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Month: March 2008

Uncategorized

A Girardian Cartoon

Posted on March 13, 2008 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

Oh, delightful, a cartoon for me and Rene. Check it out here. Thanks Len. Technorati Tags: Rene Girard, Grow Mercy, R2E (aka ‘The Road’)

Christianity/Religion

Caught in the 1971 Saskatoon Revival

Posted on March 12, 2008 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

In 1971 there was a Christian revival in Saskatchewan. I was caught in it, swept up in it like a broken straw in a prairie gust. My uncle, his two sons and I dr...

Christianity/Politics/Religion

The Church, Feminism, Dorothy Sayers

Posted on March 11, 2008 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

My mother isn’t a feminist. She was born a few years after women were given the right to vote, that is, when women became “legally human.” (Ch...

Beauty

Ocean Jazz

Posted on March 7, 2008 by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

We walked on the beach, pushed along by a baby gale, and I thought the sun was surprised to be shinning. The ocean churned out frustration. Or perhaps it was si...

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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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