An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

Dame Cicely Saunders (1918–2005)
Dame Cicely Saunders, who almost single-handedly founded the Modern 
Hospice Movement, bringing scientific excellence and spiritual care 
together to help the dying, had a profound experience of conversion. 
Afterwards, throughout her life she had a sure faith that she would receive 
the necessary support – spiritual and material – for her venture to 
succeed. She did. Her movement has now spread all over the world and 
care of the terminally ill has been transformed.
Religion had not been not part of Cicely Saunders’ home life but when 
she began her spiritual exploration, she did so with all the intensity of 
such a remarkably persistent character. As her biographer Shirley du 
Boulay put it, 
Cicely did not do things by halves and soon the search was on. She 
thought, she talked, she argued, she went to church again, and she 
read, most of all she read. . . . All this, however, was in her head, her 
heart was not yet touched. It was as if she knew how electricity worked 
but lived in the dark. She longed for the light to be turned on, for the 
real conversion she had read about and heard of from her friends, but 
it eluded her.
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It was the idea of letting go to God which eventually led to her conversion 
experience as she prayed,
Oh God, I must have been emotional or not really meaning it when 
I said I wanted to try and believe and serve you before, but 
please
can 
it be alright this time? And the Lord as it were said to me, ‘It’s not you 
who has to do anything, I have done it all.’ At that moment I felt that 
God had turned me round and that it was alright. It was for all the 
world like suddenly finding the wind at your back instead of battling 
against it all the time.
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During the war years Cicely trained as a nurse, but was unable to 
practise due to a spinal problem. She retrained as an almoner, today’s 

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Spiritual and Mystical Experiences
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social worker, and fell in love with a patient, David Tasma. He was a 
young Polish refugee, who was dying. They shared a vision for the care of 
the dying, discussing how terminally ill patients could be helped. He felt 
that his life had been wasted but in thinking through with Cicely the 
idea of a special home, he realized that he could leave a legacy. He left 
her all his money, £500, saying that he would be a window in her home. 
She would later say that it took her 19 years to build the home around 
his window. But she did it, even though it meant retraining in medicine in 
her late thirties, finding land and funds and also battling the medical 
establishment. St Christopher’s Hospice was opened in Sydenham in 
1967. However, in running the hospice, funds were an ever-present prob-
lem, but much to the distress of her accountants, Cicely continued as 
she had begun, to rely on faith and an overdraft. They managed and 
St Christopher’s became a model for the rest of the world to emulate.