NeuroDivine

There are seasons in prayer in one’s life when the words start to come together.

Not the urgent sort, and not in a rush, but the slow sort—like light across an open field, like a long road flowing beneath somebody’s foot.

Paths & Passages has been penned during such a season.

These hymns have been made with Psalms 26 to 50: psalms of walking with integrity, of being tested, held, of losing the way and finding it again. These are not songs of arrival, but of movement— of learning, again and again, to trust the One who walks beside us.

So much of this has crystallized on the train lines, where journeys begin and end; in the immense silence of the Phœnix Park; in roads they know well, where the ordinary can become momentarily open to grace.

It has appeared that prayer doesn’t remain there and wait for stillness, that it catches us along the way.

And so we are presented with those hymns not as concluding words, but as comrades—clusters of melody we come up with on the way.

The work is nearly ready now. A few final steps remain.

For now I find myself merely offering thanks: for the psalms that have not left us, for the routes that have not yet closed and for the quiet steadfastness of God in each passage.

Teach us, O Lord, to recognise you in the road beneath our feet.