last semester. The English teacher reads a poem by one of her past students. The best she’s ever had. (A rumour persists that the student and the teacher did indeed ‘have’ each other, but it was unfounded). This former student’s sister sits in front of me in the class. She winces at the mention of her brother for she Rae had endured comparisons throughout her public school career.

The quality of writing in this geo-political poem, something about beavers and eagles, leaves me completely gobsmacked. My 17 year old self thought I had some writing talent, not stellar, but better than average. How could someone my age possess such staggering talent? I dip my toes in the Sea of Self Defeat, a place I would later wade and nearly drown. How many days or weeks it was between the time I hear that poem and then sit with my parents on the sofa, just before graduating from high school, to be informed of my mother’s colon cancer, I can’t recall with accuracy.

Four years later, after a recent break up with one of the many Johns I dated, (the last had a thing for blondes) my Pastor tells me about a student of his in a music class at college, Rob. Not long after, said music student shows up to our church (enter Bridget Jones’ misunderstanding scene): with his fiancée! Who is blonde! Chatting with her, she is pleasant. And, I discover they attend my BFF’s church where BFF’s father is the Vicar.

While away at college, I learn through a letter from BFF that Rob has called off his wedding to blonde fiancée. As BFF and Rob are both much better musicians than me, I ask if she is interested in him. “No,” she says, “He’s a player.” (As it turns out, BFF has confused one girl, different hats). The important point to note is that I hold very firm opinions on country music, camo fabric, animal prints, and players.

One evening, I am out at a mystery supper at BFF’s church. Rob attends. Alone. He, BFF and I carpool between dinner locations. I find him engaging and witty. My mother is weeks away from losing her battle with cancer and I had great need of ‘witty’. I remind myself frequently that he is a player, and his new GF is a student, NON-BLONDE, opera singer. When he learns my mother is dying of cancer, he hands me his phone number with an offer of mutually consoling conversation. “My father recently died of cancer. I understand this. If you ever want to talk….” I am touched, but will never call, because, say it with me, ‘he is a player.’

We discover our cars are parked beside each other and, what started as a quick goodbye, ends as a thirty-minute conversation about the ‘c’ word. And, we share what it is like to be 22 and watch a parent die. Though all of my friends have tried to be compassionate, he is the first person who actually understands what I feel. A bond was forming. The next day I tell my mother how much fun I had the night before and she is pleased. Two weeks later, at my mother’s funeral, BFF tells me, “one day, I know God is going to bless your socks off and good will come from this.”

I adjust, (not well), to attending University in Calgary, and grief. I develop a few crushes to provide minor distractions from my grief. A snowy November evening, several of us decide to go out for cheesecake. We carpool. (Who knew we were so green in 1986)? Suddenly the car door opens and BFF pushes me onto the icy pavement. “Rob needs someone to carpool with him.” Frankly, at this point, my interest in Rob is strictly platonic. I have two other crushes on the burner. We chat non-stop, and I became more fascinated with him as the evening goes on, especially when he tells me how he ended up in jail after a rock concert. A few years previous, that might have been me. I discover once again, that we both possess a saucy, British sense of humour that plays off each other well. Rob, I later learn, kept thinking, ‘damn, she’s funny, I wish demure, Christian, opera singer girlfriend was more like Rae.”

Painful days ensue in my grief process prior to my first Christmas without Mam. December 28, at my little Baptist church, I‘m surprised to see Rob. I’m even more surprised to learn he is going to be doing a choir practicum over the next several months. Things are looking up.

That evening, a large group of friends diminishes to six. Only Rob and I are left and briefly discuss our experiences with grief. Then, to my utter disbelief, he tells the group how he wishes opera singer GF wasn’t so perfect. “Why can’t she trip, spill, fart, or drop something? Maybe speak stupid words at the wrong time?” No man, and I repeat, no man, has EVER stated these as desirable qualities in a woman!

Fast forward several months. Rob has ended relationship with Opera Singer GF, and we have developed a sweet friendship that has slowly blossomed into a romance. The first time I am at his mother’s house, we are standing in the living room and I see a family picture over a piano. “I know that girl,” I say, unsure of where I have seen his sister. He tells me her name.

“YOU, it was YOU, who wrote the geo-political poem about the beaver and the eagle?!” I am, again, gobsmacked. Five years later, I still remember not just the poem, but how impressed I was with the writing. A year later, at our wedding, we pay tribute to the parents we lost to cancer. When I return to my seat, BFF has tears in her eyes, “I told you God was going to bless your socks off!”

