JUDY VALENTE: In the maternity ward at New York's Lenox Hill Hospital, chaplain Yusuf Hasan performs the akika birth ritual, welcoming newborn Mohammed Touri into the Islamic faith.

IMAM YUSUF HASAN (Lenox Hill Hospital Chaplain): David, how have you been?

VALENTE: But he spends much of his time with the young and very sick as the pediatric chaplain at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York city. From birth to death, chaplains are there for patients and their families of all faiths at the most significant times of their lives. Seventeen-year-old David Capalbo, a Christian, was just diagnosed with leukemia three weeks ago.

IMAM HASAN (to David): Can you talk to me a little bit about your feelings, how you felt when you first heard your diagnosis, some of your feelings inside?

DAVID CAPALBO: I couldn't believe it, I thought I was going to wake up from a dream. I was shocked.

IMAM HASAN: I think the most important thing for me is to be there for them, just to be there and be prepared to walk with them whatever way I have to. Do for them whatever I have to do religiously or spiritually.

(to David): It's not easy for you, I'm sure. We'll try to work with you to make it easy for you. And you have a right to feel a little depressed at times, and the right to feel sad, to be angry too, if you like to be angry sometimes.

What I've done to really help him is to make sure everyone gives him his space and his time to process his feelings and then let him talk to me about his feelings in a private setting.

(to David's mother): And mom, how are you doing?

MRS. CAPALBO: When they said he had leukemia I didn't expect to hear that at all. My family and I have a strong faith and we believe that Jesus is going to pull him through.

VALENTE: Chaplains try to gauge each family's particular needs, knowing that the needs of the family may be different from those of the patient. And for some what is most comforting is prayer.

Hospital chaplains receive a year of specialized training and have to be certified by professional organizations. Though many are members of the clergy, their work is ecumenical. They must be able to provide spiritual and religious support to patients and their families of all faiths.

KEN TRUSH (father of patient Daniel Trush): Our whole family was watching him play basketball, he took a shot, he came running off the court holding his head and started spasming, we later found out that he had five aneurysms and one had ruptured.

VALENTE: Twelve-year-old Daniel Trush was rushed to Beth Israel Hospital where Rabbi Mychal Springer was the chaplain on call. And though the Trushes are devout Catholics, they felt an immediate connection with the rabbi.

MR. TRUSH: There was a feeling that someone understands what we are going through, someone understands what we're feeling, and someone understands our deep commitment to God and our faith that things will work out.

RABBI MYCHAL SPRINGER: They had a deep belief that they and I were about the same thing and that's what made it work.

Daniel spent 30 days in a coma, endured four surgeries, and spent 341 days in the hospital. Mychal Springer and the Trush family prayed constantly and Daniel eventually emerged from his coma --even doctors called it a miracle. Four years later, Daniel is an active teenager and is still grateful for those prayers.

DANIEL TRUSH: Without faith and without the big man upstairs, I don't think I would be here right now.

VALENTE: But the most difficult part of a chaplain's job is when prayers go unanswered and then they have to confront what is the meaning of suffering. Why do terrible things happen to good people?

IMAM HASAN: As a clergy person and as a chaplain, there are some things that we are not just able to explain ourselves.

RABBI SPRINGER: When people experience that their prayers are not answered, often there's a lot of anger. And the most important thing that the chaplain can do is to be respectful of the anger as being a faithful response. I reached out to God, I expected God's help and I'm not going to receive God's help in the way that I most desperately wanted. That anger is sacred because it speaks to the intensity of the desire for God to be a source of healing and comfort and life.