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Month: March 2012

Spirituality

Sigh, it’s Super Tuesday

Posted on March 6, 2012 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

It’s Super Tuesday. Super, because after tonight the we’ll know which candidate had the fattest super PAC and the commensurate ability to post the m...

Politics

Homeless veterans and a sleeping MP

Posted on March 3, 2012 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

Hope Mission was contacted about the problem of homeless veterans. At this stage it’s more of a potential problem. But it’s a problem that our governing Conserv...

Spirituality

You say I shine like a rising sun

Posted on March 2, 2012 by stephen t berg / 4 Comments

You say I shine like a rising sun. But how can I trust you? Your news comes to me second hand. Through the hands of several dead scribes. First let me join you ...

Culture/Hope/Spirituality

From hope to hopelessness–Margaret Wheatley

Posted on March 1, 2012 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

A friend linked me up with this article. I think it has a kinship with Grow Mercy. What Margaret Wheatley describes in this short essay is not hopelessness as w...

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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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