2012. Twenty-four swashbuckling, adventurous years of marriage filled with many epic misunderstandings, juicy secrets, a rinse-repeat of colon cancer, this time with my father, and two handsome, talented sons later, I turn my back on the Sea of Self-Defeat. I remember my love for writing, and I begin writing a novel. Frankly, our romance had waned, and writing a handsome hero is like having an affair, without the mess! But as I rediscover my love for writing, I also rediscover my love for Rob. I have always been in awe of his many talents, but perhaps he needed to hear me say it again. He listens patiently as I read chapters aloud. We start acting out characters and scenes (mmmm), one of which lands me in the hospital with a dislocated kneecap after trying to demonstrate spy ‘gravity grips!’

Today is our 26^th Wedding Anniversary. I am still deeply moved by his writing. I am more moved by him. And he is, without doubt, the funniest man I know and the best I’ve ever had. If we’re unavailable, we are probably rehearsing a scene.

Try not to think of it

On May 13, 2014May 14, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing Poetic6 Comments

Bent shoulders squeeze tight against the

seven-layer’d Sheol, curtained against

a world, upturned, and studiously

oblivious to a two-breasted sparrow,

with shark-teeth and winter’d schemes.

Words, like rainless clouds hopscotch over

solemnities, trinkets, experiments, names.

They jostle for supremacy with other shelved

things, like those good ideas, old friendships,

and Dad’s breakfast table dreams – the talk

of little boys of unwhisker’d pedigree.

Watch a man’s skin curl under

flame while doing your nails, and then shrug

away the smell before answering

your phone. It could mean playground

talk, pajama time, and networking to

stop the voices.

Still, hiding there under the clock,

breathless and stoic, that pushes only red and

black and the carbon of sweaty

palms, are the patient lines on an ambivalent

face. Come the creaks and queries and

counting petals on the tired

sidewalk. But garden variety promises, wrapped

in gum wrappers are stuck in pigeon shit, refusing

release into the Cadillac morning on a

farm truck day. So, flow down trucker

tears, leathered and unbidden,

like remembrances of the somnolent road.

Those kind of tears.

Image: Circe by Wright Baker

There is a place

On May 11, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

There is a place,

under the porch where the rattlesnakes are snoring

with one eye open, the other one hungry.

…

There is a time,

when the lush day-damp dissipates into a certain thinness

of corduroy dreams pushed up against unpainted walls.

…

There is a place,

where the shadows have darker shadows

and light is the unwelcome uncle, drunk before drinks.

…

There is a time,

after 1963, when the streetlamps meant something

more than the start of a restless evening.

…

There is a place,

where rye ‘n water and pickled herring and asparagus spears

shared secrets to little boys of parent parties.

…

There is a time,

sandwiched somewhere between lunch money and

shit wine in a coffee cup when dime-store dreams were enough.

…

There is a place,

of a certain ripe solitude, a kind of naked jamboree

when conversation stalls but silence takes over.

…

There is a place. It was not then.

There is a time. It was here.

Becoming Our Own Horizons

On May 9, 2014May 9, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation5 Comments

A new page.

Turning over a new leaf.

Hitting re-set.

Born again.

We use many terms that say essentially the same thing. Whatever lame or insufficient metaphor we choose to throw at the numinous mystery we call “life” sometimes offers its own prophetic tribute to the new reality to which it points. Sadly, there are times in my life where, upon deeper reflection, it comes to light just how dark I can be. Just when things begin to feel a bit more swept up and tidy, I find more nasty shards of the shiny mirror I misunderstood to be my life. A broken window is perhaps more accurate.

It is disconcerting at best, fractious and maddening at worst, when one is given a shocking awakening, at once freeing and burdensome; welcome, as it is unbidden. Such moments of epiphany, although rare, provide stark backdrop against which to see more clearly the indefinable truths by which we seek to live well. Just when there appears to be some small forward motion in the dangerous journey of formation, I am rudely reminded of the exponentially growing need for that very process. Although not entirely without joy or hope in bite-sized chunks, it reveals itself as the Law of Diminishing Returns.

