Why I Write and How you Can Help
How we can create a community of practice, together, here and out there.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
- T.S. Elliot, The Waste Land
I have been writing here on Substack for just about a year and a half now. Tens of thousands of words, mostly reflecting on my own thinking and striving to articulate something I couldn’t quite grasp. I could touch it, I think, and there were moments when the purpose felt clear. Many times, though, I grasped at something sharp and splintered, something that I couldn’t quite apprehend without cutting myself, almost like picking up translucent glass on the bottom of a pool, the water blurring the edges against the textured background below.
T.S. Elliot is new to me, and I won’t feign to be literary enough to interpret him, but I felt something as I read this passage from “The Waste Land,” a poem penned to reflect on the devastating aftermath of World War I.
I “know only a heap of broken images,” a fractured and flurried collection of desires and intentions. As I read this line, I felt seen: while I need not reflect on the ruined state of post-war reality, there is something evocative about it that speaks to my interior world.
The sense I have is that many of us approach spirituality – the existential quest for meaning in the arms of God – as if we “know only a heap of broken images.” We experience the sun beating down, the harsh and comforting warmth of the sun, in moments that seem lifetimes apart. How often is it that the dead tree gives us no relief, and the life-giving water of a vibrant life with God evaporates under the unrelenting pressure and stoic apathy of stony structures?
Spirituality feels daunting at the same time as it feels absolutely necessary. It is at once the thing most often overlooked and the lifeline that keeps you connected to the world within you and around you. But if you are anything like me, the whole idea of understanding your spirituality and making it more “real” seems like a pipe dream.
Christian spirituality is complicated, after all. The seemingly unending streams of interpretations and traditions, conflicts, and doctrinaire dogmatics seem to evade the lived experience of faith in the Triune God. Self-help writing promises effective fixes only to leave us with the reality of our complicated circumstances and histories, let alone our churches (if we still sense that we can darken those doors at all).
But I don’t think it has to be this way.
Throughout church history, there have been wise guides who have looked within themselves and around at others, seeking to clarify the mysterious way to God for their students and their readers. Some of them were mystics, some of them shepherds. But their goal was the same: help people understand what friendship with God is like and how personal context, history, and experience affect this relationship.
This is what I do, and I want to come alongside you.
As a spiritual director, retreat leader, coach, and teacher, I spend almost all my time helping people clarify what friendship with God is and how to grow in this relationship, based on their real, actual lives. Writing is no different.
The goal of my writing is to help you navigate life with God by unpacking spiritual practices and disciplines, life experiences, and seasons of life with robust biblical and theological reflection and pastoral sensitivity. My heartbeat is to help you become a friend of God and live deeply in the Kingdom of God, allowing your spirituality to come to life.
I want to help you put the broken images back together, much like a piece of pottery joined with luminous metals that not only restore the piece’s function but also somehow make it more beautiful for having been made of broken pieces.
Perhaps this repaired and strengthened spirituality can hold the life-giving water that Jesus promises.
Or, perhaps even more rightly, maybe these images, when put back together, give you a lens through which to see clearly that the tree was never dead and the water hasn’t run dry after all.
Here on Substack, I have a couple of commitments:
First, I never want to paywall the resources I create. I experimented with that for a season, but it left a deep sense of unease. I have come up in a specific tradition that champions making the rich resources of Christianity as easily accessible as possible for the sake of the world. I really believe in this.
Second, I want to utilize this space to build a community of experimenters. A dear friend told me years ago that life with God is much closer to a test kitchen or an experimental laboratory than to a how-to manual. I think this is true: our lives with God are deeply individuated, but they are sensible only in community. I want to create opportunities to connect with readers here.
Third, I want impersonal spaces to create personal opportunities. The internet is a wonderful and terrible thing, and content platforms like Substack are an outworking of both edges. It’s easy to let passive reading be the endpoint, but I want that to be the starting point. This beautiful community is only an impersonal one by virtue of our being located all over the world and connecting only digitally, and I want to harness our resources to create embodied, personal opportunities for people outside the Internet.
In what my kids call “the olden times,” which means any period in history prior to 2020, soul care providers, wise guides, ministers, and artists would gather patrons together to help them complete their work. These patrons were generous beneficiaries of these guides who also provided resources to make the work possible – not only possible for the patron, but for others too. Whether it was visiting those in need, creating resources, or making opportunities to share the work, patrons’ contributions made important conversations possible for everyday people.
It is with this in mind, and bearing the weight of my commitments in this space, that I say this:
I am inviting you to consider becoming a contributing part of this community.
