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Category: Nonviolence

Christianity/Culture/Nonviolence/Politics/Religion/Violence

Welcoming the defeat of Christianity

Posted on December 19, 2012 by stephen t berg / 11 Comments

Scan the globe. Violence rules, its forms are legion. There may yet be hope, but it is only in universal reconciliation, which, if you’re of a realist ben...

Christianity/Nonviolence/Peace/Violence

Madness, Christianity, PTSD, and the death of 16 Afghans

Posted on March 26, 2012 by stephen t berg / 4 Comments

It is not inevitable that a mind perpetually primed by fear and fueled by the adrenaline of war finally comes to the end of itself and plunges into a deed unima...

Nonviolence/Peace/Religion

Martin Luther King Day–“You only need a soul generated by love.”

Posted on January 16, 2012 by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

Here, in commemoration of Martin Luther King Day (USA), are a few of his lesser known quotes taken from, The Words of Martin Luther King Jr. – selected by...

Christianity/Nonviolence/Peace/Religion

Where were you when they crucified my Lord? Truthdig—Chris Hedges

Posted on December 6, 2011 by stephen t berg / 28 Comments

A couple weeks ago I wrote a piece for the Edmonton Journal’s Religion page that questioned the church about its apparent absence during the Occupy protests. 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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