The Wetterau Family Spiritual Care Center was unveiled Wednesday morning at City of Hope Orange County's new cancer hospital in Irvine with a blessing ceremony featuring local religious leaders and the Pacific Chorale.
It will be an innovative feature at the cancer hospital, which is schedule to open in December next to the existing City of Hope Lennar Foundation Cancer Center.
"We're proud of it," said Laura Grant, City of Hope Orange County executive director of strategic implementation. "I don't think I've ever seen anything like this."
Patients seeking respite will enter the room on the fifth floor of the hospital, where a touchscreen on the wall will offer them seven sacred spaces to choose from that center on nature and faith. Immersive technology leads one to a chapel, a mandir, a mosque, a temple, a synagogue, shorelines or an alpine forest.
The sights and sounds of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism -- the world's five largest faith traditions -- are displayed via a main projection on the wall. Windows on either side of the centerpieced projection feature related items like candles.
Jihad Turk, the founding president of Bayan Islamic Graduate School, was among the religious leaders who participated by dedicating the mosque.
"In Islam, supporting those who are ill is not only an act of compassion, but a duty that brings the community together in faith and service," Turk said. "When we unite to support those with cancer, as we do with this center, we embody the mercy and solidarity that our faith teaches, offering comfort and hope to every individual."
The spiritual care center was developed by former Disney Imagineer Roger Holzberg, co-founder of Reimagine Well. It was a personal project for Holzberg, a thyroid cancer survivor who also has been a cancer caregiver.
"One of my biggest regrets is not being able to take my grandmother to the city of Jerusalem, which she always wanted me to do," Holzberg said. "If she were at her end of life in a hospital like this, we could have gone to a place of faith together ... When the opportunity presented itself here at City of Hope to integrate faith into the cancer journey, we really wanted to do it. I wanted to do it from a personal point of view, and I wanted to do it from a clinical and patient experience point of view."
Reimagine Well educational program producer Adele Sender led an effort to survey patients and families, asking them an important question: "If you feel the need for prayer and you could be in any sacred space, where would you go?"
"We truly were directed by the patient and family community, and the faith leadership community, and we then sought to give them the experiences they were looking for," Holzberg said.
The projections take patients -- and hospital staff, who are also welcome to use the space -- to places near and far. The Huntington Beach Pier and the beach at Crystal Cove are pictured in the shorelines setting, while a mandir in Chino Hills is also featured, as is a chapel at Mission San Juan Capistrano.
The immersive experiences, which last for 15 minutes, typically start outdoors before heading inside. Two different Jewish temples are featured, the exterior at the Munich synagogue OHel Jakob and the interior at the Spanish Synagogue in Prague.
Holzberg was glad the images were met with approval.
"There's an old joke, bring three rabbis into a room and you'll get seven answers," he said with a laugh. "We had five rabbis, and they all agreed that this was the right imagery to use, based on what we were trying to achieve."
Adjacent to the spiritual care center room is a private soundproof "tranquility room" that's for private counseling and spiritual direction, City of Hope Orange County President Annette Walker said.
Walker said when creating the cancer hospital, she had a vision for a spiritual care center.
"In most cases, when you look at the history of health care and you try to find something that's multi-denominational, you end up with a conference room that looks pretty generic and doesn't have that sense of the sacred," she said. "This wasn't random at all. It was actually a process of continued refinement, even up to [Tuesday], when we weren't happy with this alcove so we re-did it."
City of Hope Orange County patient Tammy McInerney, 57, who has been diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer, said that spiritual therapy has become a key piece for her.
McInerney was raised Catholic, but said she's now more spiritual.
"Those bells and that stained glass did catch me," said McInerney, who lives in the Foothill Ranch neighborhood of Lake Forest, just a few miles away from the hospital. "[I got] a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes ...To be able to go into a facility like this where it's so immersive and you can choose whatever faith feeds you, I'm interested in going in there by myself and trying some of the other faiths that I'm not a part of, but I'm easily connected to."
Walker felt at peace as she sat in the spiritual care center, which will feature 12 barrel chairs and storage in the back for items like prayer mats and books of worship.
"I love the incense in this one," she said. "Now, we have to add smell."
Once the hospital is open, patients will be able to access the spiritual care center from their hospital rooms if they're unable to physically be there, she said.
"We really tailored this to the people of Orange County," Walker said. "It makes the place feel familiar, it makes it feel more like home. It's somewhere they might go to if they weren't in the hospital."