In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell what a wild, and rough, and stubborn wood this was…

- Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

My name is Mark Crozier Murphy and I’m the author of this blog. I live in Aotearoa New Zealand with my wife and kids. I work as a psychotherapist. 

I was born in Bombay/Mumbai, India, and baptized into Roman Catholic and Protestant (Church of North India) traditions. Our family continued its ecumenical pattern of visiting each church, on alternating Sundays, when we came to Aotearoa New Zealand when I was five. Many of my formative experiences were in Catholic churches and schools. In my twenties, I was part of a radical progressive Christian movement, SCM. In my later twenties, I followed the yoga path to India. In my thirties, I worshipped in a liberal Catholic Anglican church, ‘in the round’.

Then came earthquakes, children, and a brain tumour…

By my late forties, I became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

This blog began as attempt to discover where I stand in relation to Christianity and God as a middle adult, where, as Dante said, we may lose ‘the straight path’ and enter ‘a dark wood’.