Abstract

Conventional coping strategies can be pushed to their limits when people find themselves in situations of suffering, illness, and dying. Moved beyond their everyday consciousness, individuals often have spiritual experiences of grace and encounters with the transcendent or the divine. The author shows how care providers can support patients in their suffering and how they can recognize patients' spiritual experiences. Explaining different types of experiences of transcendence such as seeing angels or feelings of otherness and presence, this book will be of valuable use to professionals working in palliative and spiritual care, such as spiritual caregivers, therapists, nurses, and physicians. The book entails a new approach to spiritual care which opens a space of hope wherein grace may happen even amid pain, suffering, illness and dying.
A bold ethnographic inquiry into palliative care patients' experiences of hope and grace that transcends conventional reason, language, and cultural boundaries of the ego-based self. Hope and grace are not specific states or goals but contemplative processes of belonging with recognizable qualities that can inform compassionate palliative practices.
Bruce L. Arnold, Ph.D., University of Calgary, Canada.

There is a great value for the patient in these theological musings from this music therapist, psychotherapist, and spiritual counsellor. They have the power to lift us beyond fear and pain. Renz unravels this mode of thinking. it can assist carers and medical staff, because it facilitates the work of injecting new hope and comfort into the milieu of the dying.
This book is not always an easy read, owing to its academic approach to dying. But it has a positive spin. It shows that dying and the proximity of death can flow into a close relationship with God and his holy angels. That said, it could perhaps benefit from having fewer patient-related case studies and more analytic material from Renz.

Revd David Bryant
Church Times
Monika Renz holds doctorates in psychopathology and theology from the universities of Zurich, Fribourg, and Innsbruck. She is head of the psycho-oncology department at Kantonsspital St. Gallen, where she has been a practicing music therapist, psychotherapist and spiritual counsellor since 1998. She is the author of a number of books drawing on her research into dying, spirituality and spiritual care. Find out more at www.monikarenz.ch.
Every word of this rich and profound account of Renz's important and valuable research with the dying rings true. Monika is a courageous and inspirational pioneer. Her challenging work is worthy of the closest attention, extending the boundaries of human wisdom where we all need to go.
Larry Culliford, author of ‘The Psychology of Spirituality’, and, ‘Much Ado about Something: a vision of Christian maturity’.