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

Category: Culture

Culture/Environment/Spirituality

At the water ceremony during the climate strike in Duncan BC

Posted on September 22, 2019 by stephen t berg / 6 Comments

I can’t say for sure, but I have this notion that if we treated Mother Earth the way my mother kept her household there would be no environmental crisis. Clothe...

A meditation/Culture/Love

Absence, Presence and Laughing Toads

Posted on December 7, 2018 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

In the absence of context there is exploitation; in the absence of courage there is nationalism; in the absence of compassion there is militarization; in the ab...

Culture/Politics

So they shall make their own tongue to fall upon themselves

Posted on February 18, 2018 by stephen t berg / 7 Comments

Newspeak 2018 Blame Descartes or Derrida, blame the right, blame the left, blame religion, blame secularism it’s all the same to me. Argue with me, or not. It m...

Christianity/Culture/Hope/Peace/Violence

Declaration of a different reality

Posted on October 26, 2017 by stephen t berg / 9 Comments

Thomas Merton, writing in the early 1960’s, observed: Here is the great temptation of the modern age, this universal infection of fanaticism, this plague ...

Posts pagination

« Previous 1 2 3 … 34 Next »

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