Some commissions arrive with the subject already in place. The task is simply to discover the hymn hidden inside it.
When the request arrived on a Monday afternoon from the Rev Philip McKinley, Pioneer Minister with the Community of the Celtic Cross, I was sitting on dialysis. His brief was far more demanding than a simple request to “write something for Lent.” Philip wanted to explore the significant appearances of forty throughout the Bible—the days and years of waiting, wandering, testing, and preparation—and see whether they could somehow be brought together in verse.
And he needed it immediately. We were meeting for coffee the following afternoon—giving the commission a life cycle of roughly twenty hours, a good chunk of which would be spent attached to a machine.
By the time I sat down for coffee with Philip the next afternoon, the hymn had made its first journey: from Apple Notes on my iPhone to his, sent across Messenger.
Finding the Forties
The work began not with rhyme but with Scripture.
Lent gives the most obvious starting point: Christ’s forty days in the wilderness. But once I began deliberately following the number through the Bible, a much larger pattern emerged.
- There were the forty days and nights of rain in the story of Noah and the ark.
- There were Israel’s forty years of wandering in the wilderness.
- There were Moses’ forty days on Sinai.
- There was Elijah’s forty-day journey towards Horeb.
- There were Christ’s forty days of temptation in the wilderness.
- And beyond Lent itself were the forty days between Resurrection and Ascension.
Finding the incidences was one part of the task. The more interesting question was what to do with them. It would have been quite easy to produce a sung catalogue: one biblical forty after another, accurately referenced, put into metre and made to rhyme.
But that would not necessarily have made a hymn.
The real writing began when the question changed from “Where does forty appear?” to “What is happening during these forties?”
From Research to Verse
The different biblical forties do not all mean the same thing.
The flood speaks of destruction, preservation, and renewal. Israel’s forty years speak of wandering, dependence, and the slow formation of a people. Sinai is a place of encounter, revelation, and law. Elijah’s journey carries exhaustion, fear, and persistence before finally encountering God. Christ’s wilderness is a place of testing and preparation. The forty days after Easter belong to resurrection, presence, and preparation for what comes next. Yet something runs through them all.
Again and again, forty is a space in which something is being changed.
A world.
A people.
A prophet.
A disciple.
That gave me the theological thread I needed. It gave me Lent—and it explained the title that began to take shape: In the Thin Place of Forty Days.
In Celtic tradition, a thin place is where the boundary between heaven and earth grows porous. But forty days suggests that a thin place is not only a location in geography; it can be a period in time—an intentional threshold where the noise recedes enough for transformation to happen.
Giving the Hymn a Shape
Once the biblical material had been gathered, it needed a poetic structure capable of holding all those separate stories together.
The repeated refrain “Forty days…” became the anchor of that structure. The recurrence of the number carries the hymn forward from one biblical episode to another, giving stories from very different parts of Scripture a single, shared pulse.
Forty days. Forty years. Forty days again.
That repetition also seemed appropriate for Lent itself. Lent is a season of returning—to prayer, to Scripture, to repentance, to attention, and to those aspects of ourselves we might prefer not to examine too closely. We travel familiar ground, but the hope is that we do not arrive at Easter quite the same people who began the journey.
Avoiding a Sung Bible List
This was perhaps the main craft problem in the commission.
A hymn about biblical forties could very easily become educational without becoming prayerful.
There is nothing wrong with hymns teaching Scripture or theology. They have always done that. But simply converting Bible references into metre would not have been enough.
Each biblical episode needed to make another movement. The objective historical detail had to yield to immediate devotional vulnerability. The flood moves from ancient story to a present plea for holding:
As the ark once held creation,
hold our hearts in circling grace…
Elijah’s journey shifts from a prophet’s retreat to our own attempt to hear God amid fear and noise:
When the mountains quake and shudder,
when the flames before us rise,
in the hedgerow, with the lark’s song,
speak Your whisper, clear and wise.
Christ’s temptation could become an invitation to examine our own desires, loyalties and choices.
The biblical event is remembered, but it does not remain safely in the past.
It becomes prayer.
That movement—from what happened then to what might God be doing in us now—was what finally turned the research into a hymn.
Giving Scripture a Landscape
The biblical framework came from the commission, but the hymn also needed somewhere to stand.
The Community of the Celtic Cross has its life in Meath and Kildare, and that mattered from the beginning. I did not want the hymn to remain entirely within an ancient biblical landscape; I wanted those stories to meet the ground where the community actually worships.
There was also a very practical reason for making the hymn local. On the Sunday for which Philip wanted it, he was preaching in both Yellowbog and Kildare. Naturally, I wanted both places to find their way into the text.
That mattered deeply to me. Congregations do not often get to sing hymns rooted so specifically in the landscape around them. Much of the hymnody we inherit is wonderfully universal, capable of being sung in almost any parish, in almost any country, without alteration. There is real value in that. But there is also something powerful—almost sacramental—about singing words that name the ground beneath your feet.
So the ancient landscapes of Scripture began to meet Meath and Kildare. The desert met bogland. Sinai found an echo in Kildare’s hills. Elijah’s search for the quiet voice of God moved through hedgerows, wind, and birdsong. Yellowbog entered the hymn not merely as a place-name, but as part of the spiritual geography of the people singing.
The law received by Moses became something almost physically inscribed into the worshipper:
Write Your law like ogham markings
on the grain of who we are…
Bogland, fields, roads, birds, weather, and stone are not merely scenery outside the sacred world—they are part of the world in which God is encountered. The local imagery was not there simply to make the hymn sound Irish; it was doing theological work. The people singing in Yellowbog and Kildare were being invited to hear the stories of wilderness, Sinai, and pilgrimage not as ancient events belonging to another age and country, but through the landscape they knew in their bones.
