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Category: Spirituality

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...

Light/Spirituality

A selfish little thing I do

Posted on May 5, 2019 by stephen t berg / 18 Comments

A selfish little thing I do for the quiet anonymity, introspection and the beauty of the space: is attend Midweek Eucharist at St. Peter’s, Quamichan. But on th...

Joy/Love/Peace/Spirituality

Too late in the day for regret

Posted on April 7, 2019 by stephen t berg / 12 Comments

Too late in the day for regret: those years of lysergic and Lebanese, of mushrooms and Millers, when we knew, despite the fugue of dissipation in the theatre of...

Life/Spirituality

The Incredible Fact of Existing at All

Posted on March 5, 2019 by stephen t berg / 12 Comments

What’s to account for it? Spin of some colossal roulette wheel? Divinely timed orchestration of interlinked events? Blind dispassionate physics? Beneficent univ...

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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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