Customer Reviews

Practicing Resurrection: A Memoir of Work, Doubt, Discernment, and Moments of Grace

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Nora Gallagher tells a wonderful story about the everyday as well as the "big" events of life. Through a year of searching for answers and asking the needed questions, she goes beyond the usual metaphors to look at how to deal with the death of her brother, how to reconnect to her husband and most significantly, how to make an decision about which road to take next in her life. Readers - don't be put off by the religious words and subtext of this powerful book! It is not a book about going to church, but rather about the value of people, prayer, introspection, respect and bravery in all our lives. Relish its beautiful language and poetic flow. It is well worth your time to live in the world created by Ms. Gallagher!

I really loved this book.

I liked the pace of it, perhaps because it reminded me of my own exploration of faith. There are those moments of introspection and insight and then, well, life goes on. Gallagher shows that those moments of insight can add up to something significant, particularly if they are interpreted through a deliberate process - her exercise in discernment. The moments she describes are all distinct -- racing on the freeway to church, folding altar cloths, walking in the hills above Santa Barbara -- but they start to add up, to build momentum, early in the book.

I liked the simplicity of her writing. Her portrayals of people and emotions are restrained, but that may be why they are illuminating. I don't know what some of the characters look like, but I do know that I'd like to share a meal with them. I also appreciated her honesty - she reveals her own overly-harsh judgments, and finds ways to expose her own doubts without wallowing in them.

It's a religious book, or a book about religion, I suppose. That's obvious from the title and virtually every page. But my first thoughts about it when putting it down had little to do with religion, or even spirituality. What we see in this book is an individual on a journey to find the work for which she is best suited. It's a mystery, an uncommon mystery.

It's an interesting story, and very well written. It's a book I'll read again down the road.

At the beginning of Practicing Resurrection, Gallagher is at a crossroads, sorting out how to live after her brother's death and wondering whether she is being called to ordination. She is haunted by the sense that, despite her busyness, her life is drained of meaning. She feels trapped in a small world, as if she's just going through the motions and painting by the numbers. What is the larger, wilder, and more vivid life that keeps calling to her from her dreams? And where is the door?
As Gallagher makes clear, resurrection is not about dead bodies coming out of the grave. It is God's energy of renewal and rebirth, a compelling and sometimes dangerous vitality that calls us to live larger lives - to give ourselves more generously and to love without holding back.
Written with the keen eye of a journalist and the open heart of a poet, this marvelous new memoir is a treasure.

This book aptly shows how some who feel called to ordination are confronted with the differences between ordained and lay ministry and thereby challenged to make a deliberate choice, one way or the other. As churches move toward greater empowerment of laypersons, some who may have sought ministry as vocation instead may stay outside the borders of the institutional church hierarchy. Whether that is good or not is an open question. Gallagher tapped into my own yearning to be an ordained Episcopal priest by showing the inherent tension in the church's ministry discernment process that, instead of leading a person to ordination, may in fact instill in that person the desire to work through the increasing role of the laiety. A very good read.

Practicing Resurrection confirms what Gallagher's first book, Things Seen and Unseen, demonstrates-the holiness of candor and the well-crafted word. By inviting readers to join her on a journey of deepening faith and vocational discernment, Gallagher provides us the opportunity to experience how each of us ministers and is ministered to. Her graceful prose, her expansive heart, and her exploration of our fragile and tenacious humanness make it easier to practice resurrection. This is a transformative book-sacramental in its ability to incarnate both the doubt and the grace requisite for faith.

Nora Gallagher's openness and intellectual acuity in Practicing Resurrection are a gift, and we follow her more than willingly on her journey of discernment. This is a book for everyone who wants to live an examined life, regardless of their religious persuasion or belief. We laugh, we cry, and all along we keep turning the pages because she is also a terrific story teller.