For a few minutes, the geography of Scripture and the geography of Meath and Kildare could occupy the exact same space.
Writing to Be Sung
There is another constraint peculiar to hymn writing: whatever theological idea I want to preserve, whatever image I want to use, whatever movement I want the verse to make, it still has to sing.
In the Thin Place of Forty Days is written in 87 87 D meter, allowing it to be paired with familiar tunes like Abbot’s Leigh or Manor House. That structural choice imposes strict physical boundaries. Syllables matter. Natural stresses matter. Where a congregation needs to take a breath matters. A line can be perfectly satisfactory prose—or even brilliant poetry—while making a dreadful hymn line.
That is one of the great disciplines of the craft. The restrictions are genuine, but restrictions sharpen language. There is nowhere for an unnecessary syllable to hide when a room full of people is trying to sing it.
The task is not simply to say something true. It is to make the truth singable.
An Overnight Hymn
All of this happened at remarkable speed. Philip’s request arrived on Monday afternoon while I was on dialysis. I started by using the mobile phone in my hand, a writer’s research library of the 21st century, and started to trace the biblical forties. That evening, I carried the work forward—deciding which stories belonged in the hymn, discovering the links between them, and fitting them into meter.
Somewhere in the quiet hours of the night, research became lines. Lines became verses. And eventually, the verses became a hymn. The following afternoon, Philip and I met for coffee, and I handed it over.
I would not necessarily recommend a twenty-hour turnaround as an ideal creative method. Most writing needs time to sit, breathe, and be revised. But occasionally a commission arrives at precisely the right moment. The framework is clear, the subject opens up almost immediately, and the piece seems to know where it needs to go.
This was one of those rare occasions.
Forty as Formation
As the hymn emerged, one idea increasingly held the whole thing together: forty is almost always a period of formation.
Noah emerges from the ark into a renewed world. Israel is slowly formed as a covenant community across decades of sand and sky. Moses receives the law written in stone. Elijah is carried through exhaustion toward a quiet, transforming encounter. Christ passes through the crucible of the wilderness before beginning his public ministry. And the risen Christ prepares his disciples for the unknown road ahead.
That offered a far richer understanding of Lent. Lent need not be reduced to a season of religious deprivation—forty-odd days of proving our seriousness by giving something up. It can be a season in which we consent to being reshaped.
Beneath all the biblical references in the hymn lies a fairly simple question:
What might these forty days make of us?
The Fee Was a Cup of Coffee
There is one other detail about this commission: my fee was a cup of coffee.
No, that is not my standard rate for commissioned writing, and no one should take this story as a commercial benchmark for liturgical craft. Creative work has genuine value. Commissioned writing ordinarily involves questions of contracts, rights, expectations, deadlines, and fair remuneration—and writers should never feel embarrassed about recognizing the economic worth of their craft.
But context matters. I am a hymn writer. Philip is a pioneer minister working on the ground. And, ultimately, this particular piece was being written for the worship of Almighty God. On those terms, a cup of coffee felt like a perfectly honourable contract.
Not everything I write belongs within the exact same economy. Some things are professional obligations; some are gifts; sometimes they are a bit of both. This one began as a Monday-afternoon request on a dialysis machine, occupied the quiet hours of the night, and crossed a café table the following day.
But that, of course, was not the end of its journey.
And Then It Was Sung
A few weeks later, on 8 March 2026, In the Thin Place of Forty Days was sung in St Brigid’s Cathedral, Kildare—and I was there. I slipped away from my usual place of worship in Monasterevin for the morning.
I did feel slightly guilty. Normally, on a Sunday morning, my place is on the organ bench at St John’s. There is something decidedly strange for an organist about being, voluntarily, somewhere else while the congregation at home is worshipping.
But this was not an ordinary Sunday for me. It is one thing to write a hymn. It is another to learn that somebody somewhere has sung it. It is something else again to sit among a congregation and hear one of your own hymns sung for the first time, in the place and for the worshipping community for which it was commissioned.
That seemed worth leaving the organ bench for. Until that morning, I knew In the Thin Place of Forty Days intimately as a piece of writing. I knew the Monday-afternoon request. I knew the searches through Scripture. I knew the lines that had been discarded, the syllables counted and the stresses tested. I remembered handing the finished hymn across a café table to Philip the following day.
Then the organ sounded (played by someone else). And other people began to sing it. That changes something.
Words which had begun privately—on a screen, in notes, in the concentrated business of an overnight writing session—suddenly had breath. They were no longer simply my words. They had become part of the Church’s prayer.
When Words Take Breath
Sitting in St Brigid’s that morning, I was both writer and worshipper. I knew how the thing had been made—the late hours, the counted stresses, the discarded rhymes. But for those few minutes, I had to let it go.
A poem may encounter its reader silently on the page, but a hymn is written to be inhabited by corporate breath. The finished object is not ultimately the text on paper; it is people singing.
What began as an overnight request crossed a café table for the price of a cup of coffee. A few weeks later, it belonged to a congregation singing beneath the ancient arches of Kildare. The commission had begun with the number forty, but it became a hymn for particular people, singing in particular places. What started as a biblical number became a journey; what began as research became poetry; and in the end, the words were no longer mine at all—they had become part of the Church’s prayer.
Read the complete hymn: In the Thin Place of Forty Days on NeuroDivine.ie.
Read about its first singing: A Quiet Milestone in Kildare on NeuroDivine.ie.