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Month: December 2010

Humour/Religion/Spirituality

Year-end list of unfounded propositions

Posted on December 31, 2010 by stephen t berg / 6 Comments

Here is Grow Mercy’s year-end list of 40 unfounded propositions, or, things I believe in but can’t prove: (For fun and profit, try your hand at your own.)...

Humour

Strange fruit, Victoria secrets, a looming mystery

Posted on December 29, 2010 by stephen t berg / 4 Comments

Behind this house—within whose walls we spent Christmas—on the south-east edge of Red Deer lies a quarter section (that’s 160 acres for urbanites) of crop...

Spirituality

Mary’s temptation – Space and a face for us

Posted on December 24, 2010 by stephen t berg / 6 Comments

Your companion gauged the entrance to the Inn to be on the north side, so in his approach from the west he turned left to come around. You both stoop, he has yo...

Peace/Spirituality

Looking upon yourself with the eyes of a friend

Posted on December 21, 2010 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

Somehow she had found the grace to look upon herself with the eyes of a friend. This was not like locating a purse or a cell phone. This had taken her years to ...

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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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