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Month: January 2014

Art/Beauty/Contemplation/Nature/Poetics/Spirituality

Blue

Posted on January 30, 2014 by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

Photograph (and inspiration) courtesy of Laurie MacFayden, artist, poet, writer.   Blue You see spectral shades, sweeping north and south, following the te...

Christianity/Contemplation/Mercy/Poetics/Spirituality

Porch light

Posted on January 26, 2014 by stephen t berg / 6 Comments

The outside light is on as well as the Christmas lights that we’ve left draped over the deck rails. Taking pictures at night (my idea of innovation) while walki...

Beauty/Humour/Love/Poetics/Writing

She and I – On the occasion of her birthday

Posted on January 21, 2014 by stephen t berg / 27 Comments

She remembers things like where we bought the Maple Tea that came in the small wooden box with the intricate sliding lid. I said I didn’t know when we bou...

Active nonviolence/Christianity/Culture/Hope/Love/Nonviolence/Peace/Politics/Spirituality/Violence

Martin Luther King’s call beyond ‘I have a dream’

Posted on January 18, 2014 by stephen t berg / 6 Comments

Here, comfortable in my condo reading “I Have a Dream,” I feel good. I can celebrate Martin Luther King Day as though it’s a piece of packaged...

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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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