From pen to tea and back again

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Words...always words2 Comments

Fairly consistently, since about 1985, I’ve kept a journal. Well, I write in them. I write the stuff that happens to me in them, the stuff happening in and around me. It’s cathartic in one sense, having the cleansing effect of affecting a greater “soulishness” about the way I live and relate to my world. The visceral feel of pen on paper gives an immediate reminder of my mortality and the deeply sensory way God moves in us.

These days, however, I do most of my “writing” on computer and my pen is rusty, dulled through inactivity. It has sat, bored and undemanding, awaiting my return to saner pastures where the literary stream of consciousness I call writing gives voice once more to the complex confines of my inner circus. It is a life that always needs the light of day to prevent it from becoming just another cavernous, uninteresting drone of pedantic inactivity. Still, it acts as worthy opponent to any temptation toward self-aggrandizement. Try reading, honestly, your journalistic exploits twenty years after the fact and one is speedily confronted with the fact that the same shit I dealt with then is pretty much the same now, only with a few added layers of sophistication. This probably makes them more insidious since it is a common reality among us all to live out our lives, more or less, as the same person from start to finish. Our dissatisfaction with this reality dwells in kahoots with God’s unending desire to find us. The result is what we commonly call spiritual formation.

This morning’s exercise in stretching my spiritual muscles comes in the form of a feisty, deeply intelligent nun, sister Alice St. Hilaire. She is my friend, a fellow Ignatian and my spiritual director. If anyone can see through my often blinding hypocrisy it’s sister Alice. I have come to depend on this valuable insight lovingly offered. This is most likely because I live in a pretty consistent fog; a mushy, grey pudding of sleepy ambiguity and lack of focus all peppered liberally with self-doubt. There are always questions – so many questions, all of which become annoyingly absent the moment I sit down to sip tea and share God-talk with sister Alice.

She is never bothered by what bothers me. Am I to be intrigued or insulted by this? To be sure, it can be disconcerting whenever someone hears the most vulnerable bits of our lives and offers back ne’er a blink. It’s as though she is thinking, “alright, is that it, then? You’re all worked up about that?” A good spiritual director is one who listens to the story behind the story, ably stripping away the layers of our experience like Shrek’s onion. “Ogres have layers” he quips. If he only knew! They are adept at sensing where God might be in our unfolding narrative and never seem to be in a hurry to suggest broad, sweeping changes that might make things all better.

If I didn’t already have at least some rudimentary awakening to the things of God, such mental vapidity would seem cruelly disappointing. Of this one thing I am certain, God does not intrude upon our journey to provide certainty and a laundry list of perfectly satisfactory answers to all our queries. Countless souls, significantly greater than myself have discovered this long before me, Job being chief among them. If Job’s experience can be considered normative in any contemporary sense, we should take away the abiding idea that God does not exist to provide us with answers. Instead, God gives us better questions.

Every time I step into sister Alice’s quaint living room, the presence of God is thick in the place, literally dripping from the walls and windows and oozing out of the carpet. It smells faintly of whatever modest breakfast was consumed earlier and bears the years of humble struggle to survive in Yakima’s tough downtown, providing shards of light in the darkness there. Where my family and I dwell comfortably in “suburgatory” (thank you ABC) in our multi-bedroom home with our multi-vehicle mobility, she chooses to live in a quiet, unobtrusive peace in the midst of the despairing milieu of Yakima’s poor and destitute.

Sister Alice is fond of saying that the ways by which God has revealed Godself to me becomes who I am and paves the way for whatever may be next. If she is any indication of the ramifications of this statement, then I need to make the journey from pen to tea and back again. It is a trip exponentially greater than the sum of the miles involved. It is a foray into the heart of God.

un-muse: a non-poem

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic1 Comment

what is it I hear?

aloof and snooty, snubbing all who dare seek her way

sorting, one from another, lines dubious.

I look her way probing for

what?

drawing upon wells long dry oceans of dust

and cracks wearily worn upon my inner brow.

pondering the profound I pander to cliché

coaxing genies from bottles invisible.

I long to taste Dionysian delights

ag-ed

austere

perfect

but spew forth non-existent pleasures,

rhyming Morpheus himself to death.

wait I longer for words unheard

grasping for what refuses bit or bridle, lilt and song?

the mind yet uncaptured reels against itself

pursuing that which is beyond the chase

but, in the pursuing, doubles back to find…

the journey.


To sing or not to sing

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Words...always words1 Comment

Walking the boardwalk on a sunny, summer evening in a seaside tourist town – alone – feels a little like bicycling with one petal or being the only kid at the school dance who never has a dance partner. Places like this – Seaside, Oregon ironically, are meant to be shared. It’s not that one cannot enjoyably breath in the heady, highly sensory ocean ethos of such places on one’s own. I’ve done it many times before. An introvert by nature, I rather bask in the relative repose easily gleanable from such experiences. No, it’s quite simply the much deeper joy of cackling like friendly chickens over a reciprocated love.

