Skip to content
Grow Mercy
  • Home
  • About
  • Articles
  • Benedictine
  • Profile
  • Books
  • Subscribe
  • Contact

Category: Violence

Anthropology/Atonement/Christianity/Contemplation/Culture/Mercy/Politics/Religion/Spirituality/Violence/Writing

1000 Grow Mercy dispatches

Posted on October 30, 2013 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

When a blog reaches 1000 posts, it’s time to take stock. Grow Mercy was, is, an experiment. In a way it began through the power of a sentence, in the context of...

Christianity/Contemplation/Culture/Environment/Love/Mercy/Nature/Spirituality/Violence

God likes hair salons

Posted on October 20, 2013 by stephen t berg / 11 Comments

It is hard to believe God lives outside the house of earth,beyond the lawn of stars, and the fenced-yard universe, out in the timeless cold, his raw breath, his...

Christianity/Culture/Peace/Poetics/Politics/Religion/Spirituality/Violence

Making Peace

Posted on September 27, 2013 by stephen t berg / 1 Comment

This is a steel rimmed wagon-wheel I reclaimed from the bush. I set it up against this spruce tree over ten years ago. Over the years I placed rocks at the whee...

Politics/Religion/Violence

Dear child at the border crossing

Posted on September 3, 2013 by stephen t berg / 6 Comments

(BBC News, child refugee at the Syrian Jordanian border) As western navel forces gather in the Mediterranean; as we await the attack on Syria; as Israel test th...

Posts pagination

« Previous 1 … 4 5 6 … 31 Next »

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.

Follow Grow Mercy on Twitter

Follow @GrowMercy

Find me on Facebook

Stephen T Berg | 

Archives

Categories

Links and Blogs

  • Alison Hawthorne Deming
  • Andrea House
  • Benjamin Hertwig
  • Bleeding Heart Art Space
  • Calm Things
  • Connie Howard's Blog
  • Dana Wylie
  • Dave Von Bieker
  • Edward Van Vliet
  • Geez Magazine
  • Inscape Life Coaching
  • James Alison
  • Joyce Harback
  • Kelly Sheperd
  • Laurie MacFayden
  • Makes/Me/So/Digress
  • Mi Vida Landscapes
  • Michael Gravel
  • Natural Presence
  • Orion Magazine
  • Romancing Vinyl
  • Ryan McCormick
  • Teacher as Transformer
  • Thomas Trofimuk
  • Trevor Herriot’s Grass Notes
  • Wenda Salomons
  • Wendy Morton
  • Writer In Residence
© 2026 Grow Mercy
Powered by WordPress | Theme: Graphy by Themegraphy