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Month: December 2020

Happy New Year!

Grow Mercy’s Evolving Year-end List of Modest Propositions

Posted on December 31, 2020 by stephen t berg / 28 Comments

New Year’s day is only one important day among 365 important days. The first half of your life is spent finding yourself, the second half is spent breaking up w...

Christmas

Christmas Carols — It’s Complicated

Posted on December 22, 2020 by stephen t berg / 14 Comments

In a Mideast manger a baby’s silence is so intense as to shimmer a star and spur celestial-gazing Magi into loading up their camels and tripping for two yearsto...

Family/Friends

I’ll see you down river, I can’t wait, I love you!

Posted on December 13, 2020 by stephen t berg / 20 Comments

I came to fatherhood as delinquent.A truant. My charter: imprudence.And then, in one small announcement …  well, let me put it like this:There are upheava...

Love

LOVE

Posted on December 6, 2020 by stephen t berg / 4 Comments

LOVE Under the wet awning, a drum, auto-harp and tambourine,and a singer, familiar with a great range of rejections,           drums, sings,strums time, keeps p...

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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