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Category: Peace

Christianity/Peace

Empathy for Victims

Posted on June 22, 2006 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

For he delivers the needy when they call,the poor and those who have no helper.He has pity on the weak and the needy,and saves the lives of the needy.From oppre...

Christianity/Peace

Master/Servant to Friend

Posted on June 20, 2006 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to y...

Peace

Loving Enemies and Turning Cheeks

Posted on June 17, 2006 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

My grandfather was Mennonite, but after he emigrated, for reasons of his own, he left the “Meno’s” to hook up with the Baptists. Perhaps there...

Christianity/Peace

Knowing Jesus Through the Resurrection

Posted on June 12, 2006 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

The “return” of Christ as resurrected victim changed everything. Christ’s reentrance into the lives of the defecting disciples marked for them...

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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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