Rediscovering Christianity

This is the blog of Mark Crozier Murphy, rediscovering Christianity as an adult. I live in Aotearoa New Zealand with my wife and kids. I work as a psychotherapist. 

This blog is made with the support and expertise of my son, Arlo, without whom I would still be yelling at this screen.

I was baptized at St Anne’s, Mazagaon, in Mumbai, India, but the parish I most remember in my earliest years was All Saints (Anglican) Church, Malabar Hill. Our parents gave us an ecumenical (Roman Catholic and Anglican) upbringing in both India and (mainly) New Zealand, being members and attenders of both Roman Catholic and Anglican parishes. As an adult, I spent many formative years as a parishioner of  St Luke’s in the City, Christchurch.

In writing this section, I am shocked to finally realize that the major New Zealand churches that have been formative for me - Our Lady Star of the Sea, Sumner (where I was confirmed), the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, All Saints Anglican Church, Sumner, and St Luke’s Anglican Church (where I was married and had both by children baptized) - were all destroyed in the 2010 -2011 Canterbury earthquakes. 

In addition to being a Catholic Christian, in both Anglican and Roman traditions, I am a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), which is now my primary spiritual home.

But our soul is bigger than any one group or identity. And our soul, paradoxically, is constantly threatened, in ways both commonplace and genuinely diabolical, by a tendency for religions and religious groups to become defensive, insular, possessive, and bureaucratic. As Angelo Spoto has observed:

…[paradoxically] religions tend to keep individuals from religious experience. As religions become institutionalized, the power seems to shift from the numinous phenomena at their core to the institutions themselves as “custodians” of the numinous.*

In Christian terms, the kingdom or reign of God - the primary focus of Jesus’s ministry - is bigger than any one church, or, indeed, the Church. The Spirit - that is, God amongst us, within, the life-giver, ever holy - blows wherever she pleases.

* Angelo Spoto, review of John Dourley, The Illness That We Are.

All quotes from the Bible on this blog, unless otherwise stated, are taken from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), Catholic Edition.