Author: robertalanrife

I have spent the better part of my life as a professional musician. Primarily, that has meant the fun and challenging world of church music. Most recently, I have transitioned out of my role as worship and music director for Yakima Covenant Church, Yakima, Washington to global service in Edinburgh, Scotland. I'm a singer-songwriter, liturgist, poet, and writer. I love words. I love to read them. I love to write them. Most of all, I love the many intersections, like a sacramental tapestry, of life, liturgy, literature, the arts, and spiritual formation...oh, and I love haggis.

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (Day 22)

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

At this point, the title of this challenge is, for me, a misnomer. I haven’t even come close to posting a poem a day. However, in an act of profound self-abasement and self-care, I humbly submit to you that we’ve moved into a new flat. Phew, monum explicandum out of the way, let’s just get on with it, shall we?

Day 22 –

Moving

The fragrance of a flower remains,

regardless of the address of her rootedness;

beauty intact, bees to groom her, admirers to

love her still attract. Her voluptuous shape

and symphonious aperture, from the mouths

of old and young alike, still yield a

satisfying, “aaaahhh.”

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (6, Day 11)

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Day 11 –

My simple, but genuine, thank you to our life in Edinburgh…

A protrusion of gratitude

Cloaked in landscapes of light, remunerations

of remembrance brought clear in the rehearsing.

That literature of land partnered with time

makes for fragrant mornings in settings

of coal-kissed stone, unsullied

by lesser things.

No more exile here –

just a protrusion of gratitude.

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (Day 10)

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

One more

One more day to figure it out.

One more day to turn over the wrong tables

for the right reasons;

correct the wrongs spray-painted on crumbling walls,

the signposts of injustice.

One more day to find the right god,

tattooed on the arms wrapped around our latent lusts.

One more day to cry the tears meant for another,

for ourselves, for our children’s children, still gasping for

breath under the rubble of a thousand bad decisions.

One more attempt to set the bones,

broken, dislocated from too much heavy lifting

of things not our own.

One more song to sing, croaked out

to friend and foe, neighbour and fiend,

with words yet to come.

One more choice, to free, to find, to follow, to forget

what else might surely come.

One more day for one more day,

for one more.

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (4, Day 9)

On By robertalanrifeIn Prayers & Liturgy, Theology / Spirituality, Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Day 9 –

Lament – A Psalm About Faces

O Lord, God of faces, where now is your face?

And why have you hidden from us your gaze?

Where once we walked together,

now we thrash and reel and hack.

Darkness has become our only ally;

and hopelessness our truest friend.

For those of insolence and hatred rule over us;

the ruthless and ragged become our destroyer.

Therefore, falsehood and lies bind us;

and the absence of truth shackles us.

We have become party with wolves and savages,

those without conscience or care for the poor.

They lash out from behind empty eyes

to oppress the widow and orphan,

the immigrant and the voiceless.

All that is good, pleasing, and right is set aside;

truth and love are traded for lies and hate,

victim to the victimizers.

And through their shame have we become a byword,

a cause for mockery among the nations.

We hear them cry out in the streets,

and moan among the people of injustice against them.

But it is they who are unjust,

with lies have they clothed themselves.

How long, O Lord? How long must we watch our children caged,

and our future torn apart?

How much more treachery must we endure at their hands?

Save us, O God, from their filth;

release us from their grotesque machinations.

Turn your eyes toward us for we are weary and broken;

tearful and confused.

Find a place again among us where all that was good

can again be good; where the darkness again is dark.

Rise up, once more, gracious Lord, and be our protector;

the light behind our eyes,

the light behind our faces;

the face behind all faces.

For we are your people,

and you are our God.

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (3)

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

Day 7 –

What if?

What if we just stuck to whatever came first?

Right before us in time and space-

the faces, friends, fiends life gave us?

What if we didn’t wait to run, feel, fight, forget-

took our days and hours, minutes and decades

like a summer drink from the garden hose?

What if roses really were red, violets violently blue-

and we noticed?

