I don't like the word "memoir," and not just because it sounds like a French antique (as in, "Darling, fetch the sherry from the memoir"). It's an old-world, aristocratic term, too frail to govern the whole unruly territory of autobiographical writing. Prime ministers pen memoirs. So do aging film stars and war heroes. The rest of us write journals, reflections, and thoughtful ramblings too long or too private to give out in person.

Nora Gallagher's Practicing Resurrection: A Memoir of Work, Doubt, Discernment, and Moments of Grace is actually a piece of reflective journalism—occasionally dreamy and poetic, but more often clear-eyed and analytical. It's a sequel to Gallagher's first book, Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith, where she tells about her unlikely return to the Episcopal church of her childhood. A casual visit to a small congregation in Santa Barbara led her to a fresh discovery of faith and Christian community. In Practicing Resurrection, Gallagher chronicles the following years in which she considered entering the priesthood, even taking initial steps toward ordination. The first step was to form a "discernment" committee of friends in the parish to help determine where God was truly calling her. The group met three hours a month for the next year, discovering the process as they went along:

If someone from outside the church had been a fly on the wall during our discernment sessions, she or he would have seen five people sitting together around various dining-room tables mostly in silence. Every now and then, someone would speak. If anything was an example of how the church differs from the secular, this was it. We sat. We waited. I am not sure any of us knew what exactly we were doing in the beginning—we had no "training"—but we took to it, awkwardly at first and then more easily, as if returning to an old, ill-used language. As the year wore on, we became more familiar with what I came to call "the pull." A particular image or question would rise in the mind and would not fade: it felt the way a fishing line feels when a trout takes the hook below the surface, that singular tug, differing so much from a snag on a weed, of a living, breathing creature.

Gallagher had a huge decision to make. As she tried to discern the direction of God's "pull," she saw that in many ways her "inchoate longing" did match the formal priesthood: "I wanted to deepen my life. I wanted to anoint and be anointed, preach and listen, celebrate the Eucharist with the whole community participating because it is the community that makes the Eucharist. … I wanted to 'live' that 'holy life.'" But she knew full well that priesthood had its other side: vestry meetings, diocesan politics, the practical challenge of satisfying diverse groups of people. To say nothing of loneliness. Even as she struggled with friends to discern her real vocation, she faced her brother's death from cancer and a mounting crisis in her marriage. What if taking formal office cut her off from the very community that gave her strength—the people she loved and wanted to serve? By stepping out of the flow of ordinary life, would she lose the things that drew her to God in the first place?

I found it hard going at times to read about so much uncertainty and vacillation. It's easy to imagine Gallagher with a bumper sticker on her car that says "Question Everything." Still, I think she does well by herself and by her readers not to rush to comfortable conclusions. Ultimately she questions why the Episcopal Church keeps its priests separate from the laity: "How had it been established that only priests served the bread? What did serving the bread represent? By preaching in churches, I (and others) had broken a barrier that said only ordained persons could preach. … What other liturgical functions could laypeople fill or share with ordained clergy? And how might this add to the life of the church?" These questions seem legitimate to me, especially given that the mainline Episcopal Church allows so much latitude in matters of doctrine (I needed Valium to get through some of the theological musings in this book) while guarding its collars and chalices closely.

To read Albert Raboteau's personal history, A Sorrowful Joy, is to think that every book should be written first as a lecture for Harvard Divinity School. A scholar widely known for his studies of African American religion, Raboteau delivered the Wit Lecture at Harvard in 2000. Published by Paulist Press in a tiny paperback volume that looks like a church tract, it somehow manages to cover 130 years in the life of an American black family, beginning with the Creole great-grandfather who looks out from the "ancestor wall" in Raboteau's house:

My grandfather sits in a chair placed outside in the light. He sits straight; his large hands push against his knees. The sunlight heightens the contrast between the stiff white collar of his shirt and the dark smooth skin of his face, turned in profile.

To introduce his story with a portrait—a sort of icon—is fitting for a writer who converts to Orthodoxy before the tale is over. Raboteau's Creole grandfather was the son of a Louisiana slave. Though his children and grandchildren were born free, they suffered constant injustices in the segregated South, the worst being the murder of Raboteau's own father by a white man in Mississippi. The man was never prosecuted. Raboteau's mother packed her children off to the North in hopes of saving them from such evils and perhaps from her own anger. One summer, though, during a visit South, young Raboteau had his own taste of injustice. When a priest at the white Catholic church denied him Communion, he went away "hot-faced with shame, a blur of numbness." Years later he walked out of a Mass in South Carolina weeping the tears he hadn't wept as a child.

Given some of his bad experiences with religion, it's amazing that Raboteau developed a strong faith and a passion for the Church. He discovered Thomas Merton at 13 and dreamed of becoming a monk. His interest in African American spirituality led him to a teaching career rather than the priesthood, but he continued to be haunted by a "shadow vocation": "The path not taken still haunted me. … I felt that I had settled for a second best, not the heroic, but the regular. I had chosen the lesser way."

He became a great success in his career, teaching at top universities, publishing frequently, working so hard that he eventually grew distant from his wife and children. When Princeton offered him a position as dean of its graduate school, he knew it was far from what he'd wanted, and yet he didn't think he could refuse it. Already overwhelmed with work and guilt, he felt the world pressing down on him:

I remember as I was driving to campus to accept the position, I physically felt that the street was narrowing, closing in on me. I shrugged off the sensation and took the job. It was a "disastrous success."

Sitting through meeting after meeting, from morning to after dark, I felt that my spirit was shriveling up and dying.

Raboteau ultimately flung aside responsibility, betrayed his family, and wound up with his "spirit bleeding all over the place." Then, somewhere in the midst of huge grief and guilt, he happened to see an exhibit of Russian icons at the Princeton Art Museum. He was surprised to find himself drawn to one of the icons there, "an icon of the Theotokos with sad loving eyes. She seemed to hold all the hurt in the world with those eyes. … I gazed at her and she gazed at me."

He went back to see that icon three times. Later he visited an Orthodox church and kept going because of the comfort the community and liturgy brought him. As he began to explore Orthodoxy he discovered similarities between it and African American spirituality. Among other things he found a shared "quality of sad joyfulness, a sense that life in a minor key is life as it is. Christianity is a religion of suffering. The suffering of Christ and of the martyrs is at the center of the Christian tradition and suffering grounds the Christian to the suffering of the world. As the old slaves knew, suffering can't be evaded, it is a mark of the authenticity of faith."

Raboteau's reflections on personal suffering are profound, especially considering that they came from a black scholar in the year 2000, when talking about the redemptive nature of suffering could get you accused of listening to Rush Limbaugh. It will always be a mystery, though, why someone finds one Christian tradition more of a home for his soul than another—why Orthodoxy speaks to a black man raised Catholic while a California feminist falls in love with the Episcopal priesthood. The pull of a particular tradition and particular vocation are as unexplainable, indefinable as the pull of love, but both of these books, in very different ways, reveal that pull in its clumsy fullness. They show the zigzag path that a Christian takes not only to a kind of work and community of people but to a place of satisfaction and new birth. Both show us that the journey is a strange mix of God's leading, "inchoate longing," and blind persistence. At the beginning of her book, Gallagher quotes Wendell Berry from "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front":

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Betty Carter is the author of two novels. Her new book, Home Is Always the Place You Just Left: A Memoir of Restless Longing and Persistent Grace, will be published by Paraclete Press in May.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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