Dr. Monika Renz’s work with dying patients is unusual if not
unique in the way she appropriates and applies insights from Jungian depth
psychology, practices available in patients’ faith traditions, and musically
guided meditation to invite and support the spiritual experiences that so often
come, bidden or unbidden, near the end of life.
An experienced oncologist, Dr. Renz offers carefully amassed data to support
her advocacy of focused practices of spiritual care as a dimension of
palliative care, but is also quite comfortable with the fact that “neither the
frequency nor the visible effects of experiences of the transcendent prove that
such experience is an expression of grace” because “unverifiability is
intrinsic to grace.” Still, her long
experience leads her to assert not only that “grace” can be a useful,
practical, operative word for what professional caregivers may witness and
mediate but also that affirmation and support of patients’ spiritual,
religious, or transcendent experiences in the course of dying can amplify and
multiply moments of grace, which manifest as sudden, deep peace in the very
midst of pain, profound acceptance, openness to reconciliations, or significant
awakenings from torpor that allow needed moments of closure with loved ones. Describing herself as “an open-minded
religious person and a practicing Christian,” she reminds readers that God is a loanword, whose basic form in
Germanic was gaudam, a neutral
participle. Depending on the
Indo-Germanic root, the word means “the called upon” or “the one sacrificed to
. . . .” Openness to the divine in both
patients and caregivers, Dr. Renz argues, can and does make end-of-life care a
shared journey of discovery and offer everyone involved a valuable reminder that
medicine is practiced, always, at the threshold of mystery.
