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Category: Anthropology

Anthropology/Beauty/Christianity/Culture/Hope Mission/Mercy/Poetics/Poverty/Religion

Fundamental Ignorance

Posted on March 27, 2015 by stephen t berg / 10 Comments

The following is a kind of polemical poem, written against myself, inspired in part, in edging close to the end of a 25-year career in social care with Hope Mis...

Anthropology/Culture/Humour

Today at Tokyo Express they’re playing Hotel California!

Posted on March 18, 2015 by stephen t berg / 9 Comments

Today at Tokyo Express they’re playing Hotel California! Perhaps, you’re thinking, this hardly warrants an exclamation mark. And certainly, as far a...

Anthropology/Contemplation/Culture/Hope/Love/Peace/Spirituality

Love make me bolder – a New Year’s prayer

Posted on January 1, 2015 by stephen t berg / 9 Comments

Love make me bolder. Bold to take myself less seriously, so to take beauty, kindness, mercy, more seriously. Bold to recall, under the tyranny of all our applie...

Anthropology/Art/Culture/Humour/Poetics

A bit of cold hard reality for those dupable dreamers – and a warning for the rest of us

Posted on December 28, 2014 by stephen t berg / 14 Comments

Have you had it up to herewith all those creative-come-mystic types going on about the quiet wonder of the quotidian? Do you, too, cringe when you read the revi...

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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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