NeuroDivine

Dialysis, Stabilitas, and the Liminal Watch on the River Barrow

There is a specific kind of emptying out that happens in the hours after dialysis. It is a physical and sensory vulnerability—a state of being scraped clean, suspended between the sterile, bright utility of the clinic and the anticipated sanctuary of home.

Sitting in the rhythmic sway of the train carriage, watching the dusk settle over the River Barrow, I found myself suspended in a profoundly thin space. It was there, through the glass, that I saw them: bats looping against the fading light. In that quiet moment of exhaustion, my Anglican Benedictine formation and my neurodivergent reality collided, giving birth to a prayer.

1. Stabilitas on the Railway Line

In the Rule of St Benedict, the vow of stabilitas (stability) binds the monastic to a specific community and a specific soil. For those of us living with chronic illness, our stability is often forced upon us by the immutable geography of our medical needs. My landscape is mapped by the railway line, the dialysis machine, and the ancient, winding path of the River Barrow.

There is a temptation to view a broken or struggling body as a place of exile. Yet, Benedictine spirituality insists that God is found here—not in an idealized version of health, but in the precise, local reality of our current existence. As the train tracked the river, I realized that Christ does not wait for me to be healed to meet me. He walks the “limen-paths” of the Barrow. He is rooted in the very landscape of my exhaustion, proving that even when heaven leans to bone, we are standing on holy ground.

2. The Convergence of Liturgies

Monastic life is anchored by the rhythmic cadence of the Divine Office—Vespers at sunset, Compline before sleep. But chronic illness introduces a competing, heavy, medical liturgy into our lives. The ticking of pumps, the flash of monitors, and the rigid schedule of treatments become a modern, sterile liturgy of hours.

Coming home at dusk represents the ultimate threshold: the transition from the clinical world back to the human world. As I watched the river through the train window, I saw that creation was keeping the Office for me when I was too tired to hold the breviary.

The River Barrow became a cathedral. The heron stood as a “monk of river-prayer” in patient grey; the mayfly offered its brief life as a soul-light for the dead. This is the sacramental vision of the Celtic Christian tradition—nothing is secular, nothing is wasted. The natural world picks up the chant when our own voices fail, carrying the liturgy through the twilight hour.

3. NeuroDivinity and the Echolocation of Grace

For the neurodivergent mind, the world can often feel like a barrage of overwhelming sensory data, a landscape built for linear thinkers, where we must constantly translate our internal maps to survive. It was the bats that unlocked this reflection for me.

Bats navigate the dark not by sight, but by echolocation. They cast their voices into the shadows and listen for the returning echo to map the unseen shapes of the world. They do not fly in the straight, predictable lines of the day-birds; their flight is a frantic, beautiful, looping dance.

To the neurotypical or able-bodied world, this non-linear movement might look like chaos. But to a neurodivergent observer, it is a flawless mirror. Our minds process the world through unique sensory echoes, tracing alternate patterns in the dark.

By comparing their flight to Ogham signs—the ancient, notched Irish script carved into stone—the poem reclaims this divergent way of being as something sacred. The bats are not lost; they are writing a silent script of living grace upon the night sky.

They find their way through the dark by listening to the hidden contours of creation, just as we must often find God by listening for the echoes of grace in the shadows of illness and sensory overwhelm.

The Barrow Vespers

This hymn grew out of that twilight journey—a liturgy for the weary, the divergent, and those who keep the watch where mortal borders blur.

1
O Christ who walks the limen‑paths
Where dusk and daylight meet,
Your footfall stirs the hidden world
Along the Barrow’s beat.
2
The aqueduct, a guardian arch,
Holds silence in its stone;
A doorway where the worlds align
And heaven leans to bone.
3
An otter, keeper of the deep,
Glides through the shadowed gleam;
A blessing borne in liquid runes
Across the twilight stream.
4
A kingfisher, a flame of blue,
Cuts through the thinning air;
A spark from Brigid’s ancient fire
Still burning everywhere.
5
The heron, monk of river‑prayer,
Stands robed in patient grey;
Its vigil marks the threshold hour
Where night outbreathes the day.
6
The mayfly, brief as whispered hope,
Ascends its shining thread;
A soul‑light rising from the reeds
To honour all the dead.
7
And bats, in looping ogham signs,
Write blessings on the night;
Their silent script of living grace
A gift beyond our sight.
8
O Christ who keeps the liminal watch
Where mortal borders blur,
Hold us within your shadowed peace
Till dawn makes all things sure.

Hymn information

First line: O Christ, who walks the limen paths
Text: Br Michael CSB
Metre: CM
Tunes: Kilmarnock, Kingsfold (2 verse per tune), or St Columba

Copyright

© Michael McFarland Campbell. 2026. 
Permission granted for local church or parish use with attribution. Not for commercial reproduction.

Written recently and shared here as part of the NeuroDivine hymn collection.