It started on Memorial Day as my wife and I were cleaning our home. There were some resistant hard water stains in the shower that I decided to tackle with an electric scrubber and an industrial-strength cleaner. Soon after, my left hand and the left side of my face went numb, and I had difficulty controlling my movements. I concluded that I had unwittingly poisoned myself by inhaling the cleaner. The symptoms quickly wore off, and our discussion with poison control persuaded us that I did not require emergency services.

Later that week, I awoke in the middle of the night, my wife sleeping quietly beside me. My mind was filled with a message that felt like it came from outside me, in words that were not my own: “Someday your body will fail you, and all you will have is me. It will be enough.” I pulled a piece of paper from my nightstand and wrote the words down.

Several months later, after a long walk on the beach during a family vacation, the symptoms I had while cleaning our shower recurred. It was a focal seizure, as I would later learn. An MRI scan showed a mass in the right posterior frontal lobe of my brain, abutting the motor strip. It was a glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor with a poor prognosis. Although I had noticed some facial weakness and a droopy eyelid on my left side while watching an interview I had done on a news program earlier that year, my wife and I dismissed it as part of getting older.

As medical science clarified the cause of my symptoms, I was left wondering what to make of the voice that had come to me in the night. Nothing like it had happened to me before. True, as a boy I had often experienced a deep feeling of wonder while wandering the small backyard of my family’s home in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church, in which I was raised, also filled me with a sense of awe.

But any sense of connection to something larger than myself slipped away as I grew. Later in life, I unsuccessfully attempted to reason my way to belief in a personal God. The mere idea of a God who created the universe was hard enough to accept. The idea that this God might reach down to share in human suffering in this broken world seemed like an insurmountable leap for both my intellect and imagination.

All this time, I was steeped in the assumptions of a profession that tends to be dismissive of the religious experiences of patients and families. Physicians are increasingly comfortable exploring previously stigmatized topics such as a patient’s sexual history. At the same time, they tend to show little interest in the religious experience that is central to the lives of many patients. Whether this reflects a newfound stigma is hard to say, but taking our patients seriously requires physicians to explore issues of ultimate concern, suggesting that a spiritual history should be an expected component of any comprehensive clinical evaluation.

One problem I faced was my belief that knowledge of God could be arrived at via the intellect, or not at all. The folly of this attitude would have been apparent to the philosopher Blaise Pascal, who on the night of Nov. 23, 1654, had a transcendent experience that he recorded on a scrap of paper. One portion of that text read: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of philosophers and scholars.” Pascal did not meet God by constructing a proof for divine existence; he encountered God unexpectedly in the middle of the night.

Such a moment of sudden revelation or insight is often referred to as an epiphany, derived from the Greek “epipháneia,” meaning appearance or manifestation. Forty-five percent of U.S. adults report having such experiences. Discounting these occurrences as purely subjective has potential to limit practitioners’ connection with patients in medicine and psychiatry.

My story isn’t complete, but the words that came to me in the quiet of the night are true enough: Someday my body will fail. Indeed, that process has already begun. Following a craniotomy and partial surgical resection of the tumor, along with radiation and chemotherapy, I have experienced changes in sensation and strength on the left half of my body. Although the remaining words of the message contain some mystery, I’m hopeful and confident that the love of God surrounding me “will be enough.”