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

Gallagher, Nora

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679775498 ISBN 13: 9780679775492

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1999

Synopsis

"Gracefully written and moving ... Things Seen and Unseen starts with Nora Gallagher entering the labyrinth of her life ... and ultimately it leads to the center of her being."--The Boston Globe

It started with an occasional Sunday, a "tourist's" visit to a local church. Eventually Nora Gallagher entered into a yearlong journey to discover her
faith and a relationship with God, using the Christian calendar as her compass.

Whether writing about her brother's battle against cancer, talking to homeless men about the World Series, or questioning the afterlife ("One world
at a time"), Gallagher draws us into a world of journeys and mysteries, yet grounded in a gritty reality. She braids together the symbols of the
Christian calendar, the events of a year in one church, and her own spiritual journey, each strand combed out with harrowing intimacy. Thought provoking and profoundly perceptive, Things Seen and Unseen is a remarkable demonstration that "the road to the sacred is paved with the ordinary."

"Like Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace, Gallagher is renewing the language of ultimate concerns."--San Francisco Chronicle

"The deep serenity that suffuses Gallagher's work, the lyrical cadences in which she writes, do not blunt the sharp edges of what she discovered in her quest for meaning."--Los Angeles Times

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 Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0679775498
• ISBN 13: 9780679775492
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256