Skip to content
Grow Mercy
  • Home
  • About
  • Articles
  • Benedictine
  • Profile
  • Books
  • Subscribe
  • Contact

Author: stephen t berg

Christianity

Passion Week Scandal

Posted on April 12, 2006 by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, …He was teac...

Religion/Spirituality

Tuesday of Passion Week, Spellbound

Posted on April 12, 2006 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

And when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellboun...

Religion/Spirituality

Monday of Passion Week

Posted on April 11, 2006 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they...

Religion/Spirituality

Palm Sunday

Posted on April 10, 2006 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

The Pharisees then said to one another, “You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!” (John 12) Containing a King who rides in on a don...

Posts pagination

« Previous 1 … 372 373

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.

Follow Grow Mercy on Twitter

Follow @GrowMercy

Find me on Facebook

Stephen T Berg | 

Archives

Categories

Links and Blogs

  • Alison Hawthorne Deming
  • Andrea House
  • Benjamin Hertwig
  • Bleeding Heart Art Space
  • Calm Things
  • Connie Howard's Blog
  • Dana Wylie
  • Dave Von Bieker
  • Edward Van Vliet
  • Geez Magazine
  • Inscape Life Coaching
  • James Alison
  • Joyce Harback
  • Kelly Sheperd
  • Laurie MacFayden
  • Makes/Me/So/Digress
  • Mi Vida Landscapes
  • Michael Gravel
  • Natural Presence
  • Orion Magazine
  • Romancing Vinyl
  • Ryan McCormick
  • Teacher as Transformer
  • Thomas Trofimuk
  • Trevor Herriot’s Grass Notes
  • Wenda Salomons
  • Wendy Morton
  • Writer In Residence
© 2026 Grow Mercy
Powered by WordPress | Theme: Graphy by Themegraphy