With her considerable and piercing powers of observation focused inward on herself and outward on her community, Nora Gallagher takes us into a year of her own spiritual striving and into the life of a parish church -- Trinity Episcopal in Santa Barbara. It is a time during which her struggles with faith are experienced in the midst of community: a fatal illness in the family, encounters with guests at the church soup kitchen, and a vestry wrestling with how to help a priest who is gay come out to the parish. It is a year in which she learns to speak and write of belief and its meaning and the need for ritual and sacrament, in the generous language of uncertainty, suffering, grace, and commitment.

Perceptive, candid, and wonderfully written, Things Seen and Unseen illuminates the demands and rewards, mysteries and concrete embodiments, of both personal and communal faith.