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Month: September 2013

Aboriginal/Culture/Homelessness/Hope Mission/Poetics

By reason of wind

Posted on September 16, 2013 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

John is from Turnor Lake in Saskatchewan. I ask what nation, he says Birch Narrows Dene. I say I’m originally from Saskatchewan too, and he asks where, an...

Love/Mercy/Music/Poetics/Spirituality

This morning on joy’s patio

Posted on September 12, 2013 by stephen t berg / 6 Comments

We are given joy because we are given death. And heavenwill be its name until we arrive and know the true end of time.  – Sally Ito  (On Joy and...

Aboriginal/Culture/Poetics/Politics/Religion

Born Canadian, born male, born white, born straight

Posted on September 9, 2013 by stephen t berg / 10 Comments

Born Canadian, born male, born white, born straight, raised on the prairie politics of John Diefenbaker, baptised in the theology of John Calvin and Billy Graha...

Love/Poetics/Spirituality

One year after my father-in-law’s death

Posted on September 5, 2013 by stephen t berg / 4 Comments

One year after my wife’s father took his life,his children go through his garage:a repository of memory-imbued material. And on this day, the rite of reca...

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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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