My fears of loneliness were banished by nearest and dearest, family and friends and members of the congregations where I had worshipped. The cost to them in effort, time and practical imagination were all testimonies to that New Testament insistence that we visit the sick, and are as alert as Christ to their needs. A lay friend bent his journey from Westminster to Fleet Street to bring a bottle of champagne on the day of my operation. The family put it in a fridge and brought it back to celebrate Easter Day at a tiny party with a fellow patient and two grandchildren.

One of the hospital’s stated aims was to establish a personal relationship between staff and patients. What did I want to be called? They seemed to expect a job description and a first name so we settled on “Dean Alan”. As the mists of anaesthetic faded I tried to remember their names, amazingly various from all the world’s continents, thanks to the globalisation of modern nursing.

A nurse from the Caribbean told me of the two children she is bringing up in the East End while her doctor husband is working in the States. Nurses from Namibia, India, South Africa, Brazil, New Zealand, all came to care. It felt as if our Western internationalised medical service was fulfilling Christ's dream of universal caring love. But undeveloped countries are still desperately short. The events of Good Friday and Easter were believed by the church to have cosmic significance and Christ himself came to be called Salvator Mundi.

Post-operation euphoria wears off and sleep can be elusive. Visits from surgeon and anaesthetist, two blood transfusions and the hydro pool were restorative, but the “black dog” of depression was also an occasional visitor. Would I ever enjoy walking or swimming again? My leg seemed not to belong to me and I resented its ineffectiveness. Oddly, I felt strengthened by remembering how much religious teaching is negative. I remembered those disciples left in total despair and profound hopelessness on the road to Emmaus. Reading and, even more, writing failed me. The radio, especially Mark Tully’s Something Understood from New Delhi, helped with its poetry and music and the sense of a subconscious spirituality from the Psalms and the Prayer Book.

Later, I found Dr Oliver Sacks’ A Leg to Stand On a rich resource. He quotes John Donne: “I am re-begot by Absence, Darkness, Death; things which are not” as well as the philospher Hume’s conviction about our perceptions being in “a perpetual flux and movement”. I found myself, like Dr Sacks, addressing an “unimaginable Thou”, comforted by a mysterious presence.

Both hospitals had chaplains; gentle, sensitive men closely linked to the healing and counselling professions in their London areas, and they seemed to have time. They brought the Sacrament on four or five occasions in that fortnight, and the Holy Week and Easter readings added an intensity of concern with life and death. We remembered a fellow patient who had had a hysterectomy and was returning home to care for a husband suffering from Alzheimer's. The crisis in Iraq was developing and many health workers were Muslim. I felt the ancient words “Lift up your hearts” with a new sense of appreciation for the healing services and the miraculous caring of loved ones family and friends.

When I returned home, thanks to the benign road transport of a volunteer from the Red Cross, it was some time before I could rejoin the churchgoers. Then it was with eight others at a weekday communion in a country church. The celebrant asked me to give the New Testament reading. Two sticks and a 15th-century pillar got me to and kept me on my feet, as well as the faith and friendship of the congregation. Since it was May — the month of Julian of Norwich — I recalled her words that “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”

When Holy Week and Easter come in 2004 I’m sure I'll have religious as well as medical reasons for my gratitude for those weeks barred from church attendance by a stay in hospital. My hospital intuitions will fuse with the worship of the Church and enrich my perceptions. Perhaps we need times of abstinence from the over-familiar religious words to grasp the realities to which they point.

Alan Webster is Dean Emeritus of St Paul’s and author of Reaching for Reality (2002).