NeuroDivine

There is an urgent, instinctual pull that happens when a loved one enters the final, thinnest room of palliative care. The mind wants to leap ahead, to bypass geography, to run north to my father’s bedside. It is the natural response of love in the face of mortal thresholds.

But this afternoon, my body has issued a different directive. Before I can travel north to resume my watch,

I must sit still.

Just last Thursday evening, I was granted the sacred, heavy privilege of sitting with him in the deep of the night. In that quiet room, as the landscape outside seemed to hold its breath, I wrote a hymn about keeping vigil at the veil, watching him approach the great crossing.

I held his hand and realized that at the border between worlds, love can do nothing except remain present. No fixing. No solving. Only faithfulness.
Today, that faithfulness requires a different kind of presence. It requires me to surrender to the clinical enclosure of a dialysis chair.

The Dispersed Monastic Cell

As a brother in a dispersed Anglican Benedictine community, my vow of stabilitas (stability) cannot be anchored to the stone walls of a physical monastery. Instead, it must be lived out in the raw, moving geography of my medical reality. This afternoon, my stability belongs right here. The clinic is my cloister; the rhythmic hum of the blood pump is my choir office.

Sitting in this chair, I find myself reaching back to a prayer I wrote here last year, asking God to transform this routine into grace and this room into a chapel. In that space, I prayed for the “stability to remain faithful in the long hours, and obedience to the wisdom of care.” I did not know then how sharply those words would be tested today. The instinct is to tear myself away from the machines, to rebel against the delay, and to rush back to the bedside I left on Friday morning. But the boundaries of chronic illness are absolute. To keep the vigil at the veil later, I must accept the stability of the chair now.

Honouring the Gift of Care

Trapped by the lines that keep me alive, a deeper theological clarity has settled into the quiet of the ward.

My father spent his life taking care of me. Long before we had the diagnostic vocabulary—decades before we knew I was autistic—he instinctively knew how to guide, protect, and soothe my neurodivergent mind. He didn’t need a medical label to meet my unique wiring and fragile health with a fierce, intuitive tenderness. He simply loved the reality of who I was, protecting me in a world that was often too loud and unyielding.

If I were to neglect my own body now, rushing north at the expense of the very treatments keeping me alive, I would be discarding the ultimate gift he gave me.

There is no point in running to him if I make myself sick in the process. Loving him well means honouring the life and the body he spent a lifetime helping to sustain.

The Continuous Vigil

Taking care of myself this afternoon is not a pause in my duty to my father; it is my first act of devotion to him today. The vigil I began at his bedside last Thursday has not stopped; it has simply changed coordinates. By honouring the discipline of dialysis, I am honouring his legacy of care, ensuring that when I cross the threshold back into his room, I do so with the strength to hold the space.

Christ does not wait for me to arrive at the bedside to meet me. He walks the liminal paths of the clinic just as softly as He walks the corridors of palliative care. He is keeping the first watch beside this chair, answering that old prayer to make this broken body a vessel of His peace.

To my dispersed community and those who pray along the way: hold the wall with me this afternoon. The chapel is right here.