Explores how care providers to critically and terminally ill persons can understand and engage with extreme distress as a process where spiritual experiences of transcendence happen

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.

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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.