NeuroDivine

A reflection for Remembrance Sunday in sound, silence, and sacred tension.

This morning, I arrive early. The organ pipes tower above like silent witnesses, and I sit at the console with reverence. Each note I play is a prayer, a lament, a thread in the tapestry of memory. Music is my offering—precise, immersive, sacred. For someone whose world is shaped by patterns and sensory depth, sound becomes the truest language of emotion. Today, it speaks of sorrow, dignity, and hope.

I wear the insignia of the Order of St John. Not as a declaration of allegiance, but as a quiet emblem of care, healing, and remembrance. In Ireland, the red poppy carries layered meanings—woven with histories of empire and pain. I do not wear it. Instead, I choose symbols that speak to mercy, to hospitality, to the rhythm of a life shaped by prayer and peace.

The ancient rule I follow urges us to “prefer nothing to the love of Christ.” That love is not abstract today—it is incarnate in silence, in music, in the names spoken aloud. It lives in the tension between remembering and resisting, between honouring the fallen and questioning the forces that led them to fall.

Today’s readings deepen that tension. Isaiah offers a vision where weapons become tools of cultivation, where nations cease to train for war. It is a dream of peace that feels both distant and urgent. As I play “Abide with Me,” the chords rise and fall like the tide on the western coast. I think of those who served, those who suffered, those whose stories remain untold. I think of Irish soldiers in foreign uniforms, of civilians caught in the crossfire, of families who mourn in quiet corners.

John’s Gospel calls us to love as we have been loved—to lay down our lives for our friends. On this day, we remember those who did just that. But remembrance is not enough. We are called to live that love now: to be companions in the work of reconciliation, to abide in the presence of the one who calls us friends.

For me, remembrance is not about uniformity. It is about nuance. It is about holding space for contradiction, for discomfort, for truth. It is shaped by a mind that sees detail others miss, by a life ordered around prayer and work, by a tradition that sings its theology and kneels in its questions. It is Irish in its ache, liturgical in its cadence, and rooted in a spirituality that listens more than it speaks.

And so I play. Not to glorify war, but to honour the cost of peace. Not to erase the past, but to echo the prophets and the Christ who call us to love, to abide, and to walk in the light.