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Category: Anthropology

Anthropology/Christianity/Mercy

Boy of Sorrows

Posted on November 14, 2021 by stephen t berg / 3 Comments

  He was ungainly, a loner, kind, intelligent, and a natural outcast. We cornered him after class but he slipped away. I was a runner. Caught him, tackled him a...

Anthropology/Environment/Faith/Spirituality

This Beautiful World

Posted on June 24, 2021 by stephen t berg / 10 Comments

…then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice.   – Psalm 96 I’m lost in this beautiful world.I’m not smart enough to live without faith.Everything l...

Anthropology/Culture/Spirituality

Where I interview an aging man who hopes to pass a life exam

Posted on May 7, 2017 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

Lac Ste Anne, Alberta  December, 2016 Life is short, but how trite to say… What do you mean? I mean we say this but rarely think it through, which makes it hack...

Anthropology/Hope/Poetics/Spirituality

A little hymn to life

Posted on February 1, 2016 by stephen t berg / 13 Comments

“Personal needs come and go, but one anxiety remains: Am I needed?  There is no one who has not been moved by that anxiety.”   – Abraham Jo...

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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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