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. The death of her brother of cancer is very difficult to handle, and her grief is deep. Gallagher writes: "The life of faith was amorphous, ephemeral, a glimpse, a moment. Trusting it was like my early swimming lessons in learning how to float."
    When a zealous priest friend tells another woman, "I don't take care of myself, I spend myself," the author ponders what she wants to dedicate her life to. She feels she might be called to the priesthood and begins work with a discernment committee to clarify her feelings. The Eucharist anchors her practice and confirms her belief that she must act on behalf of others in all that she does.
    Gallagher is approved by the Commission on Ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles and is sent to a parish for a study year. But while working there, she misses the cutting-edge social and healing ministries at Trinity. Gallagher wonders whether she would be willing to serve in "some place slow and steady, an island for the shipwrecked." After all of her wonderful experiences as an active layperson at Trinity, she worries about the rift that still exists between clergy and laity. The professional club aspect of the priesthood does not appeal to her.
    The thought-provoking title, Practicing Resurrection, comes from a poem by the inimitable Wendell Berry, who likes to stir things up. Gallagher comes to see that new life is rising out of the ashes of her grief, in her deliberations about becoming a priest, and in her marriage, which is floundering during a period of dryness and instability. In the midst of all this, she is practicing resurrection by recognizing the transformations that are afoot in her life and in the lives of those she loves. Best of all for us, Gallagher comes to see afresh the healing and holistic powers in her writing vocation.

Reviewed by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

San Francisco Chronicle, April 6, 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." Thus asserts Gallagher toward the end of this second memoir, though its insight applies from the get-go. The formality of a church structure and hierarchy are not the sole means of conjuring spirituality. The ability to create that which is holy, without the imprimatur of a formal sectarian tradition, is introduced in Gallagher's first book, Things Seen and Unseen. In that initial memoir, Gallagher stitched a somewhat diffuse tapestry of a year at Trinity Church in Santa Barbara, where she was an active congregant and soup kitchen employee.
    In "Resurrection," the narrative focus gains coherence, focusing less on Gallagher's co-congregants and slightly more on her own path. Gallagher deftly describes the crises of faith and reminders of grace that she experiences during the final weeks of her brother's battle with cancer and in the aftermath. Kit's death and Nora's grief expose struggles, perhaps latent, perhaps newfound, with faith and its practice.
    She finds temporarily that she cannot abide small talk, and she experiences an unfamiliar existential malaise. However, instead of the despair this might inspire in others, Gallagher realizes enough to allow the incoherence to exist and to believe that it, too, has a purpose. Elsewhere it is the very ritual of practice that anchors her, as she writes, "prayers were what I came to believe in; they were the glue that bound me to the living, and made it possible for me to remain upright and walk."
    Ambivalence, however, does not stop Gallagher from continuing the "discernment" process of discussing her call with a committee of peers. They raise provocative questions with one another about faith and liturgy. Why, they probe, does Gallagher feel a need for ordination rather than continue as an active member of the laity? The tension this question poses recurs throughout the memoir. The priest at Trinity tells Gallagher, "You understand the idea of layperson so clearly that to seek ordination feels to me as if you are joining the palace guard," and his comment resonates with her. She ponders how the administrative and bureaucratic duties of priesthood will limit the spiritual dimension that has provided nourishment. Furthermore, she wonders if priesthood will eclipse her first call, writing, and how the pursuit of ordination will affect her marriage. Vincent, Gallagher's husband, is not religious, and the gulf between them seems to widen as she pays increasing attention to church concerns.
    Gallagher's journey is not isolated. She introduces issues facing Trinity with the same sensitivity, humor and erudition that guide her throughout. The parish struggles with blessing same-sex unions, and Gallagher includes the contrasting views expressed by congregants without judgment or condescension toward those who might seem less progressive. She recounts the heated discussion surrounding accepting a gay priest as Trinity's rector, as well as the communal sense of joy when his appointment is confirmed. Indeed, Trinity's experience grappling with issues of the day, as Gallagher presents them, might well serve as a starting point to enter discussions of a similar nature at other parishes.
    She links local discussion of timely topics with related conflicts within the church at large. In examining the phenomenon of female priests, Gallagher not only makes her own case but also provides a national context. As of 2002, she writes, there were nearly 3,500 female Episcopalian priests in the United States, representing a fifth of that clergy. Though this is an indisputable step forward, Gallagher tempers the triumph with anecdotes demonstrating ongoing resistance to such change expressed by many members of the faithful.
    Interspersed in the narrative are Gallagher's observations from the natural world. Her wonderment at its beauty and seasonal cycles underscores the notion that evidence of the sacred is omnipresent. She forges connections between nature and Christian tradition, seeing within her surroundings the possibility for rejuvenation and resurrection. She writes, "Apart from simple discipline, we are asked to pray at the same hour every day so that we may be witnesses to the world." Gallagher is a thoughtful and talented writer who succeeds in making questions of belief, politics and tradition part of a wholly personal story that will engage open-minded readers of all faiths.

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Publishers Weekly, March 25, 2003

When Nora 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." Beginning in 1995 where the earlier book left off, Gallagher describes the three-year process she went through to discern whether to become a priest. While involved in making this decision, she and other church leaders were also wrestling with questions that could split the parish: should their gay rector divulge his sexual orientation? Should he perform same-sex weddings?

Meanwhile, Gallagher's husband was repeatedly expressing distaste for her heavy involvement at church. In spite of continued affirmation from church friends and diocesan officials, Gallagher began to wonder if her true calling was to writing, despite her persistent attraction to priesthood. Skillfully interweaving multiple themes, Gallagher maintains suspense right up to the epilogue, where various "resurrections" are revealed. With a poet's ear for language and a novelist's eye for essential detail, Gallagher offers a compelling story of her journey toward "a wholeness bought at the cost of suffering."

Forecast: Gallagher's first book made the L.A. Times bestseller list and was blurbed by luminaries such as Marcus Borg and Annie Dillard. This has the potential to be a word-of-mouth favorite and a strong backlist title in the growing field of the spiritual memoir.

Reviewed by LaVonne Neff, Publishers Weekly

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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."
    Does that experience, she wondered, include t he priesthood? Discernment, for Gallagher, included bureaucracy, change, humor, bloody hard work, some stupidity, plus "impulses of an essentially and manifestly different order," to borrow Simone Weil's phrase.
    To write of that discernment required honesty. Gallagher's years as a reporter helped her: "[Journalism] became the way I made sense of the world, but it was also a way of entering into the world." She warms cold facts: She gathers information from friends, from books and interviews, but she writes flawlessly and seamlessly.
    Her style enables her to credit the wisdom of others, such as her friend Ann Jaqua; to tell good stories; to rehease the church's recent history re sexuality; to limn vignettes (of bishops George Barrett and Dan Corrigan, for example); and to ask searing questions about her "call," her marriage, her church.
    From one woman's hoop-jumping, she widens her discussion to consider where the Episcopal Church is going--or needs to go--with respect to laity. And in the end, her decision is informed by resurrection as a disciples' practice, a way to "find the sacred . . . in different places."