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The Pharmacy of Praise
This morning I wrote a hymn about pill boxes and blister packs—about Sundays spent sorting seven small doorways for the week ahead. It’s personal. Andrew and I both live by the rhythm of medicines, colours divided into morning and evening, lids clicked shut in quiet preparation. Sorting tablets isn’t a small thing in our house;… Continue reading
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🌙 Psalm 139: The Autistic Psalm
Coming back to Compline tonight as a Benedictine feels like returning to a rhythm that knows me better than I know myself. The Office doesn’t ask me to perform or adapt; it simply invites me to rest in its steady cadence. And in that space, Psalm 139 stands out as the psalm that speaks most… Continue reading
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Stay with me in the waiting.
There are days when Jeremiah’s cry—“My anguish, my anguish!”—feels less like something from long ago and more like the body’s own truth. In the dialysis unit, with the soft beeping of the machines and the hush of people doing their best to get through another session, you can hear that same ache. Jeremiah speaks of… Continue reading
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God’s Whiskered Rogues
This hymn was born from a passing glimpse on Facebook—a brief mention of otters warming St Kevin as he stood in the icy waters of Glendalough. The image lingered. It was easy to picture the bold little creatures of the river: curious, bright-eyed, unafraid. Not solemn attendants, but playful companions. Not tame, but gloriously themselves.… Continue reading
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The Knot of Grace: A Lorica for the Wired Mind
I wrote the hymn in English first. It came out of lived places. Hospital corridors. Strip lighting. The hum of machines. Motorways. Rain over stone. The strange ache of being surrounded and alone. It wasn’t theory. It was my nervous system on paper. There are days when my brain feels like too much input and… Continue reading
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A hymn inspired by 1 John 4:18: “Across the bog and standing stone” (DCM)
The hymn expresses the power of perfect love to dispel fear, connecting Celtic faith with the assurance that love meets us amidst our complexities and challenges. Continue reading
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The Icicle Lounge: Come in from the cold
Inspired by the Birth of The Icicle Lounge, a series of short stories is now taking shape. While each piece stands on its own, they are quietly connected by the Lounge itself — a shared setting where different lives unfold. I hope you enjoy this second story. The Icicle Lounge was not supposed to exist in… Continue reading
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By the Triogue’s Edge
Inspired by the lone heron standing by the River Triogue in Port Laoise that I see as I walk up to dialysis. I stand beside the quiet streamWhere Triogue’s waters glide;The mallards chatter in their team,But I keep to the side.The park hums soft with passing feet,With prams and dogs and play;Yet here upon my… Continue reading
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In the Thin Place of Forty Days
Rooted in the landscape, spirituality, and imaginative tradition of the Irish midlands, the text interweaves the great biblical “forty” journeys—the flood, the exodus, Sinai, the wilderness, and the risen Christ’s forty days—with the sacred geography of Kildare and its surrounding boglands. Drawing on Celtic Christian imagery and the rhythms of creation, it invites worshippers to… Continue reading
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The Icicle Lounge: The Night the Hand was Offered
Inspired by the Birth of The Icicle Lounge, a series of short stories is now taking shape. While each piece stands on its own, they are quietly connected by the Lounge itself — a shared setting where different lives unfold. I hope you enjoy this first story. The newcomer had walked past the frosted windows… Continue reading
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The Petals Beneath the Morning Light.
The first person to notice the flowers was Mrs Byrne. as she arrived early to light the candles before the eight o’clock Mass. The sun had only now begun to slip through the high windows, with long golden stripes lying across the tiled floor. There, caught in the light like a secret being revealed, lay… Continue reading
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Fit Lads of Winter & The Birth of The Icicle Lounge
There’s something about winter that sharpens everything. The air is colder. The sky is clearer. The silence feels closer to the skin. And yet—in that cold—warmth becomes unmistakable. “Fit Lads of Winter” began as a playful meditation on contrast. I kept imagining figures striding through snow as if it were nothing. Jackets open. Breath visible.… Continue reading
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Arrival
Arrival is a poem about coming home—not only to a place, but to a moment, a body, a ward, a riverbank, a sky clearing after rain. Set along the familiar paths of Monasterevin and Ballybrittas, the poem moves through train platforms, hospital rooms, shared umbrellas, and sudden shafts of light. What might appear ordinary becomes… Continue reading
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Waiting
In much of Christian spirituality, waiting is treated as a virtue—Advent waiting, prayerful waiting, hopeful waiting. But that language can sometimes feel abstract, almost decorative. It does not always account for the body. For the nervous system. For the long fluorescent hours in hospital wards. For the way time stretches, distorts, or presses against the… Continue reading
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Morning. Coffee. Birdsong.
There’s something beautifully Irish about the way morning begins. Before traffic. Before emails. Before the news. Just the thin grey light over hedges and fields—and the blackbird breaking the silence. When I wrote this dawn chorus poem, I was thinking about that ancient rhythm: robin on the post, wrens in the ivy, curlew calling over… Continue reading
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Ash, Attention, and the God Who Breathes: Writing This Hymn for Ash Wednesday
I wrote this hymn for Ash Wednesday out of a neurodivergent way of praying. For many of us, faith does not begin in abstraction. It begins in texture. In the grit of ash against skin. In the sound of a river looping the same bend again and again. In the stillness of a heron that… Continue reading
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Sacred Imagination, Wonderfully Wired
Many of the images that accompany my poems and hymns are created with the assistance of artificial intelligence, which I use as a humble instrument in the service of the Creator. As someone wonderfully wired, I believe the varied ways our minds perceive, feel, and imagine are not accidents but expressions of the imago Dei—the… Continue reading
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Thanksgiving on the Midland Line
There are journeys we take because we must, and journeys that quietly give something back to us along the way. For me, the railway through Ireland’s Midlands has become both—a path to healing and a moving window onto beauty. This poem is a small act of thanksgiving: for tracks that carry me to care, for… Continue reading
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Marked by Starlight, Bound in Love
At NeuroDivine, we know well that the road of faith is seldom straight. It bends and wanders, like a river finding its way to the sea. “Forty Days the Path Before Us” is a Lenten hymn for pilgrims of every kind—for those who travel by valley and high hill, through bogland hush and bright shoreline,… Continue reading
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The rainbow on my wrist.
From Monasterevin’s quiet stopThe morning train rolls west;Past cattle grazing by the line,And rooks that guard each nest.We cross the Barrow’s silver span,The viaduct below;A hare breaks cover in the reedsAnd watches as we go.In Port Laoise-bound and drifting thoughtsI catch a sudden grin—A stranger nods as though they knowSome secret held within.In town, the… Continue reading
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