Like the horizon, always moving at the same pace I am, coming to terms with my need for change and the slippery slope of progress toward it, never gets any closer. By definition, one never gets closer to the horizon (well, unless you are a theoretical physicist, existential nihilist, or Hallmark card). Beyond this one are countless others just the same. Only the scenery changes, never the distance. It will always be, in mystical (and, in my case, practical) terms at least, unreachable. What we can say definitively however is we have more miles on our spiritual odometers.

In the enigmatic, mostly squishy, process of sanctification, merely having more miles and less tread does not automatically make us wiser. It may only make us older and more run down, with less resale value. Even, at times, assigned to the ditch. It’s not in the miles alone. It’s in the degree to which we pay attention to whatever road is opening before us; wherever that road may be leading (if we can even know that much.)

“Are we there, yet?”

“How much farther?”

“I’m bored.”

These are the kinds of questions we ask as juveniles who, lacking a mature ability to remain patient, merely await the destination. The journey itself is something to get through as quickly as possible. It is most unfortunate that this is where most contemporary evangelicalism has grown wearily stuck. We miss the largest part of the gospel in our frantic need for geographical clarity post mortem. We speak often of going to heaven but seldom of waiting for heaven in us.

That said, the relative safety afforded us in the knowledge of ultimate blessedness in Christ allows for colossal failure along the way. Our journey to the destination allows the richly ubiquitous love of God to drive us, lead us and await us on the journey “there.” And, what of “there” anyway? In the Christian enterprise are many “theres” and yet one “there.” In every case, our “arrival” is guaranteed by grace, at least in an ultimate sense. In kingdom terms, even if not yet real ones, we stand where we are, looking at ourselves at the edge of our own horizons.

We no longer need to fear whether we may miss where we’re going. That is secured by grace, once and always. Our many mini-arrivals, though, still met with grace, are less certain this side of heaven – whatever that is. But, in spite of the many ambiguities of, and forks in, the roads we’re given, it is always and forever our arising to those roads that, in themselves, become our horizon. As those greater than I like to say, we are both on the way and already there.

In the gospel, we become our own horizon.

Images from here and here

Writing…about not being able to write

On May 4, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Words...always words5 Comments

Oh, what a vexing irony: to sit and type out words about a losing game of hide ‘n seek with words. I will certainly not be the final voice on finding a lost literary voice. It’s just that, well, I didn’t think it would happen to me. So soon at least.

Shit, I’m only fifty years old. I’d hoped this wouldn’t happen until I had left an entire generation agog over my mastery of linguistic flare, and deftly adroit word choice. This is what happens to the aging novelist with one good one under her belt but finds herself paralyzed producing a second. Not me! I’ve yet to be published. By that I mean, more than the occasional University research paper, blogging, and the guy with the cleverest quips in birthday cards. As a writer, I am reaching for more than the guy with the best Facebook posts.

Shit, I’m already fifty years old. Shouldn’t I have something significant to say by now? One would think that this well-earned silver crop of thinning hair and commensurate wrinkles might have shoveled a thing or two into the loading bay. This sagging, white ass is well deserved I say. It’s watery impression sadly shaped into my favorite writing chair.

So, what happens when the words dry up? When the notes that come from pen or strings or keys no longer woo, titillate or otherwise amuse? When, instead, they are the stale, reused, overused bag ‘o tricks of a modern hack? When nothing sings anymore, but mutters imperceptibly under its own muffled (bad) breath? When one becomes a caricature of oneself – a sorry lump of stigma buried under borrowed artistry?

Can good art descend as easily from the ordinary, unadorned lives we live at kitchen tables, card games, and board meetings as it does from our bungee jump moments? Does one’s life, in order to become pregnant with words needing midwifery, require the overheated backdrop of anger, anxiety or joy? Perhaps then the super cooled, glacial faces of fear, pain, doubt, foreboding, even despair? Can the altruistic and universal issue from us as easily when our feet are ablaze with the dance of heaven and running onward to new adventure as when they’re encased in the cement of toilsome drudgery?

Men love when women laugh at their sorry ass jokes. I’m convinced that far too many women are far too polite as to give our jokes what they deserve – looks of disgust or grunts of disapproval. My wife still laughs at mine, oddly. I think, in part at least, it is because she’s often funnier than I am and feeds well off my fumbling attempts at humor. Mine is the bump and set. Hers the spike. Mine the missed lay-up. Hers the rim hang slam. She knows exactly what I’m about to answer when someone asks a question or tells me something either stupid or clever. If that was you, nothing personal.