I am inviting you to participate in this work. I am inviting you to make something incredible possible.
The paywall is designed to help writers turn an income, and I don’t fault those who use it. My sense is that the use of the paywall is a matter of content, community, and conviction. I believe the content I make here is important to everyone, not just people who can pay. I believe the community (here and in the “real world”) benefits when everyone has access to everything I create, including my older stuff that wasn’t so great but might still be helpful. Finally, my conviction is that financial resources should never be a determining factor in exploring and growing in a maturing friendship with God. Spirituality is too important to be determined by prevailing economics.
I’m not going to paywall.
But the reality is also that each essay I generate takes between 8 and 12 hours, including ideation, research, brainstorming, writing, and editing. That’s a lot of time spent, and time I wouldn’t trade for anything. I will continue to write here, and I want you to make it possible to never compromise that time.
I want you to consider becoming a patron for my work. There are three levels
Here’s the idea: a small amount of patronage from a good number of folks helps keep it all going. By subscribing for $5 per month, or less than one coffee in most places, you help keep the lights on here and support my writing.
That’s what I am asking you to consider: become a patron here on Substack for at least $5 a month ($60 per year) and commit to sharing at least one post a month with your community on this platform or another, like Facebook or Instagram. If my writing has been helpful for you, invest in the work happening here and help others discover a resource that might help them.
But there is another way to contribute to this community.
One of my convictions is that I want to build a community of experimenters, and to do that, I want to create opportunities to highlight stories of spirituality-in-practice, where the people here experiment with the ideas and reflect on them.
If you are willing to do the work and want to share your voice, become a $25-per-month patron and be invited to join the voices on this platform. By skipping out on a dinner or foregoing a trip to the movies, you can not only support writing and research but also become a guest contributor to a post in this growing community at least once per year. The goal is for you to share your story of a practice or life experience you are reflecting on for the sake of encouraging the same in others.
But there is a higher investment that I want you to consider, too.
As a spiritual director, I am aware of the fraught nature of the economics of practice. Traditionally, many spiritual directors bill directees by the hour, either at a set rate or, more often, on a sliding scale. This makes a lot of sense – for most of us who practice direction, we often take time away from other jobs to provide care and guidance to directees. So, we take our cues from the therapeutic world and bill enough to cover costs and help pay the bills. What this means, though, is that receiving spiritual direction becomes contingent on being wealthy enough to afford a service that can cost as much as professional counseling. I don’t think it has to be that way.
I want you to consider subscribing here for $50 per month, or $600 per year. This is a steep jump, but here’s the math: $50 is about half the cost of a session of spiritual direction, and by subscribing at this level, you underwrite my work with directees such that if they cannot pay anything, they don’t have to abandon the lifeline my office offers them. This is a radical form of “paying it forward”: if you think what I do here and in the real world is valuable, and if you want to make it possible for folks to access spiritual direction regardless of their finances, this is the way.
Here’s the Call:
Subscribe for free and read, share, whatever. This is a space for you to enjoy, and we want you here and to have access to resources regardless of finances.
Subscribe at $5/month ($60 per year) to support the writing happening here and share pieces at least once a month to help us reach more folks.
Subscribe at $25/month to become a contributing voice, sharing your experiments in the With-God life with our community.
Pay it Forward at $50/month ($600 per year) to cover one session of spiritual direction for a directee each month, ensuring they can access it regardless of their finances.
Each and every invitation here is a way for you to become a contributor to this community, a partner in this ministry, and a patron for the work I do. You get to be a part of simplifying spirituality and unpacking life with God, helping others navigate the pitfalls and mountaintops of friendship with Jesus.
My commitment to all paid subscribers is to share this journey with you. Over time, I will introduce features such as patron-only research pieces and case studies. Finally, I want to leverage your experience to crowdsource research focus areas for this space – as a patron, you get a voice in helping discern what to write about next.
I am writing here to help people grow in their friendship with God by unpacking Christian spirituality, spiritual practices, and life experiences with thorough biblical and theological reflection. My aim is to simplify Christian spirituality by asking and answering the kinds of questions that impact folks as they wrestle with their real, on-the-ground lives with God.
If this is what you want to do, too, and you have the resources to help, consider becoming a patron.
If you can’t, you’re welcome here. Hopefully, we can work together to mend the broken images and see if that tree is really dead after all. Hopefully, we can come together, mending and strengthening your spirituality such that it becomes a cop capable of holding living water.
In peace,
Murphy