Hospice Chaplain Writes About Her Talks with the Dying

"It took me a while to understand that talking about their family and their relationships within their family, their love relationships, was their way of trying to understand these larger spiritual questions.... We’re all meaning-making creatures. All our lives, this is what we’re doing, whether or not we realize it. If you think of these big spiritual questions — why am I here, what does it all mean, why am I suffering now? — those are really hard questions, and so we tend as human beings to want to talk about the abstract by thinking about concrete examples. When we talk about God as love, it’s really natural for people to think: What have my experiences of love been? And what do those experiences, good and bad, teach me about God?"

Hospice Chaplain Writes About Her Talks with the Dying