My tricks are used up. Nothing surprises anymore. Little takes her by storm. This is okay in a good marriage. Not so much if one is the keynote speaker for a plenary address. Tell a bad joke to a packed house met by stony silence just once and you’ll never forget it (or so I’ve heard).

The flaccid, often noodle-y jokes that belch out of me these days are a good example of what I’m after here. To the uninitiated they may still speak or cause a chuckle or two. But, they’re not exactly earth-shattering stuff by any stretch. And every writer wants that – to be earth shattering, hugely entertaining, eternally perceptive, generously intuitive; all topped off with that orgasmic metaphor that leaves the reader with tousled hair and a far off look. We want to write that paragraph that causes readers to light one up afterwards.

I feel stuck, like the last dander of spring, clinging perniciously to the dandelion stalk refusing to admit summer. I’m that solitary bat hanging to the brick wall humming happily to myself while everyone else made it to Batman’s photo shoot an hour ago. Okay, so I exaggerate to make my point.

As a musician and songwriter, I’ve crossed this bridge before (there, see what I mean?) and what I’ve discovered is there are only three ways to overcome composing dry spells. One, write. Two, write. Three…well, you get my point. Best of all is when I’ve emerged from the songwriting dust heap I am always the better for it and have generally gleaned something helpful along the way.

So, here I am. I write to be a gooder writer, writing even gooderer stuff than ever before. It may feel awkward, like walking straight with one leg shorter than the other. But, at least it will be. I will have refused to be stifled by something, which, itself, refuses imprisonment. It barks insistently for release into the atmosphere it craves for its own freedom.

I’m not asking so much for the words as to dive deeper into the life from which those words await the pickaxe to dig them out. I don’t ask for inspiration as much as consternation that what comes has passed through the honing tapestry of a life, fully lived. I don’t ask for clever turn of phrase (well, that’s only partly true) as much as an honest churn of thought, where the ambivalence, arrogance, innocence and yearning that, together, form my life, blend and cohere into a face and a name to call my own.

Did I mention I’m only fifty?

Images shamefully taken from here

Thoughts gathering. Still listening. Longing.

On May 2, 2014May 2, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Words...always wordsLeave a comment

He strode as heir apparent to a memory

in galoshes filled with dust

and leaves of threadbare

thoughts.

Gravel, like a road of broken glass,

bundles itself together in

tousled lumps of the old roads,

gathering.

Footfalls, freshly faltering,

appraise themselves of what had

gone before – like a wagging tongue, never

still.

Even the magpies mock their

cowboy choir – their country for

cajoling cowards, crowing without

listening.

Crumpled into corners of hours,

crouch the days of famished weeks. Years

rake up from the ditch, staring down his borrowed

longing.

Image found here

Finding a voice without one

On May 1, 2014May 1, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

He ran out of words right about the time

his hope hit a wall like winter in June.

Lucidity escaped through loss, and

a life runs its twisting course

beside another’s parallel stream, just out of view.

Where to the waning West became of

words that once transfixed golden-souled,

silver-penned pirates of the journey?

They scaled the hull of pitch and yaw ships

laden with gifts from the sand of distant shores.

There it is again, once song of the Muse,

now the Siren’s cry like a whip of lustrous thought,

piercing ears, thirsty for the music of sojourn.

“Listen, listen,” she sings and, by singing, hopes

to be free from something that never bound her.

He would answer but his voice is drowned

in the shriller insistence of a mermaid’s lonely tale.

A single wave-tossed rock provides her stage.

But loudly though she sings, louder still the waves

that divide. All others are silenced against her solemn tones.

Laboring under misapprehension of invisible dangers,

she notices not that all ships have left. The song she

knows well has merely chased all hope of rescue.

Soon, her shrinking solo speaks no longer to gods nor men,

for without a voice, there are no more voices.

Picture found here

Eyes for the Alley

On April 29, 2014April 28, 2014 By robertalanrifeIn Beauty, Christian spirituality, Christianity, faith, Lent 2014, Lenten Guest Blog Series, life together, sacramental living, spiritual formation1 Comment

The journey of Lent starts in ashes and ends at Easter’s empty tomb. The leftovers of our charred and dying selves have been replanted in ground upon whom walks, impossibly, someone newly alive. Our ashes, only the carbon possibility of something else, leads instead to some One else. Emptiness, spent and without purpose, leads to emptiness, welcome and full of promise.