The voice of storyteller, Nora Gallagher is so compelling, so wise and warm and funny, that this book about the serious issues that occupy us all (vocation, faith, marriage, death, the sacred in the natural world, to name a few) reads like a story you can't put down. Quite simply, it delivers all the pleasure of a great read about things that matter deeply.

In this sequel to her bestseller Things Seen and Unseen (1998), Nora Gallagher continues to explore what a life of Christian faith marked by authenticity and integrity might look like in our contemporary world. She compares her journey of faith to the swimming lessons she took as a child: "The life of faith [is] amorphous, ephemeral, a glimpse, a moment. Trusting it [is] like my early swimming lessons learning to float." In particular, her brother Kit's diagnosis of bladder cancer, a prognosis for a "zero percent" chance of recovery, the horrors of surgery and chemotherapy, and eventual death all forced her to ask life-altering questions about God's call upon her own life.

The themes of vocation and call loom large in Practicing Resurrection. Through her many involvements at Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara, Gallagher began to wonder what might God have for her. To what could she devote her passion and considerable skills? Where did her joy and gladness intersect with the world's needs, as Buechner once put it? Sensing a possible call to the priesthood, her church formed a "discernment committee" of four saints. They met once a month for three hours across the year, plying Gallagher with questions, telling their own stories about vocation, reading the Scriptures, praying, and, perhaps most important of all, "honoring listening." What voices should she listen to? Which ones should she tune out? What about her husband's deep ambivalence? Was the priesthood any more sacred than her identity as a writer that she had nurtured for over thirty years? After negotiating the labyrinth of the Episcopal bureaucracy and its application process, Gallagher was "exiled" to a very different parish with a very different priest for a year as a ministry-study student. At first she felt like she and the priest were on a "bad blind date," but across the year she gained a deep appreciation for her mentor's faithfulness.

While Gallagher was trying to discern how she might hear God's call, Trinity Episcopal grappled with how as a church they might extend a call. Their interim pastor had informed the vestry that he was gay. Should that impact whether they called him as their regular priest? How did they guard issues of confidentiality once the vestry knew but the congregation did not? How to tell the congregation? What about feelings of distrust and betrayal? Should the church wrap the different but related matter of gay marriages in with the possible call of the pastor? How might the denominational officials respond, if at all?

You'll have to read this fine memoir to learn about Gallagher's call to church and the church's call to their pastor. In the end she likens herself to a friend who was listening to an unctuous priest ask, "what do you really want for Christmas this year?" Her friend responded, "What I wanted to do was to stand up and call out, 'I would like to really believe in the resurrection.'" Her remark reminded me of the words of the eminent church historian Jaroslav Pelikan, who near the end of his life said, "If Jesus rose from the dead, nothing else matters. If Jesus did not raise from the dead, nothing else matters." In practicing resurrection we thus inaugurate a tiny bit of God's eschatological future into our lives today.

Gallagher's fans, and their numbers are considerable, will want to note the release of her first novel, Changing Light, in early 2007.

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.

Beautiful stories. Frequently made me cry.

Gallagher is discerning a vocation from the priesthood in the context of the Episcopal church, so some of it is strange to me whose church home is a radical queer Methodist church (and whose secondary church home is a UCC church) -- reading the book I sometimes retort, "You don't have to be ordained to do that! _I_'ve done that!" I feel confident that I'm not Called to ordained ministry (at least not right now -- I'm allowing for...more Beautiful stories. Frequently made me cry.

Gallagher is discerning a vocation from the priesthood in the context of the Episcopal church, so some of it is strange to me whose church home is a radical queer Methodist church (and whose secondary church home is a UCC church) -- reading the book I sometimes retort, "You don't have to be ordained to do that! _I_'ve done that!" I feel confident that I'm not Called to ordained ministry (at least not right now -- I'm allowing for the possibility that this will change at some later point in my life), but I like the stuff she says about discernment -- the reminder of the value of practicing silent contemplation, active listening for the Spirit.