Life/Light/Love

Majesty at Tillicum Mall

Posted on by stephen t berg / 4 Comments

A mother with two boys make their way across a parking lot to the entrance of the mall. The boys are dressed in white sweaters, hair combed, shoes clean. They walk ahead but turn back often to check on their mother.

The mother uses a walker. Halts with each step. Her legs look weighted as though she drags a thick chain. Her arms tremble as she pulls herself ahead half-step by half-step.

When they come to the entrance she sits down on the narrow chair that walkers have and smiles at her boys who hurry with some excitement through the glass doors.

She sits beyond the path of foot traffic, waiting, gazing across the parking lot above a line of mature spruce trees and over toward the low mountains northeast of the mall.

After a while she reaches for the handles of the walker, then stops, stills herself, places her hands palm down on each leg and smooths away some spasms and goes back to watching the sky.

And every so often she turns to the glass doors and her eyes, glistening light, watch for her sons. And every so often the sun looks through the banks of cloud and rests on her face, and all the faces going in and out of the glass doors.

Happy New Year!

Grow Mercy’s year-end list of gentle propositions

Posted on by stephen t berg / 18 Comments

That a word of mercy is a tender embrace;
that to be human is to be, at any given moment, filled with joy, angst, wonder, madness, sorrow, want, majesty, misery, boredom, radiance, resentment, love;
that pavement longs to be pierced by grass;
that we are not agents of unalloyed originality but inchoate composites of desires, bits of wisdom and knowledge, knowingly and unknowingly borrowed from a host of others;
that in wonder or blunder, we receive our lives through the eyes of others;
that intelligence can be admired, but kindness should be revered;
that despite the crazed magnificence of our vanities, our screwy, clingy, messed-up lives, our deepest desire is to be each other’s joy;
that intellectual convictions can be overturned by spiritual experience;
that a revelation, a flash of insight, some broad clearing suddenly lit up by love or beauty or forgiveness, can shift your life forever, or flop back down like an expired fish; that faith is about fanning the embers of the former;   
that poetry can reanimate a capacity for surprise;
that should you want to find God, love the earth and her array of inhabitants, which is to say, should you want to find meaning, turn the ego outward;
that miracle is still the best word to describe life’s origin;
that the big bang is a model half-way succeeding in describing our oneness;
that leaves are snowflakes ensouled.
that laughter is champagne;
that beauty is both grape and bubble;
that doubt is necessary and healthy but the spell of skepticism is a sickness;
that the certainties in our heads must be held by tentative hands;
that truth still flourishes beyond the theatres of commerce and public affairs;
that cynicism in small doses can be good for you but a steady diet is constipating;
that reason needs a trellis, faith needs a frame and theology needs poetry;
that we are lonely people still searching, proven by our obsessions, impositions and addictions;
that all great art enlarges our existence;
that science is humble in theory but not so much in practice and that this is what it has in common with religion;
that things repair themselves if they are unplugged for a while, including humans;
that God is a verb and Jesus expository;
that time is a line that winds, folds, bends and swirls;
that death is hard, hard, hard and every explanation unfitting;
that my privilege is also my particular blindness;
that love is not a gleaming gem found at the crown of a mountain, but comes to find us in the grief-fractured layers of our lives;
that yesterday I knew many great and grand principles of life, but today all I know is that a hug can be healing.

Happy New Year! With a hug.

Christmas/Life/Peace

Jesus was born in Saskatchewan

Posted on by stephen t berg / 16 Comments

Jesus was born in Saskatchewan, that is, in what is now known as Saskatchewan, about 60 km west of Wynyard near the ghost town of Amulet, which is on the traditional lands known as Treaty Four Territory, the original land of the Cree.

It’s a revelation not without controversy. But it’s supported by a growing list of prairie archaeologists, historians and anthropologists. There are many gaps but the research continues.

The only thing they are certain of at this point is that the stable was framed with poplar poles and covered with buffalo hides; and that it was spring and the gophers were beginning to pop their heads above their holes, and the ice was breaking up and you could hear the creek running over the beaver dam and the robins and ruddy ducks had returned and the bearded irises and crocuses were opening and the wild chives were poking through the melting snow and the first wave of geese was passing high overhead and you could smell the horses just beyond the camp and Jesus was a very happy baby that almost always slept through the incredibly silent (but for a nearby burrowing owl) nights.

Wishing you a wondrous Christmas, clamouring with life!

A meditation/Culture/Love

Absence, Presence and Laughing Toads

Posted on by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

In the absence of context there is exploitation;
in the absence of courage there is nationalism;
in the absence of compassion there is militarization;
in the absence of community there is corporatization;
in the absence of faith there is mechanization;
in the absence of respect there is colonization;
in the absence of dignity there is death;
in the absence of understanding there is fear;

in the presence of loam, rain, sunlight,
there is rosemary, mint and lavender;
in the presence of cattails, marsh grass, lilies,
there are red-winged black birds and laughing toads;
in the presence of wind there is liturgy;
in the presence of large flakes of falling snow
there are children with tongues out;

in the absence of beauty there is violence;
in the absence of forgiveness there is darkness;
in the absence of ambiguity there is totalitarianism;
in the absence of mystery there is fundamentalism;
in the absence of insight there is hate;
in the absence of humility there is eugenics;
in the absence of relationship there is engineering;
in the absence of conversation there is atrophy;
in the absence of evolution there is extinction;
there is extinction in the absence of love;

in the presence of Love
we are all one breath.