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Month: October 2010

Spirituality

Postmodern Christians

Posted on October 31, 2010 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

We are bleached out poles holding up tattered flags of twilight. Wind forsaken, standing solo on rooftops of age-curled ache and desire. Where did that day go w...

Spirituality

I’m a Rocket Man

Posted on October 28, 2010 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

One day Gabriel Marcel, not wishing to appear erudite, nevertheless said this erudite thing: Through a phrase from Brahms…which ran through my head for an...

Spirituality

Truth is in the flourishing

Posted on October 24, 2010 by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

Sure, it gets better than this, but as a second rate experience, walking into a Starbucks that just opened a half block from your  condo and hearing KD Lan...

Spirituality

In Chile – by Wendy Morton

Posted on October 22, 2010 by stephen t berg / 7 Comments

Here’s another poem, like a fragrant offering, sent along by Wendy Morton. IN CHILE the miners rise into the light and the world weeps in precise jubilation. He...

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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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