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Author: stephen t berg

Art/Photography

Varieties of Dignity (Ode to Instagram and the Art of the Selfie)

Posted on September 3, 2020 by stephen t berg / 10 Comments

In her beautifully crafted blog, Shawna Lemay has explored the nature of social portraiture, the nature of the selfie and the medium that gallerizes all of it. ...

A Sliver of Memoir

Restless Sureness

Posted on August 27, 2020 by stephen t berg / 18 Comments

Nobody told me there’d be days like these — strange days indeed.  – John LennonAnd were your feelings so terrible and dark they could not be turned ...

Prayer/Religion

A Theology of Prayer (Or Reasons Prayer Goes Unanswered)

Posted on August 16, 2020 by stephen t berg / 10 Comments

Brief note: Raised in a conservative evangelical tradition, sermons on prayer were as common as “Amens” from Deacon Ted or Betty’s scalloped potatoes on potluck...

A meditation

While wondering about our current existential and pestilential state, a small memory comes to calm the psyche

Posted on August 1, 2020 by stephen t berg / 11 Comments

(Alternative title: It’s summer, but some of us need therapy) Having spent this much time inside the bubble of ourselves,given aperitifs of news through slots i...

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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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