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Month: January 2011

Spirituality

Actual things heard at RAH day surgery:

Posted on January 19, 2011 by stephen t berg / 4 Comments

Overheard in pre-op: First Nurse: What’s taking her? Second nurse: She’s trying to get the ring out of her lip. A patient to a nurse: I suffer from ...

Christianity/Freedom/Religion/Spirituality

Through the eyes of Another other

Posted on January 16, 2011 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

Six of us kneel at the Eucharist railing and wait. My mind is on the snuffling priest who is busy beside the altar, disinfecting and wiping his hands, breaking ...

Spirituality

Yield

Posted on January 14, 2011 by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

I love the cold, relentless and indifferent. I love it the way I love an enraged black bear, close but not penetrating or crippling. I love when the sun is perc...

Christianity/Religion/Spirituality

Here I sit–annual confession

Posted on January 11, 2011 by stephen t berg / 11 Comments

I often live with a sense of abandonment…yet with a keen anticipation of epiphany. I live with the idea that natural life is a miracle and a mystery; but ...

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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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