What if the wax from our candles had time

to run down, scattering itself in fluid memory,

cast out on wooden tables?

What if I finished this poem

and there weren’t any more to follow?

What if that was okay?

What if what ifs weren’t so frightening?

Then, could we laugh and turn the page?

November – A Poem a Day Challenge (2)

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing PoeticLeave a comment

In the many conflagrations which rage around the globe, in some sense we are all complicit in the death of another, somewhere. We can never see ourselves in the oversimplification of projected sainthood, political correctness, assumed innocence, or erroneous belief that “God is on our side.” We truly are our brother’s keeper and must all weep for the other at the level ground of Christ’s cross.

“Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Day 2-

Why do you smile at gunfire?

Why do you smile at gunfire,

when spilt blood smells like

a bullet from your own gun?

November – A Poem a Day Challenge

On By robertalanrifeIn Words...always wordsLeave a comment

I don’t write much poetry these days. Partly a lack of inspiration. Partly laziness. Partly a narrower life hallway not as friendly to poetry construction. Okay, mainly laziness. Good friend and fellow poet, Kelly Belmonte over at All Nine (please do check out her wonderful stuff!) has thrown down the gauntlet, literarily speaking. She’s has taken up the challenge to post a poem a day, or at least, a number of times throughout November.

Dearest Kelly, I take up that challenge. I do so in the simplest possible manner: Haiku. Nineteen syllables more than the ridiculously long stretch of dry, poetry-less crickets from me of late!

So, here goes.

Day 1 –

November

I saw what November press’d

against her bosom –

Spring, wrapped up tight in Winter.

Islands of the Evening – A Review

On By robertalanrifeIn Book Reviews, Theology / Spirituality2 Comments

What follows is my Goodreads review of this book. The amount of eclectic material that crosses my desk and ultimately finds its way to my GR ‘to-read’ pile can feel overwhelming at times, dizzying even. So much of it follows the same old patterns, character and story arcs both predictable and tired, tropes emerging like prairie calf-ruts can leave one wanting more.

In this case, my spirit just drank heaven from a garden hose. This post-evangelical, Celtic mystic sits in dust and ashes akin to a post-coital haze after mounting this treasure of a book (sorry, too much?).

Islands of the Evening: Journeys to the Edge of the World by Alistair Moffat

My rating: 5 of 5 stars (6, but I was only given the option of 5)

I read a lot of books. Fewer than some. More than others. I’ve come to expect certain things – peaks and troughs, mounting action and denouement, savages routed, heroes touted, love lost and regained, bad guys, good guys, undetermined guys; sometimes cliché, sometimes quaint, tropes and gropes and the like all tumbling together to form what eclectic fare has become my Goodreads history.

I’m no literary expert, nor do I pretend to have anything more than a reasonable grasp of specificities or requirements of genre. But I know what I like.

From time to time comes a book so beautifully crafted, so nuanced and unashamed to go to those deeper, unexplainable places of angst and ache, anger and anxiety, passion and purity. Alistair Moffat’s “Islands of the Evening” was, for me, that book. Part memoir, part travel blog, part history and hagiography, Moffat takes one on a truly remarkable journey into Scotland’s distant past. It is carved equally in stone and moss as it is blood and devotion of those “white-martyr” saints intent on braving the elements in pursuit of union with their God.

Perhaps most notable is how powerfully a man who claims no discernible faith or even belief in any God can write about the God he claims not to embrace. I leave this here where you can decide for yourself.

“Even though churches are emptying and prohibitions are being dismantled, there is an enduring consensus across Europe, in the Americas and elsewhere about decency, good behaviour, about what constitutes right and wrong. Overwhelmingly that consensus was formed by the centuries of Christianity. As doctrine and belief evolved, and as far too much blood was spilled, the Church largely formed our morality…the teachings of the Church have been enormously determinant in the operation of a generally accepted code of conduct both in private and public life.”

An atheist wrote this. So, for God’s sake (or yours, whatever), read this beautiful book.

View all my reviews