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Month: August 2007

Beauty/Spirituality

Summer’s End

Posted on August 28, 2007 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

Summer’s coming to an end and people are revving up for fall. There’s fresh bitching in the coffee shop, I mean fresh. Corporations, companies, boss...

Christianity/Peace/Spirituality/Violence

Righteousness and Peace Kiss

Posted on August 27, 2007 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

 …righteousness and peace will kiss each other. (Psalm 85) Righteousness is a word that probably needs a reclamation project behind it. But here...

Christianity

Church Friendships

Posted on August 25, 2007 by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

The other evening over dinner, my brother-in-law made the observation that their friendships at the church they once attended, must have been based primari...

Christianity/Peace/Violence

Resentment, disarmed hearts, and the dew point of peace

Posted on August 21, 2007 by stephen t berg / 3 Comments

I’ve wondered sometimes, how much I contribute to keeping war alive. Does the steam of my half-conscious half-baked desires rise and a...

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Over the coming months, I’ll be slowly retiring Grow Mercy. This Easter marks 20 years and some 1500 posts. (And here, a deep bow to you, for reading and/or responding.) I’ll not, however, be retiring the impulse behind Grow Mercy, but will be shifting, exploring, following a hybridized urge, and a genre to suit. For me, what these decades have increasingly revealed is how writing is a spiritual path. Now, for whatever time and energy remains for me, I’ll be tilting more toward The Ragged Psalmist, still inchoate, but the handle feels like it fits. I do hope you’ll subscribe.

Why — The Ragged Psalmist?

Because some stubborn ember, still warm, compels me to write some cobbled songs — praise and lament, cries and sighs — and sound them back to the sacred Mystery.

To throw a wrench into a world geared up for business; to resist the moneychangers in their corporate temples — because poetry is political, and light is its administrative wing.

Because old lies and old words screw us over and must be remade to tell the truth; because our glossary of mockery needs burial, and the lexicon that’s left needs anointing.

To strive to honour the life of a sparrow; attend the spell of a dead star — whose light we still see; to feel, down to the bone, the quantum foam, we all flail in.

To thicken compassion and thin out aggression; to oppose injustice and hate in a way that excludes no one, not even the hater.

To let failure, discouragement, suffering and perishing have their say, without any spoon of bromide; to let joy, delight, and beauty come as they may.

To penetrate darkness and delusion — and so discover all this love in us.

Because mindfulness and mercy need constant oxygen.

Because in the time that’s left I want to tattoo the implications of our “forgiving victim” on the body suit of my heart.

Because reality points to unity — and we must hurry to catch up.

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