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Month: December 2014

Anthropology/Art/Culture/Humour/Poetics

A bit of cold hard reality for those dupable dreamers – and a warning for the rest of us

Posted on December 28, 2014 by stephen t berg / 14 Comments

Have you had it up to herewith all those creative-come-mystic types going on about the quiet wonder of the quotidian? Do you, too, cringe when you read the revi...

Christianity/Contemplation/Culture/Spirituality

Christmas mourning – Blue Christmas

Posted on December 21, 2014 by stephen t berg / 6 Comments

This year, for Christmas, the folks at Bleeding Heart Art Space, made space for sadness. Photo credit: Bleeding Heart Art Space What follows is my contribution ...

Culture/Mercy/Music/Peace/Poetics/Spirituality

Mercy among pillars

Posted on December 18, 2014 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

(“Throwback Thursday” post) Beside a bus stop on Saanich Road we set up our furniture. A sofa, arm chairs, a pole lamp–humped through the fron...

Beauty/Christianity/Contemplation/Love/Poetics/Spirituality

The Lord’s prayer with edits

Posted on December 10, 2014 by stephen t berg / 12 Comments

Our God, who rides upon the heavens, and hides in every human heart, give us this day, a basement window, and a haze of thin branches through which to view a wa...

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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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