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Month: April 2009

Benedictine/Spirituality

Remembering Father James Gray

Posted on April 16, 2009 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

A couple weeks ago, the last time we had tea with James, he dropped his cup–the lip broke on the floor and tea splashed over the tile. The three of us, De...

Atonement/Christianity/Religion/Spirituality

Easter is about a wrath-free God

Posted on April 11, 2009 by stephen t berg / 7 Comments

May you have a blessed and bloom filled Easter! Just realized it’s been exactly three years (and 500 plus posts) since Grow Mercy hit the blogosphere with...

Peace/Politics

Passion week and peace

Posted on April 9, 2009 by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

It’s like we’re at the Longbranch in an episode of Gunsmoke and Jesus is at the bar and we’re at a poker table where the inevitable showdown i...

Spirituality

Passion week and tanks and missiles

Posted on April 6, 2009 by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

Passion week is upon us (for those of you who follow the Christian liturgical calendar). At the same time on the front page of our city’s principal newspa...

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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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