Skip to content
Grow Mercy
  • Home
  • About
  • Articles
  • Benedictine
  • Profile
  • Books
  • Subscribe
  • Contact

Month: August 2008

Spirituality

No fixed schedule

Posted on August 27, 2008 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

Two women of indeterminate age sit facing each other, alternatively lifting banana bread and porcelain cups filled with coffee to their mouths–all the whi...

Poetics/Spirituality

Very tall grass

Posted on August 22, 2008 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

I walk in very tall grass. Its green is beginning to drain and I smell the colour orange. The ripening heads are over my head. They tilt and swing. The grass st...

Benedictine/Spirituality

Acedia the noon-day demon

Posted on August 20, 2008 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

These are the dog days, the fog days, the automaton days, days of sleepy restlessness when the vice of shallowness snuffs out the bit of light I normally cast o...

Beauty/Peace/Poetics

Minutia

Posted on August 15, 2008 by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

Today I wear a white T-shirt with nothing on it. I wear it blank as an affront to this world of mind-arresting slogans. And I wonder…in an age of near rea...

Posts pagination

1 2 Next »

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.

Follow Grow Mercy on Twitter

Follow @GrowMercy

Find me on Facebook

Stephen T Berg | 

Archives

Categories

Links and Blogs

  • Alison Hawthorne Deming
  • Andrea House
  • Benjamin Hertwig
  • Bleeding Heart Art Space
  • Calm Things
  • Connie Howard's Blog
  • Dana Wylie
  • Dave Von Bieker
  • Edward Van Vliet
  • Geez Magazine
  • Inscape Life Coaching
  • James Alison
  • Joyce Harback
  • Kelly Sheperd
  • Laurie MacFayden
  • Makes/Me/So/Digress
  • Mi Vida Landscapes
  • Michael Gravel
  • Natural Presence
  • Orion Magazine
  • Romancing Vinyl
  • Ryan McCormick
  • Teacher as Transformer
  • Thomas Trofimuk
  • Trevor Herriot’s Grass Notes
  • Wenda Salomons
  • Wendy Morton
  • Writer In Residence
© 2026 Grow Mercy
Powered by WordPress | Theme: Graphy by Themegraphy