The author of the highly praised memoir Things Seen and Unseen now bears witness to the way death yields new life as she searches for direction in the wake of her brother's death. “Honest and human and surprisingly humorous in its clarity of vision.” — The Washington Post Book Review In her memoir Things Seen and Unseen, Nora Gallagher reflected on a year of spiritual renewal and the fact of mortality with uncommon wisdom and grace. We rejoin her in Practicing Resurrection . A desire to reclaim her own “wild life” and a sense of the sacred in the world compels her to assess everything: her marriage, her writing career, and her commitment to parish life. A profound testimony to the urgency of living with meaning, to the natural world’s solace and sacredness and a beautiful and often harrowing account of the search for vocation. Gallagher “Honest and human and surprisingly humorous in its clarity of vision.” — The Washington Post Book Review “Gallagher is a thoughtful and talented writer who succeeds in making questions of belief, politics and tradition part of a wholly personal story that will engage open-minded readers of all faiths.” — The San Francisco Chronicle “Nora Gallagher is able to bring words to the ineffable, and to make audible the language of prayer, especially the prayer that emanates from everyday life--from marriage and friendship, from work and family. A gorgeous, deeply honest, wise book.” —Sue Halpern, author of Four Wings and a Prayer “With a poet’s ear for language and a novelist’s eye for essential detail, Gallagher offers a compelling story of her journey.” — Publishers Weekly In the highly praised memoir Things Seen and Unseen , Nora Gallagher reflected on a year of spiritual renewal and the fact of mortality with uncommon wisdom and grace. We rejoin her in Practicing Resurrection as Gallagher searches for direction in the wake of her brother s death. A desire to reclaim her own wild life and a sense of the sacred in the world compels her to assess everything: her marriage, her writing career, and her commitment to parish life. A profound testimony to the urgency of living with meaning, to the natural world s solace and sacredness and a beautiful and often harrowing account of the search for vocation. Gallagher bears witness to the way death yields new life. In the highly praised memoir Things Seen and Unseen , Nora Gallagher reflected on a year of spiritual renewal and the fact of mortality with uncommon wisdom and grace. We rejoin her in Practicing Resurrection as Gallagher searches for direction in the wake of her brother’s death. A desire to reclaim her own “wild life” and a sense of the sacred in the world compels her to assess everything: her marriage, her writing career, and her commitment to parish life. A profound testimony to the urgency of living with meaning, to the natural world’s solace and sacredness and a beautiful and often harrowing account of the search for vocation. Gallagher bears witness to the way death yields new life. NORA GALLAGHER’s best-selling memoir, Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith, received outstanding reviews. Her essays, book reviews, and journalism have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times Magazine , the Washington Post , DoubleTake , Time , the Los Angeles Times Magazine , The Village Voice , and Mother Jones . She is also the editor of the award-winning Patagonia: Notes from the Field, a collection of literary essays on the outdoors. She and her husband live in Santa Barbara, California. I have a recurring dream in which I find, behind the familiar walls of my study or bedroom, another whole house. It is always much bigger and grander than the house I live in. Once its long windows looked out on fields of lavender in Provence. In the dream I think, Why didn’t I figure this out before? It’s simply a matter of finding a door. I sat in church near the altar on a Thursday evening in April, waiting for it all to begin. Watery blue light fell from the high windows onto the fair linen, empty as a pocket. The altar was wooden and plain, ordered from a Lutheran catalog specializing in church furniture. The wine, shortly to sit on the altar in a little silver chalice that a priest found in a second-hand store, was cheap Christian Brothers cream sherry; the wafers were the whole wheat variety made by nuns in Clyde, Missouri. The table, the wine, the wafers were as everyday, as ordinary as my house, and also contained within and behind them a reality as complex, as beautiful, and as hidden as the house in my dream. Prayers rose from the kneelers; I breathed in the stone-cooled air. In a few minutes, others arrived for this Thursday-evening service. An attorney for legal aid, an advocate for abused children, a heating serviceman, a realtor. Someone new, a woman with short reddish-brown hair wearing a cream-colored suit. They walked in from the street and stood in the cool dark, loo