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Month: July 2009

Uncategorized

Aging – a son’s lament

Posted on July 12, 2009 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

My mother and I sat out in the Bentley Retirement Community lounge playing Rummy-O for a good part of the afternoon–and held court. There’s a bit mo...

Poetics

Minor bridge

Posted on July 10, 2009 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

I do nothing, I feel less, words dissolve in my cup The thin places have disappeared and I’m stranded under blankets of clear sky. Hidden stars as static ...

Humour

On besting North Battleford’s Gold Eagle Casino

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

Say, for example, you’re visiting relatives in Saskatchewan that happen to live along the Yellowhead, and on the trip back you realize you’ll not ma...

Christianity/Freedom

Ed Viso from Belgrade to Edmonton

Posted on July 6, 2009 by stephen t berg / 4 Comments

Ed Viso — from air raids to oasis. Technorati Tags: Hope Mission,Ed Viso,Yugoslavia

Posts pagination

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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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