If we manage to let the entire Lenten journey of self-inspection do its work in us, we will not only benefit from the two ends of the equation but will have as our journey the very steps of the One whose ignominious death ended in glorious life. The Jesus Way becomes our ‘way’ with ‘forever’ thrown in as a bonus.

Easter has come and gone leaving both questions and answers in its wake. We’ve risen along with Christ, and all that means. In the backwater stench of our lives, those void, stale places, we still wonder how such a humungous mystery could possibly shape us.

How this Lenten road, the arena of spiritual formation thereby, and the lost ones we find on the shoulder has been the subject of our inquiry. We have titled this series, “Eyes in the Alley.” This signifies a need for honesty and vulnerability in the midst of our precarious, sometimes sinister lives. Whatever language a person uses to describe their experience of the Holy, combined with the mess and mystery of our own experience, leads us to ask the primary questions; questions that might, in turn, lead us to the streetlight of hope and safety. To Jesus.

We who are “the convinced” have ready access to centuries of holy dictionary and sacred stage upon whom great men and women have acted out their influential lives. We have learned to find comfort in the theological work of our forebears even as we engage in our own. But, as is so often the case, we can quickly “Pharisee-ize” this good stuff to such a degree that it becomes insurmountable to the very souls most in need of its Jesusy nutrients. Without our even recognizing it, we turn the language of freedom and rescue into the insider language of church potlucks, the monastery, or the country club. Although often unintended, where bridges are needed, we build gates. Instead of a boat, we offer an anchor.

Christianne Squires helped us do this by learning to see, along with her, Jesus hanging out in “the dark and dingy places…Jesus with his back against our wall.”

The meandering faith journey of Bob Holmes resulted in his deepest discovery: the love of a God who is love.

Valerie Hess reminds us of the deep restoration to be found in the Gospel by means of confessing our powerlessness, similar to the life-changing experience of those in A.A. She equates the resulting freedom to hitting a re-do button, birthing for us a new beginning.

That very love, made fully human in real time, enters an extraordinary conversation with an unexpected woman by a well. Her humble responses to his unexpected questions leave her empowered and rejoicing. Dr. Elaine Heath recognizes just how purposeful and powerful such a story can be for women even today whose sense of shame and rejection can overwhelming.

Tara Owens’ story reminds us, once our fences come down, we discover grass really is greener on the other side since it involves the lawn of someone else, just as lonely as we are. Where there are no obstacles, either real or imagined between us, friendship and community result. Complacent proximity becomes warm friendship.

Much of what I have been struggling to say about what we struggle to say is the subject of Giff Reed’s piece. In it he makes the important observation, “The problem comes when the same language that created the space begins to define its boundaries of in ways that deny ‘outsiders’ the ability to understand, engage, and embrace the God we are attempting to talk about in the first place.” His conclusion is an apt one, “God’s grace is grand enough to make up for any deficiency of description.”

A fitting denouement to our Lenten exploration is found in Valerie Dodge Head’s heartwarming story of finding Jesus in a homeless man, whose presence allowed her and her granddaughter to be ‘present’ to him. For them, laying a blanket on a smelly, hungry, tired stranger became the Eucharist. “It felt as if the three of us had just shared the Eucharistic feast together, on Holy Thursday, at the park, in ordinary life. God had awakened me to something so good, so true and so beautiful.”

Whatever we don’t readily understand, we submerge under the waters of our safe controls. To gaze into a night sky, exploded in the shrapnel of light year stars, is to have our tiny selves contextualized rightly. We are given perspective that leaves us wondering more than calculating, praying more than dissecting. The same is true when we gaze at the mysteries of Easter.

As I see it, our task as people of faith is to help another’s jaw fall agape, like our own, in the humble fear that accompanies awe. This gives birth to…something; faith perhaps, or longing; perhaps even seeking. Our theology, our orthodoxy, our language, our shared values-all of these is important. But, a beautiful life lived fully and well brings more glory to God and more souls to the table than all of the above combined.

Therefore, armed with the very love of God in Christ Jesus, let us strive to enter into the Gate, named Jesus, with that love writ large upon our lives. It will be the most convincing Gospel argument for those for whom mystery means darkness, the cloud of unknowing feels like the smog of unseeing and lectio divina just means homework. If that is the result of our Eastertide, then “I believe that God the Father, almighty, maker of heaven and earth, will keep them coming…until we all wake up.”*

May it be so.