Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith.

Alfred A. Knopf, $23, 241 pp.

Peggy Rosenthal

This is an inspired book. Nora Gallagher, a writer for Life, the New York Times Magazine, and Mother Jones, has transformed her professional skills into a vehicle for at once probing and dramatizing what it means to live as a committed Christian in our time.

How she returned to Christian faith, after trying to make sense of life in the secular world, forms part of the narrative. But Gallagher concentrates on sketching the incidents through which she and her fellow parishioners at Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara, California, seek to live out their Christian commitment. Here is where Gallagher's professional writing experience serves her well. Magazine journalism usually presents issues by profiling real people. Gallagher turns that technique into a resource for representing the Incarnation, which is for her the power of God's love embodied in each of us as we stumble through a day. Furthermore, the mosaic journalistic narrative - quick, usually unexplained shifts between short scenes - plays well into Gallagher's sense that the apparently fragmented experiences of daily life are connected by unseen forces in ways we only occasionally make out. She isn't at all claiming this as an original insight. Quite the contrary. The book's value is that it brings to life a current self-understanding of mainstream Christian spirituality: that, as Gallagher quotes from Esther de Waal, religious practice means "allowing the extraordinary to break in on the ordinary." Things Seen and Unseen is, in the best sense, a product of its time.

The year of the book's subtitle isn't a calendar year, but the liturgical year, whose seasons Gallagher takes as her chapter titles. Though each chapter touches on how a liturgical church formally celebrates the season at hand, for Gallagher each season's real action lies in the concrete ways that her parish lives it out. As grounding for this understanding of liturgy, which is also that of current liturgical theology, she rites Saint John Chrysostom's insistence that "there is a liturgy after the liturgy, that work in the world is inseparable from worship."

So while Gallagher includes some powerful descriptions of traditional liturgies, the book's main settings are the parish soup kitchen and the weekly meetings of her "base community" (we Catholics might call it her small Christian community), where members both reflect on and experience each season's particular spirit. Journalism's free-floating present tense ("Yolanda comes into the kitchen carrying a letter") allows Gallagher to recount incidents that perhaps didn't occur literally during that liturgical season but which in their essence are very much of that season. So, for instance, in Advent, the season when "the holy breaks into the daily," she looks up from the salad plates she is filling in the soup kitchen's dining room and is struck by an invisible light connecting a homeless man sitting at a table and the parish volunteer who is bringing him his meal. In Eastertide, the parish seeks signs of hope in the painful deaths of members and relatives, whose sufferings - including those of Gallagher's brother, dying of cancer - are woven through the book. In Lent, the brokenness of human relations is the implicit theme. Some kitchen guests behave badly; neighborhood businesses complain; we learn of the priest's struggles in coming to terms with his homosexuality.

That Gallagher's pastor can struggle so publicly and remain the community's priest shows where this parish stands on the hot-button issues of our day. Gallagher makes clear that she wouldn't be at Trinity Episcopal if it weren't decidedly liberal. The parish's open discussions of sexuality and its creative forms of worship may make even mainstream "liberal" Christians uncomfortable. But because Gallagher presents these practices as developing from a search for how to live Christianity authentically, they challenge us all to ask how deeply and broadly our own parish is living out the faith, and how powerfully liturgical symbols are speaking to and through us.

Gallagher has the gift of writing for a range of audiences. Assuming a readership wholly ignorant of Christian practice, she explains the basics as she goes along. However, this rudimentary instruction is done with a flair that practiced Christians will find refreshing. On Pentecost, for instance, after explicating the key passage in Acts, she glosses: "The third member of the Trinity arrives without warning and, unlike the youthful, dramatic son, moves in to stay." Most important, the principal subject of the book - the ups and downs of a community trying to embody their faith - can engage readers with no religion or a great deal of religion. For Roman Catholics, there's the added interest of seeing what it's like to benefit from the service of ordained women.

I'm going to recommend this book to my parish liturgy committee and to the volunteers in our neighborhood outreach supper program; to the coordinator of "small Christian communities" in my diocese; to a Baptist friend who is curious about the experience of the liturgical year; to a relative who grew up in a non-practicing Jewish household and is now being mysteriously drawn toward the Episcopal church his wife attends; to a Buddhist friend, an anthropologist, who in her comparative religion courses wants her students to get a feel for the lived texture of religious practice; to any of the many nonbelieving friends who, apparently out of nowhere at dinner parties, ask my husband and me what our faith means to us. And I recommend it to people one hundred or five hundred years from now who want a firsthand account of day-to-day Christianity at the end of the notoriously secular twentieth century.

Peggy Rosenthal has, most recently, co-edited the anthology Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry (Oxford University Press).