Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith - Hardcover

Gallagher, Nora

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679451323 ISBN 13: 9780679451327

Publisher: Knopf, 1998

Synopsis

"Faith is not about belief in something irrational or about a blind connection to something unreal. It's about a gathering, an accumulation of events and experiences of a different order . . . the longing a soul has to find its shape in the world."  

In the late eighties, Nora Gallagher entered Trinity Episcopal Church as a tourist and ended up a pilgrim. What she wanted was peace, she thought. What she got was something entirely different. In this remarkable book she describes her journey from secular life into "the world of the almost known," the world of faith.
     With her piercing powers of observation focused inward on herself and outward on her community, Nora Gallagher takes us into a year of her own spiritual searching and into the life of a parish church. During this year, Gallagher struggles with faith in the midst of community, a fatal illness in her family, guests in the church soup kitchen, and the efforts of a priest who is a gay man and the church's vestry to decide whether he should be called as their rector.
     As Gallagher sits with a friend dying of AIDS and another with cancer, serves communion wine at the altar, locates buckets for the Holy Week foot washing, and copes with homeless men and women and their critics, we learn with her that "the road to the sacred is paved with the ordinary."
In the generous language of uncertainty, suffering, grace, and commitment, Gallagher writes of faith and its meaning and the need for ritual and sacrament. She continually reveals in her choice of metaphors her own emerging faith, and we seem to experience her discovery with her, in real time. She gives us, as well, a beautifully rendered portrait of a community struggling with change, without ever losing sight of the cross.
Perceptive, candid, and wonderfully written, Things Seen and Unseen embodies the demands and rewards, the mysteries and realities, of both personal and communal faith.

About this title

Review

"I came to this church five years ago as a tourist and ended up a pilgrim," writes Nora Gallagher, speaking of her year at Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara. It started with an occasional Sunday visit, a shy toe dip into the Episcopal Church. Eventually she delved into a yearlong journey to discover her faith and a relationship with God, using the Christian calendar as her compass. What Kathleen Norris did for the language of the church in Amazing Grace, Gallagher does for the Christian calendar--finding contemporary meaning in an ancient calendar that is often misunderstood or overshadowed with oppressive dogma.

Starting with the chapter titled "Advent," and ending with "Ordinary Time," Gallagher speaks to the biblical and historical themes of the church's calendar, then offers a translation for living in America at the end of the millennium. Most touching is her raw honesty, whether writing about feeding the homeless in the Community Kitchen or the unglamorous job of caring for a friend with AIDS. Indeed, it is Gallagher's humble interpretations of faith that make her seasonal wisdom so trustworthy. "I learned something about faith, its mucky nature, how it lies down in the mud with the pigs and the rabble," she says when writing about the darkness of Advent. "...God is not too good to hang out with jet-lagged women with cat-litter boxes in their dining rooms, or men dying of AIDS, or, for that matter, someone nailed in humiliation to a cross." --Gail Hudson

From the Publisher

An absorbing, compelling, insightful and poetic narration of a year in the life and lives of a
mainstream congregation, it mediates 'things unseen' through the seen...The story of a 'thin place,' this book is itself a thin place where the boundary between the sacred and the everyday becomes soft and porous, and the veil lifts. Marcus Borg, author of Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time

Nora Gallagher's brave journey ignites the faith-starved, who waver between spiritual need and an unwillingness to heed traditional orthodoxies...She opens her own faith strand by strand, illuminating every woman's struggle...Hers is a soul that quickens.--Ellen Meloy, author of Raven's Exile

Gallagher depicts a year in the life of a congregation much as an Impressionist would fashion a landscape. Images of life and death, of struggle and victory, of confusion and clarity, emerge from these pages as Gallagher and those around her struggle to understand what it is to be people of faith in this secular age.--Debra K. Farrington, author of Romancing the Holy

You can read this book for its great beauty, and when you have read past beauty, you can read
this book for its depth of feeling. And when you have read past depth of feeling, past this book's
stunning evocation of the arc of the Christian year, you read on and on, unwilling to stop,
overcome by the generosity of Nora Gallagher. Her penetrating gift to the reader is a vision of working, suffering, rejoicing faith.--Verlyn Klinkenborg, author of The Last Fine Time

Gallagher juxtaposes personal sagas brilliantly with the church year...Quotidian concerns--such
as parish fund-raising and the soup kitchen where she works--are interspersed with larger theological questions... A beautifully rendered fusion of the transcendent and the day-to-day--Kirkus Reviews

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679451323
• ISBN 13: 9780679451327
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 241