NeuroDivine

Reflection | a year of NeuroDivine | 13 August 2026

One year after writing a Benedictine prayer in the dialysis chair, I return to what those words still mean.

A year ago today, on 13 August 2025, I published a prayer called A Prayer in the Dialysis Chair, in the Spirit of St Benedict.

At its heart were these words:

Let this chair become my cloister,
This room my chapel,
This time my offering.

I wrote them from within the strange rhythm that dialysis imposes on life: three times a week, several hours at a time, connected to a machine that does for me what my kidneys no longer can.

At the time, I was trying to put words around something I had slowly begun to understand. Dialysis was not simply time taken away from the rest of my life. It was part of my life. And if God was to be found anywhere, then God had to be found there too.

A year later, I think I understand that more deeply.

The dialysis chair has not become romantic. I have no desire to pretend that illness is somehow spiritually desirable, or that there is anything inherently holy about needles, alarms, blood-pressure cuffs, exhaustion or the long journey home afterwards.

There are days when dialysis is tedious. Days when it is frustrating. Days when the body simply says that it has had enough.

And still, the chair remains.

Three times each week I return to it.

That repeated returning has begun to look, to me, very much like the Benedictine promise of stability.

Stability does not mean that everything stays pleasant or predictable. It means remaining present to the place in which we have been given to live. It means resisting the constant temptation to imagine that real life is happening somewhere else.

For several hours on a dialysis day, this is where my life is happening.

And so the chair can indeed become a kind of cloister.

Not because the dialysis unit is silent—it certainly is not—and not because the machinery resembles monastic architecture, but because a cloister is a place of returning. A place where the same paths are walked again and again until, perhaps, we begin to notice what has always been there.

• The machine hums.
• The blood travels out and returns.
• Numbers change on the screen.
• Staff move between patients.
• People sleep, talk, watch television, read, worry, wait.
• And somewhere within all of that, prayer happens.

Sometimes it is formal prayer. Sometimes a psalm. Sometimes the Rosary. Sometimes one of the offices from NeuroDivine Book of Daily Prayer.

Sometimes prayer is nothing more than sitting quietly and breathing.

Sometimes it is writing.

A surprising amount of NeuroDivine has been written in a dialysis chair.

Poems, hymns, prayers, reflections and ideas have emerged during hours that could easily have been regarded simply as lost time.

Perhaps that is one of the things Benedictine spirituality has taught me most clearly: very little has to be wasted.

• The ordinary can become offering.
• Waiting can become listening.
• Routine can become rhythm.
• Even dependence can teach us something about grace.

Dialysis is an unusually visible form of dependence. I cannot simply decide that today I will manage without it. My continued life depends upon machinery, medicine, nurses, technicians, scientists, cleaners, engineers, drivers, administrators and countless people whom I will never meet.

That is humbling.

But perhaps all human life is more dependent than we like to admit.

We live because others grow food, purify water, produce medicines, maintain electricity, build roads, teach, care, repair and serve.

The dialysis chair merely makes that interdependence impossible for me to ignore.

A year ago I prayed:

This time my offering.

I think I would still pray that today.

But perhaps I now understand the offering differently.

I am not offering suffering to God as though God requires suffering from me.

I am offering attention.

I am offering presence.

I am offering these hours as part of the life I actually have, rather than forever wishing for another one.

And sometimes, from that offering, something grows.

A prayer.

A hymn.

A conversation.

A moment of kindness.

A few words written on a screen while the machine continues its work beside me.

There is nothing dramatic about most of it.

That, perhaps, is precisely the point.

The Rule of St Benedict is filled with ordinary things: meals, sleep, work, prayer, hospitality, tools, timetables and the difficult business of living alongside other people.

Holiness is worked out in the repetitive details.

So perhaps dialysis belongs there too.

• The chair.
• The machine.
• The dressing.
• The blood-pressure cuff.
• The cup of tea, slices of toast and marmalade.
• The journey home.
• And then, after a day or two of rest, the returning.

A year after writing that prayer, I still would not have chosen this particular cloister.

But it is one of the places in which I have learned to pray.

And perhaps that is enough.

Today I return to the words with which I prayed a year ago:

Let this chair become my cloister.

Let this room become my chapel.

Let this time become my offering.

And let me meet Christ there, as faithfully as I hope to meet him anywhere else.