Sacred Moments in Medicine: How Awe and Wonder Could Transform Patient Care

Medicine and spirituality have traveled side by side for millennia, yet the modern clinic has largely kept them at arm’s length. A new editorial in the Journal of General Internal Medicine argues that this separation may be costing both patients and physicians something profound. Writing in response to two companion studies published in the same issue, Lenny López of the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine and Horace Delisser of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine contend that so-called sacred moments—brief episodes of transcendence, deep interconnectedness, and spiritual emotion that arise within clinical encounters—are far more common than most clinicians realize, and that learning to recognize and share them could reshape the emotional architecture of healthcare itself.

The editorial builds on a rapidly maturing evidence base. Multidisciplinary international consensus conferences have defined spirituality as a dynamic and intrinsic aspect of humanity through which people seek ultimate meaning, purpose, and transcendence, and experience relationship to self, family, others, community, society, nature, and the significant or sacred. Religion, in that framework, is the search for significance within established institutions oriented toward facilitating spirituality. Comprehensive systematic reviews have since demonstrated a strong positive association between health and religion or spirituality, prompting evidence-based recommendations from organizations as prominent as the World Health Organization for integrating spiritual considerations into healthcare delivery. Partnerships between US federal and state health agencies—including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the National Institutes of Health—and local faith-based organizations have shown positive outcomes at both individual and community levels, leading researchers to assess religion and spirituality as an important social determinant of health.

The epidemiological backdrop is striking. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that roughly 70 percent of Americans identify with a religion and also believe in an afterlife, and about half say that parts of nature—mountains, rivers, or trees—can carry spirits or spiritual energies. Yet physician training and professional culture remain steeped in a secular scientific worldview. Even so, physicians themselves report moments that feel more than ordinary, episodes that lend deeper significance to their work and strengthen their connection with patients. Clinical encounters, after all, are saturated with vulnerability, uncertainty, and intense emotions ranging from joy to grief. It is precisely within this charged space that the two new studies locate the phenomenon of sacred moments, defined as brief periods in which people experience transcendence, boundlessness, ultimacy, deep interconnectedness, and spiritual emotions.

The research team behind the conceptual model, led by Wong and colleagues, treats sacred moments as a marker of strong humanistic connection—one that may address the yearning for holistic and compassionate care felt by clinicians and patients alike, in which people are seen more fully as spiritual as well as biological, psychological, and social beings. Importantly, the authors use the word sacred in an expansive, non-ontological sense, emphasizing both religious and non-religious meanings. Spirituality, in their formulation, is the search for the sacred, encompassing deeper human experiences and emotions, and sacred moments are embedded within worldviews shaped by context and culture. This definitional flexibility is what allows the framework to travel across belief systems rather than presupposing any particular faith commitment.

That cross-cultural portability is put to the test in the second study, by Sakama and colleagues, which examines clinical practice in Japan. Like the United States, Japan hosts a multiplicity of religious traditions alongside widespread secularism. Almost all Japanese participants initially expressed unfamiliarity with the term sacred moments, whether rendered in Japanese or English. But once interviewers explained the concept, participants readily described parallel experiences, invoking ideas such as deep connection and fate. In the Japanese context, sacred moments appear to map onto a broader category of profound non-religious relational experiences, and some participants even voiced negative views toward religion and spirituality. The takeaway, the editorial authors suggest, is that sacred moments exist cross-culturally but are likely to be described and understood differently—a finding with real implications for how the concept is taught and studied internationally.

When recognized, noted, embraced, and reflected upon, these moments can carry immense weight in the daily lives of busy clinicians. Clinicians have described sacred moment experiences as the reason they went into medicine in the first place. The accumulating research indicates that such experiences nurture well-being and act as an antidote to burnout, with beneficial impacts on both clinicians and patients: decreased stress, improved mental health, an increased sense of purpose in life, and a stronger relational and therapeutic alliance between clinician and patient. What was long dismissed as ephemeral and nebulous is now being given empirical structure. Wong and colleagues present a rigorous framework that specifies predisposing factors, such as openness and religious or spiritual beliefs; precipitating factors, such as palliative care contexts or near-death experiences; and hindering factors, such as lack of time and training.

