Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith (Paperback)

While engaged in a year-long journey to reclaim her faith using the Christian calendar, the author shares her revelations about suffering, death, and life in this moving meditation on the meaning of belief. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

Faith is not believing 8 impossible things before breakfast.
Q Why did you write this book?A My best friend, who is an agnostic, asked me to write a book describingmy faith -- why I go to church and what a yearin 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 whocollectively have changed the practice of religion in the United States (and probably worldwide). Dr. Clark Roof in A Generation ofSeekers: 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 nowwe're looking at Eastern religions, mysticism, Twelve-steprecovery groups, and even mainstream congregations and synagogues. Manyboomers 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, butnot inspiring. Many books about the the spiritual life try to be inspirational without many facts, or they are written for peopleinside the beltway who understand religious language much more thanthe average reader. Often the latter use a lot of beautiful words andphrases that don¹t, in the end, have much weight. In many books, the most sentimental aspects of psychology have joined together with the mostsentimental 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 somethingirrational or a blind connection to something unreal. It¹s about agathering, 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 famousleap comes at the beginning when there is not enough experienceto justify the effort. Even then, something begins faith -- a memory of areality or of an experience that doesn¹t 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 arm¹s length. What about you?A This is a pretty raw book, rawer even than I had planned. It covers ayear in a which my brother was diagnosed with cancer, a good friend had just died of AIDS, our priest told the vestry of thechurch 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 God¹s presence in the midst of everything. God, I finally decided, is not too good foranything.Q A lot of what we hear about churches or church life tends to be aboutfundamentalist 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 ofparishes and philosophies. Trinity Episcopal in Santa Barbara, California, the parish in this book, is a downtown church with amembership mostly in their 30¹s to 50¹s. Most of the people who cometo Trinity are professionals and liberal but they are also people who wantto really live their faith. They want to take the Gospels seriously, but not as a how-to guide. One woman said at a newcomers¹ orientation: Iwant to bring my whole self to church. I don¹t 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 findchurches 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 don¹t reachout to new people, they pay no attention to the hugechanges in culture that this country has gone through in the last twentyyears, they ignore the influence of therapy and psychology,and, worst of all, they treat faith, God and people¹s longing for them asif 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. Ican¹t remember exactly what prompted me to goone Sunday to Mass rather than stay home. I was fairly miserable at thetime. I was working very hard as a free-lance writer in San Francisco, stringing for Time Magazine, and going to lots ofparties with artists and writers in the city but I didn¹t feelas if my life was going the way I wanted it to go. So one day I went tochurch. 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 aboutliberation 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 aday-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 didn¹t really change. It was and still is the anchorpoint 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 nothunderclaps, 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 actsgrandly, if at all. But my experience of getting to know myself, my own soul, and my relationship to God were always quiet, hardlynoticeable. I¹d have a brief glimpse of something, usually inthe soup kitchen, and then have a sense of release and the world wouldfeel righted, remade in a way that was upside down from what I had imagined. Though I still don¹t count on these moments, I havecome to the point where I notice them.Q The hand at your back is a powerful image in your book. What does itmean?A I¹m still not sure. In the late eighties, shortly after I returned from Nicaragua, I began to pray every day although I didn¹t 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 murderedin El Salvador in 1989. And I felt, in the end, an uncanny sense that allof this was happening because of a hand held against my back. Candidates for the priesthood often talk about being called. I usedto cringe at that word; I found it overblown for what was, I thought, a career choice. Are bankers called? I¹m still wary of it. But something certainly happened to me. A firm, insistent pressurebetween my shoulder blades was a felt presence, unnerving and unmistakable. Finally, I decided I needed spiritual direction. I had heard aboutspiritual directors from others who attended Mass at a local monastery; I wasn¹t 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 I¹d 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 fromthe Pacific Ocean. She had short, blonde, no-nonsense hair and clear blue eyes. She wore a loosely gathered skirt, a red jacket, ablack 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 aspriests. With great trepidation, I told her about the hand at my back. I wasafraid, of course, that she would think I was crazy or overly imaginative. If she had, I think my life would be verydifferent now; at that stage everything was so new any skepticism would have felt like an assault. But as it happened, Anne Howardreplied, matter-of-factly, That¹s interesting. I felt it as someonepulling me. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.