The challenges of meeting spiritual needs in a hospital I have never been very good at visiting people in the hospital. I am unsettled by the smells of disinfectant that do not quite mask the sick-room odors of medicines, and of the cloying, private aromas of the human body. I seem, always, to get lost in the maze of hallways. The sight of blood makes me dizzy. You might think that I would be the last person to shadow hospital chaplains in their daily patient rounds, and an even more unlikely person to visit with patients and family members on a big-city hospitals Intensive Care Oncology Unit. Maybe so, but as a masters student embarking on an independent study of my own design, my fears and anxieties especially, my own spiritual uncertainty quickly took a backseat to the amazing displays of compassion and faith that I witnessed there. I now understand so much more deeply the ever-present tension between intellectual curiosity and the unsettling emotions I would need, somehow, to process. I sensed the dichotomy between the academic the systematic gathering of data and the slow and rarely anticipated birth of inner wisdom. In taking on this project, I strove to understand, experientially, how compassion could bring about healing. Perhaps I would also learn something more about myself and how I was connected to what I envisioned (albeit somewhat diffusely!) as God, Nature, or Universal Spirit