That conceptual scaffolding matters because it converts a subjective experience into a legitimate object of study, allowing processes and outcomes to be defined and tested through interventions. It also highlights how common these experiences may already be. Prevalence rates of sacred moments in healthcare are estimated at 68 percent among general internal medicine physicians, with the majority of sampled healthcare clinicians endorsing having had such an experience with a patient. In other words, the phenomenon the field has barely named is already woven through the routine fabric of hospital wards and outpatient clinics, occurring daily in environments that rarely pause to acknowledge it.

Yet acknowledgment is exactly what is missing. Although sacred moments may be common, intentional processing and discussion of them with professional colleagues is rare. Relevant content already exists in doctoring courses during the early professional formation of medical students, but these curricula are typically not revisited later in clinical training, when multiple daily patient encounters dominate a clinician’s day. The editorial calls for normalizing sacred moment experiences through story sharing and formal curricular education during residency and continuing medical education, giving clinicians the vocabulary to speak of these experiences in a nonjudgmental fashion with cultural humility. Modeling by senior physicians, the authors argue, will be a cornerstone of such curricula, and interprofessional interactions with spiritual care professionals—chaplains and ministers of various faith traditions—could both facilitate normalization and sharpen clinicians’ sensitivity to recognizing these experiences as they unfold.

The word sacred itself can provoke unease among clinicians, an uneasiness that reflects the secularization of the broader culture and the naturalism underlying the bioscience of physician training. But the editorial points out that physicians, regardless of worldview, have discrete patient and interprofessional experiences of deep connection, closeness, empathy, sacrifice, selflessness, and care—experiences that, while subjective and idiosyncratic, trigger combinations of awe and wonder, appreciation and gratitude, contentment and satisfaction. Reconceptualizing sacred moments in terms of these transcendent relational experiences makes the concept accessible to physicians of any religious framework or none. Psychology research reinforces the point: many nonreligious contexts reliably trigger awe and wonder, including engagement with nature, music, visual arts and design, collective movement such as dancing, marching, or singing in a crowd, and the observation of moral beauty, such as witnessing extreme courage, kindness, or selflessness in others.

The stakes extend beyond clinician well-being to the quality of patient care. Despite the importance of spirituality to large majorities of patients—estimates range from 71 to 99 percent—spiritual care remains infrequent: desired by 50 to 96 percent of patients but received by only 9 to 51 percent. Similar findings have been published over the last 30 years, suggesting a stubborn, structural gap. Patients often look to their doctors and nurses for support in negotiating the spiritual and existential dimensions of illness, yet clinicians report feeling uncomfortable or unprepared to provide it. Sacred moments, the editorial argues, sit within the broader spectrum of transcendent experiences, and the awe they evoke allows people to know, sense, see, and understand the fundamental truths that bond us together. Having physicians acknowledge their own sacred moments may therefore open the door to greater comfort in engaging the religiosity and spirituality of patients and families—nudging the clinical relationship toward something more fully realized, more inclusive, and, in the deepest sense, more human.

Subject of Research: The role of awe, wonder, and sacred moments in the clinician-patient encounter and their effects on well-being and care

Article Title: Attuning and Sharing Sacred Moments: Awe and Wonder in the Clinical Encounter

Article References: López, L., & Delisser, H. (2026). Attuning and Sharing Sacred Moments: Awe and Wonder in the Clinical Encounter. Journal of General Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-026-10883-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11606-026-10883-9

Keywords: sacred moments, spirituality, awe, clinician-patient relationship, burnout, internal medicine, spiritual care, cross-cultural research, medical education, social determinants of health, transcendence, well-being