Nora Gallagher

Morning Plenary

Nora Gallagher

Nora Gallagher has turned rejection into renewal many times in her life. After numerous New York publishers turned down her book proposal on families in Prague and she was fired by her agent, she wrote Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith, an account of her spiritual life. An avid storyteller, she then wrote The Changing Light, a novel being adapted for film that she based on vivid imagery she documented while walking on her land in New Mexico.

Phyllis Tickle, founding editor of the religion department at “Publisher’s Weekly,” recently asked Gallagher to write a book about communion for a series on Christian practices. The idea intrigued her. The result is a memoir-like book about taking communion called The Sacred Meal.

Gallagher is editor of the award-winning Notes from the Field and contributed a sermon to Sermons That Work and a poem to the anthology September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond. Her essays, book reviews and writings have appeared in many publications, including “The New York Times Magazine” and “The Los Angeles Times.”

She is preacher-in-residence at Trinity Episcopal Church, Santa Barbara, Calif., and sits on the advisory board of Yale Divinity School. She lives with her husband, novelist and poet Vincent Stanley, in Santa Barbara and New York.

The Dark Angel: Renewing My Relationship with the Present by Nearly Losing My Sight “It was like a blur at the edge of my right eye, as if a ghost were disappearing around a corner. When I finally got to my eye doctor, he told me my optic nerve was inflamed. I could go blind. When I asked my minister what to do, he said, ‘When I am in this kind of situation, I ask myself, “what is real now?” For the next several months, I learned that if I did not keep myself in the present, in what was real now, I would go into the ‘what-ifs’ of the future or the remorse of the past. I thought a lot about how Jesus comes to us in the present, and how, as a poet said, ‘Task: To be here now … even in this solemn and absurd role, I am still the place creation does a little work on itself.’ And I also realized that the present holds information that makes it possible for us to make the next step.” Writer, speaker, preacher and colorful storyteller: Nora Gallagher’s life inspires us because of her faith and the manner in which she embraces life’s challenges.