The perioperative situation, particularly the moment preceding the induction of general anesthesia, constitutes a distinct existential threshold at which vulnerability becomes manifest. The body – ordinarily lived as the tacit medium of being-in-the-world – appears here as exposed, objectified, and entrusted to others. In this suspension of control, the patient confronts fragility: agency recedes, continuity is threatened, and finitude becomes experientially tangible. Such a threshold may evoke anxiety or emptiness, yet it may also open a space in which the meaning of surrender emerges.
This paper offers an existential-phenomenological reflection on perioperative vulnerability and explores how spirituality and religiosity unfold within this liminal moment. Rather than approaching them as coping strategies, the analysis understands spirituality and religiosity as existential orientations shaping how surrender is lived and interpreted. Through a conceptual examination of key experiential structures – diminished agency, heightened bodily awareness, exposure to finitude, and the possibility of trust – the study articulates surrender not as passive resignation, but as a transformation of one’s relation to vulnerability.
The analysis suggests that religious or spiritual gestures – such as prayer, entrusting oneself, or openness to transcendence – may reconfigure the experience of threat into relational meaning. At the threshold of anesthesia, surrender can thus become an existential act through which vulnerability is not denied but inhabited. Perioperative care consequently emerges as a site for reflecting on embodiment, finitude, and the lived meaning of spirituality and religiosity in situations of existential exposure.