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Month: July 2019

A meditation

When your heart is overwhelmed

Posted on July 24, 2019 by stephen t berg / 16 Comments

When my heart is overwhelmed, lead me to the rock that is higher than I. (Psalm 61) When the sky’s red fades, when the sparrow stops singing, when the soul ache...

Poetry

Beacons, Blues and Holy Goats

Posted on July 16, 2019 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

If you’ll pardon a bit of self-promotion, I’d like to let you know that my first full-length book of poetry is out. Here’s a description of its content: I...

Family/Gender/Grace

For my transgender son on his birthday

Posted on July 7, 2019 by stephen t berg / 30 Comments

I know your compassion for people, your tireless research and study to be a practitioner, to become more of a healer than you already are. I know your path, whi...

Faith/Life/Resistance

We are just people

Posted on July 3, 2019 by stephen t berg / 10 Comments

You’d like to find a way to capture that first bit of clarity that arrives as rouge light rising rosily behind the rigging of pines while reading the Torah with...

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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