unpleasant if not painful tests, nurses determining when they will sleep, brush their teeth, be needled and prodded). Their new context is also one of extreme vulnerability. Worry and grief have a way of wearing persons down, debilitating the entire personality, sapping the vitality of sufferers. Pain takes a significant toll on the human beings it visits. In light of these contextual considerations, it seems only appropriate that pastoral carers enter the spaces of the suffering with a sense of