There’s just something unnamable, almost intangible, in shared experiences like these. To be with others you know and who know you sprinkles a delight and sweetness on the top that magnifies the joy exponentially. C.S Lewis knew this well and alludes to it in the Four Loves. One’s love for someone or thing amplifies in the sharing thereof. The mutuality of “yeah, I get it” is one of life’s greatest gifts. It is, I suppose, a function of our naturally communal human nature. To share is natural when we love something and find it difficult to articulate to ourselves alone.

Either because I am indecisive when it comes to choosing hobbies or because I am not in possession of anything close to a reasonable ability to say ‘no’ to anything remotely interesting, I have a host of varied spheres in which I have lived, moved and shared. One such world is the reason for my brief sojourn to this little Pacific paradise. I am attending a weeklong workshop for choral conductors.

I have had a profound appreciation for the choral tradition and its sublime repertoire my whole life. I recall with some reverie singing in the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church youth choir as a young elementary school kid. Although a right pain in the ass to the conductor I am forever grateful for her patience in opening the door to music I could never fully describe.

Similar to the annoying guy forever showing pictures of his kids on the subway, I am left with another thing I love to share (foist really) at every opportunity. Even then at around eleven years old I was equally intrigued with Henry Purcell, Johannes Brahms and Palestrina as I was with Simon and Garfunkel, Elvis Presley or Rush. My piano teacher at the time thought it commendable. My parents thought it quaint. To the older kids at school it forever sealed my fate as the tall, geeky brown-noser who perhaps fancied himself a cut above the rest.

Turned up noses meant nothing however as the first notes of some a cappella chamber choir began to nip at the edges of my soul, expanding it to be singed by the burning beauty of voices shared in common cause. For those who have yet to be entranced by such beauty, caught in the choral clutches of grace to which you are a contributor, I pray one day you find it even as I have. We’ll have one more thing whose beauty grows more in the sharing.

Of life, love and bagpipes

On By robertalanrifeIn Words...always words2 Comments

I am a Highland Bagpipe player or piper in street talk. It is an instrument with which I have had a love-hate relationship for almost forty years now. For the longest time I wondered what might have gone through my parents’ minds when, at eight years of age, I loudly proclaimed my overweening desire to begin lessons immediately. That is, until I mused lately on the fact that both of my sons are rock drummers. I’m sure that bears at least some resemblance.

Perhaps not.

The Great Highland Bagpipe (GHB) as it is called by the musicology muck-a-mucks is an instrument uniquely designed to be heard. A perfect wake-the-dead alarm, they have been used for centuries to alert clans of forthcoming gatherings, oncoming battles and soon coming dignitaries. A piper on a hill is not just a cliché or quaint tourist post card. It does in fact typify much of bagpipe history. Moreover, as either clever tactic or cruel joke (depending upon whether one is a piper or not), the bagpipes were always the first line of defense in any conflagration. Apparently, troop commanders figured they could simultaneously amuse, entertain and confuse their enemy with a burly, red-haired, stumpy man in a dress, himself attacking the weapon of choice and tossing note after screaming note at them as a monkey flinging musical feces.

Like an octopus missing some legs the GHB consists of three drones – a bass and two tenors; a blowpipe through which ample air must pass into the bag acting as reservoir for this purpose, and a chanter that accommodates fingers eager to surprise the world with music both raunchy and wild, pristine and sweet. Heard under a best-case scenario in which all of the varied factors of its engineering converge successfully and wielded by someone with a modicum of experience lassoing them into submission, it is undoubtedly the most mystically beautiful thing I’ve yet heard. However, the usual encounter of the average passerby is a rather less than desirable auditory experience not unlike a grumpy orangutan humping an unsuspecting cat on the rush-hour freeway after a losing football game. That said, I confess such a description as that which I have yet to see.

Yet, it is what many might actually prefer when they hear this baffling instrument. It is, under any circumstances, an instrument that, like a crying baby on an airline, demands center stage. It is a sound that captured me even as a boy of seven years old. I well recall my first visceral experience with the bagpipe.

I grew up in a tiny bungalow in Calgary, Alberta the adopted son of a brewery worker and his house-wife, my mother. As I, along with my younger brother and sister, continued to grow, it became abundantly apparent that our consistent brushing of shoulders would only lead to inner-family disaster. My father set about building me a bedroom in our not-quite-finished basement. For some fifteen years to follow it would be my sanctuary – my monastery and the place where I found music, booze, girls (don’t mention that to my parents, they only know about the previous two) and ultimately salvation.

The spring before my eighth birthday I moved in. Kismet. I was also sick as a dog. My parents in true devoted fashion brought me hot soup, books (I’m a total nerd) and best of all, a TV to help wile away the hours spent in sniffly, coughing boredom. Changing channels one afternoon I happened upon a presentation of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, an annual display of pomp, circumstance, bright lights, booming cannons and bagpipes – lots of bagpipes. It is filmed live at Edinburgh Castle. From the very first sound I was hooked. I cried through the entire thing, later asking my parents if I could learn to do what I had just seen but thought I had dreamed.

A love affair had begun.