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Category: Spirituality

Spirituality

Query the Hawk to Prove the Air (A Parental Ode)

Posted on April 28, 2024 by stephen t berg / 18 Comments

  I Ask a fish to prove the sea,query the hawk to prove the air,conscript the core to prove the bark,the crown to prove the cloud? Tell the thrush to stop its t...

Contemplation/Spirituality

In the Midst of Mounting Grief a Moment of Calm

Posted on March 8, 2024 by stephen t berg / 18 Comments

  In the midst of creeping worry and mounting grief—a moment of calm:almost happiness, not epiphanic, simply present; and when I turned my head to it, of ...

Spirituality

Hound at my Heels

Posted on February 19, 2024 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

  With His mercy like an unclaimed mongrel,Following, still following. -Ronald Duncan I’m ash in a respectable urn.I’m a rock rabbit blending in. I mimic the ev...

Spirituality

The Pastor

Posted on November 13, 2022 by stephen t berg / 6 Comments

For my eldest brother, and a few others, both men and women, I’ve been lucky to know.  You were plucked from the current, only to be tossed back in, facin...

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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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