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Surrounding the death of my father-in-law

Posted on September 6, 2012 by stephen t berg / 21 Comments

My wife is running. The ground slopes down from where she parked the truck, the grass is wet from dew. She is running awkwardly toward the cabin and I am watchi...

Favourite Posts/Uncategorized

To my kids on Father’s Day

Posted on June 17, 2012 by stephen t berg / 12 Comments

Mark: moves through the world cutting a lyrical path of creative kindness. I’d say he’s simply the sweetest guy I know, if I knew it wouldn’t ...

Spirituality/Uncategorized

My aunt Irma

Posted on April 2, 2011 by stephen t berg / 1 Comment

I’m sitting in Starbucks listening to Iron and Wine playing, "Such great heights," when I open my sister-in-law’s email and read the news ...

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Aging – a son’s lament

Posted on July 12, 2009 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

My mother and I sat out in the Bentley Retirement Community lounge playing Rummy-O for a good part of the afternoon–and held court. There’s a bit mo...

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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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