Book of the Year Finalist

NEWS! The heavily-visited spiritual web site Beliefnet has chosen Practicing Resurrection as one of ten finalists for its "Book of the Year" award.

Reviews

Spirituality & Health, March 2003: In her best-selling spiritual memoir, Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith, Nora Gallagher wrote about her experiences at Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara, California, as a lay Eucharistic minister, a soup kitchen worker, a participant in a Thursday evening base community, and a member of the vestry. In this sequel, her Christian faith is challenged and stretched over a three-year period.... continue

San Francisco Chronicle, April 2003: What is a life lived in religious faith? There are rituals of observance, there is prayer and there is a sense of the sacred that stands in relief or recedes in shadows as trials and joys befall both the individual believer and her community. In "Practicing Resurrection," Nora Gallagher, a writer and observant Episcopalian, lovingly explores these elements as she chronicles her process of determining whether or not to heed a persistent call to ministry.
"People make church; they carry with them the altar on which to place the sacrament of their lives."
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Publishers Weekly, March 2003: When Gallagher's beloved older brother died of cancer, grief struck intensely: "I would be watering the garden or opening an envelope and Kit's death would spring on me completely new and jolting, as if I'd been hit hard from behind with no warning, and I then would fold up, like a fan." Her work at Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara, which she portrayed so passionately in her 1998 memoir, Things Seen and Unseen, now seemed hollow: "I felt an urgency to reclaim the holy in my life, to find a new way to spend myself." continue

Episcopal Life, April 2003
Nora Gallagher writes in the Overture to her second book that "Trusting [the life of faith] was like my early swimming lessons in learning how to float."
She finds that she is being foxy, as poet Wendell Berry suggested, that she "makes more tracks than necessary,/ some in the wrong direction." But she follows Berry's other exhortation, too, to "practice resurrection."
She has to. Following the death of her brother Kit in 1996, Gallagher assumes no only the burden of mourning but also the weight of discernment. As part of the community at Trinity Episcopal Church, Santa Barbara, Calif., for six years--about which she wrote eloquently and passionately in her first book, Things Seen and Unseen--she came to understand that her "faith had to be grounded in experience."
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Excerpts

Overture In mid-November of 1995, during the church season of ordinary time, my brother’s radiologist told him he had “zero percent” chance of recovery from the cancer diagnosed only a year earlier. Our family went into a kind of free-fall, and my religious faith took a series of unexpected turns. The year itself was filled with change: Kit underwent all the horrors of surgery, chemotherapy and pain; the newly hired priest at my church began the hard work of reviving a parish; I worked with homeless men and women in the church soup kitchen.
I had been part of the community at Trinity Episcopal Church for six years and I had finally begun to see that my faith was not about belief in something irrational or about a blind connection to something unreal or about “belief” at all. As I worked in the soup kitchen, tried to pray, planned liturgies and dealt with my brother’s illness, what I came to understand was that my faith had to be grounded in experience or in “impulses” as Simone Weil put it, “of an essentially and manifestly different order.... continue

1996 I have a recurring dream in which I find, behind the familiar walls of my study or bedroom, another whole house. It is always much bigger and grander than the house I live in. Once its long windows looked out on fields of lavender in Provence. In the dream, I think, why didn’t I figure this out before? It’s simply a matter of finding a door.... continue

1997 In July, the fog comes in every morning and flattens Santa Barbara into a dull pancake. The mountains disappear, the trees turn gray. All shadows vanish, all contrast fades in a bank of moist blankness. I got up, brushed my teeth and read Habbukk. One morning I drove up to the monastery, as much as to get above the fog as to pray with the monks, and stood outside with Brother Nick watching the white blanket float beneath us like a huge inland sea. We were in the new garden next to the staked tomatoes. Nick said he’d been reading Genesis.
    “Eating that apple may be about consciousness instead of sin,” he said, bending down to inspect a green tomato. “It may be about desire for wisdom, that sensuous fruit. But the price of this consciousness, of self knowledge, is that we also know, among other things, about death, and we are exiled from Eden." He looked out over the garden walls and down towards the bank of fog. It lifted enough to reveal sandstone rocks, and the red bark of a California madrone below us. Then he said, “But maybe Christ promises something else, a better place than Eden, but at the cost of suffering,”
    “What kind of place?” I asked.
    “Your guess is as good as mine,” he replied. continue

Praise

"A stunning book about faith and the writing life; what I like best is that it gradually and unexpectedly turns into a love story."
--Annie Dillard, author of For the Time Being

"The bookstore is crowded with volumes offering instant enlighten-ment and painless growth. This isn't one of them. This is a true book, about faith and about doubt and about the daily things that inform a soul -- and one of the finest things I've read in a very long age."
--Bill McKibben, author The End of Nature and Enough

"Once again, Nora Gallagher is able bring words to the ineffable, and to make audible the language of prayer, especially the prayer that emanates from everyday life--from marriage and friendship, from work and family....a gorgeous, deeply honest, wise book."
-- Sue Halpern, author of Four Wings and a Prayer

"In her beautifully written and engaging memoir Nora Gallagher shows us what it is like to live inside a mind, body, and spirit that is trying to discern the next step in the world. She invites us not only to witness her journey, but to take the rich journey that is discernment for ourselves."
--Debra K. Farrington, author of Hearing With the Heart: A Gentle Guide to Discerning God's Will for Your Life

"Nora Gallagher is a rafiqi, a guide who can negotiate for us safe passage through treacherous and unfamiliar terrain. Her writing is honest and sober and she doesn't flinch from all that is possible in this world, neither the nightmare nor the waking vision. I am grateful for her hands at the keyboard and for her wise heart dictating."
--Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

"Nora is a breath-taking writer. She is a writing and spiritual influence in my writing life. In Practicing Resurrection, Nora writes about the loss of her 'own wild life.' This is one of the best books I've ever read about finding one's way in the world. This is a book for anyone who wants to find the juice again."
--Jennifer Louden, author of The Woman's Comfort Book