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Month: September 2012

Christianity/Hope/Hope Mission/Poverty

Family brought Hope to worst of Depression

Posted on September 25, 2012 by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

A feature article on Dagmar Cunningham (1920-2012), daughter of the founders of Hope Mission. Family brought Hope to worst of Depression Edmonton Journal 22 Sep...

Health/Hope/Spirituality

Lift the Silence—The Support Network

Posted on September 14, 2012 by stephen t berg / 5 Comments

A few hundred people gathered at City Hall (Edmonton) last evening to lift the silence on suicide—an annual event put on by the Support Network. There were spee...

Uncategorized

Surrounding the death of my father-in-law

Posted on September 6, 2012 by stephen t berg / 21 Comments

My wife is running. The ground slopes down from where she parked the truck, the grass is wet from dew. She is running awkwardly toward the cabin and I am watchi...

Anthropology/Culture/Spirituality

Falling in love, falling out of resentment

Posted on September 1, 2012 by stephen t berg / 11 Comments

“See the extremes of what humans can be.” Bruce Cockburn “Resentment and love…are of the utmost theoretical importance precisely because they are not abstract c...

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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