A conversation with the author

Nora Gallagher has worked for Time and Life magazines, and her articles and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including The New  York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, the Village Voice, DoubleTake, Mother Jones, and the Utne Reader. She lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Q: Why did you write Things Seen and Unseen?

A: My best friend, who is an agnostic, asked me to write a book describing my faith -- why I go to church and what a year in my life as a religious person is like. I wanted to convey, without being too stuffy or too insular, the world of a religious person: the reality of church life, in a church that is not fundamentalist. The book is directed towards my own generation -- baby boomers who collectively have changed the practice of religion in the United States (and probably worldwide). Dr. Clark Roof in A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation, says that boomers, as we age, are asking questions about the meaning of our lives, about what we want for ourselves and for our children. We're still exploring, Roof says, as we did when we were young, only now we're looking at Eastern religions, mysticism, Twelve-step recovery groups, and even mainstream congregations and synagogues.  Many boomers are arriving at Trinity, the church I  belong to, and the book talks about what drew us in and why we stayed.

Q:  There are hundreds of books written these days about “going back to church” or “the spiritual life.” What distinguishes this one?

A: Many of the books about “going back to church” tend to be factual, but not inspiring. Many books about  the “the spiritual life” try to be inspirational without many facts, or they are written for people “inside the beltway” who understand religious language much more than the average reader. Often the latter use a lot of beautiful words and phrases that don’t, in the end, have much weight. In many books, the most sentimental aspects of psychology have joined together with the most sentimental aspects of religion to create something, not surprisingly, sentimental; what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace."

Faith is neither about an abstract ideal nor a belief in something irrational or a blind connection to something unreal. It’s about a gathering, an accumulation of events and experiences of a different order. These experiences are gradually convincing enough, or you have paid them so much attention, they reach critical mass. The famous “leap” comes at the beginning when there is not enough experience to justify the effort. Even then, something begins faith -- a memory of a reality or of an experience that doesn’t quite fit with everything else, the longing a soul has to find its shape in the world.

Q:  Many books by journalists about church tend to keep their own experience at arm’s length. What about you?

A: This is a pretty raw book, rawer even than I had planned. It covers a year in a which my brother was diagnosed with cancer, a good friend had just died of AIDS, our priest told the vestry of the church that he was gay, and a member of our Bible study group died of ovarian cancer. I worked in the parish soup kitchen throughout the year where I dealt with drug dealers, prostitutes, and people who had mental illness. I wrestled with all of these events and people, doubted, prayed, lived in community and got a sense of God’s presence in the midst of everything. God, I finally decided, is not too good for anything.

Q:  A lot of what we hear about churches or church life tends to be about fundamentalist churches or from the religious right. What about the church in this book?

A:  The Episcopal Church has a lot of room in it for different kinds of parishes and philosophies. Trinity Episcopal in Santa Barbara, California, the parish in this book, is a downtown church with a membership mostly in their 30’s to 50’s. Most of the people who come to Trinity are professionals and liberal but they are also people who want to really live their faith. They want to take the Gospels seriously, but not as a how-to guide. One woman said at a newcomers’ orientation: “I want to bring my whole self to church. I don’t want to have to leave a part of my history or a piece of myself at the door.”

Q:  While many people are interested in a spiritual life, many of them find churches  boring or the language too old or insular. Mainstream denominations are losing numbers. What can you say about that?

A: Many mainstream denominations deserve to lose members. They don’t reach out to new people, they pay no attention to the huge changes in culture that this country has gone through in the last twenty years, they ignore the influence of therapy and psychology, and, worst of all, they treat faith, God and people’s longing for them as if all three could be domesticated, fit into a box.

Q: Why did you return to church after an absence?

A:  I returned to church in my late twenties, in 1979, in San Francisco. I can’t remember exactly what prompted me to go one Sunday to Mass rather than stay home. I was fairly miserable at the time. I was working very hard as a free-lance writer in San Francisco, stringing for Time magazine, and going to lots of parties with artists and writers in the city but I didn’t feel as if my life was going the way I wanted it to go. So one day I went to church. I spent a year crying in that church. I would say now that I was lost and on the verge of being found.

Q: What was your involvement in the base community and how did  it change over the year you describe in your book?

A: I got involved in the idea of base communities when I heard about liberation theology as it was practiced in Latin America: small groups of men and women, most of them peasants, who got together to read the Gospel and decide how it was speaking to them, without benefit of clerical guidance. Anne Howard, Ann Jaqua and I did a day-long workshop at La Casa de Maria, a local retreat center, in the spring of 1990 called “The Spirituality of Liberation.” From that, came the first base community at Trinity.

My involvement didn’t really change. It was and still is the anchor point for me regarding how to understand my faith. We still meet week in and week out and talk about the Gospel for the coming Sunday to try to find out what it is asking us to do.

Q: You write about your epiphanies, describing them as quiet, with “no thunderclaps, no voices from heaven.” Can you elaborate on this?

A: I think many of us think that God only speaks in a big voice, and acts grandly, if at all.  But my experience of getting to know myself, my own soul, and my relationship to God were always quiet, hardly noticeable. I’d have a brief glimpse of something, usually in the soup kitchen, and then have a sense of release and the world  would feel righted, remade in a way that was upside down from what I had imagined. Though I still don’t count on these moments, I have come to the point where I notice them.

Q:  The “hand at your back” is a powerful image in your book. What does it mean?

A:  I’m still not sure.  In the late eighties, shortly after I returned from Nicaragua, I began to pray every day although I didn’t know how. I began to notice the connection between prayer and activity in the world. I helped organize a prayer vigil for the priests who were murdered in El Salvador in 1989. And I felt, in the end, an uncanny sense that all of this was happening because of a hand held against my back.

Candidates for the priesthood often talk about being “called.” I used to cringe at that word; I found it overblown for what was, I thought, a career choice. Are bankers called? I’m still wary of it.  But something certainly happened to me. A firm, insistent pressure between my shoulder blades was a felt presence, unnerving and unmistakable.

Finally, I decided I needed “spiritual direction.” I had heard about spiritual directors from others who attended Mass at a local monastery; I wasn’t sure what they were or what they did -- psychoanalysis for the soul? -- but I was willing to try.

I chose a woman priest close to my age whom I’d met a few times at the monastery. On the day I went to see her, she was seated in her office at the church, a lovely redwood building two blocks from the Pacific Ocean. She had short, blonde, no-nonsense hair and clear blue eyes. She wore a loosely gathered skirt, a red jacket, a black shirt and a white collar. She greeted me and said, “Oh, I love your shoes, where did you get them?”

“Esprit,” I said, and thought, one more reason to ordain women as priests.

With great trepidation, I told her about the hand at my back. I was afraid, of course, that she would think I was crazy or overly imaginative. If she had, I think my life would be very different now; at that stage everything was so new any skepticism would have felt like an assault. But as it happened, Anne Howard replied, matter-of-factly, “That’s interesting. I felt it as someone pulling me.”

Q: Where are you now in your learning process?  Will you pursue a position in the Church?

A: I will indeed. I’m not sure what that position is, yet. I am presently in the process of discerning whether or not I am being called to the Episcopal priesthood. (Women have been ordained in the Episcopal Church since 1974.) Or whether God would be just as happy that I remain a lay person. It’s a long and interesting process and makes up a good part of my next book.