A Faith Renewed by Introspection and Social Action

The vast literature of “armchair adventure” can be understood as a restless search for meaning--what else, after all, prompts someone to climb Mt. Everest, row across the Pacific or trek through the Sahara? Beneath the glory seeking and thrill seeking of such exploits, I suspect, is a raw spiritual hunger that demands to be fed.

Nora Gallagher, by contrast, did not sublimate her own spiritual crisis by climbing a mountain. Rather, she put herself in the embrace of a community of earnest believers, and she discovered a way of life that heightened and deepened her experience of the world. “Things Seen and Unseen” is her account of “a year lived in faith” in the precincts of the Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara, a year of both “dread and hope.”

Significantly, Gallagher came to her calling from the ranks of newspaper and magazine journalism, a profession that has always attracted men and women whose jaded manner often conceals the purest idealism. Some journalists express their high ideals by, for example, going to jail rather than revealing the name of a confidential source. Gallagher satisfied her own urgent need to find meaning in a “desacralized” world by going to church.

But Gallagher is no wide-eyed true believer. “Doubt is the handmaiden to faith,” she observes, thus warning herself against “the sometimes false camaraderie of a faith community” and echoing her husband’s fierce reminder that church affiliation is no guarantee of moral purity: “In Rwanda, 50% of the people were Catholic.” Indeed, Gallagher’s book is considerably enriched and enlivened by her experience in the secular world, a wry sense of humor and an admirable refusal to preach.

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The Episcopal Church turns out to be especially welcoming for what Gallagher calls “ ‘returnees’ of the boomer generation.” To hear Gallagher tell it, the church seeks not just hymns and tithes but good works, too--and that’s the heart and soul of her own faith. Over the year that she describes in “Things Seen and Unseen,” members of the congregation start a soup kitchen for the homeless, wash the feet of the afflicted at a Maundy Thursday service, organize a human sexuality workshop at which they role-play an encounter between a lesbian and a priest, and minister to AIDS patients and other ailing men and women, including her own brother, in their dying days.

“Seconds,” says one homeless woman who is astonished to be offered another helping of food at the soup kitchen. “That’s a miracle.”

Gallagher succeeded in finding the spiritual sustenance that she sought, but she makes it clear that her discoveries came in surprising ways. 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, an experience that prompted both introspection and social action: “The Gospel is a living document,” she explains, “speaking to us aloud, shaking us up.”

Indeed, what is best about her book is the utter absence of smug self-congratulation or aggressively cheerful evangelism. Clearly, Gallagher is witnessing in the pages of “Things Seen and Unseen,” but she adopts a bluntly honest and sometimes even hard-boiled style of confession.

“I came to this church five years ago as a tourist and end up a pilgrim,” writes Gallagher in what can be regarded as her own intimate credo. “What I wanted at the time I walked in the door for the late morning Mass was peace, I told myself. What I got was ‘the peace of God that passes all understanding,’ as the prayer book says--or, as an old Irish hymn goes, ‘the peace of God--it is no peace.’ ”

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Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, is the author, most recently, of “Moses, a Life” (Ballantine).