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    Accompany Me: A Life in Vulnerability and Faith
    Accompany Me: A Life in Vulnerability and Faith
    Accompany Me: A Life in Vulnerability and Faith
    Ebook49 pages34 minutes

    Accompany Me: A Life in Vulnerability and Faith

    By Nora Gallagher

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    About this ebook

    In her deeply affecting and profound portrait of illness and how it can dramatically alter the fabric of our lives and our faith, Nora Gallagher depicts the process of alienation she experienced when she encountered her first major crisis of health. Learning to suddenly have to ask for help, to heal, and to find her own capacity for wellness and resilience—Gallagher makes a powerful call for a more meditative, shared existence in which we can sit quietly with one another, open our hearts, listen, accept, and throw off the narrative of business and function that pervades our lives and blinds us to compassion.

    Meditative, touching, and an inspiration—Accompany Me welcomes people from all walks of life and tradition to join Gallagher on her journey to rediscover her faith, her home and her comfort in a community of all of the other souls who spend their days with one another in the land of the vulnerable. 

    A Vintage Shorts Original. An ebook short.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
    Release dateFeb 13, 2017
    ISBN9780525435167
    Accompany Me: A Life in Vulnerability and Faith
    Author

    Nora Gallagher

    Nora Gallagher is the best-selling author of Changing Light, a novel that received outstanding reviews and of two memoirs,Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith and Practicing Resurrection. She is licensed to preach by the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, a preacher-in-residence at Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara, and is on the Board of Advisors of the Yale Divinity School.  She is married to novelist and poet, Vincent Stanley.

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      Book preview

      Accompany Me - Nora Gallagher

      1. Vulnerability

      The year I drowned, I took the No. 6 train uptown in New York to the Hispanic Society of America to visit their collection of ancient maps. On display that day were the large maps of the world as it was known at various times, including Juan Vaspucci’s Mappa Mundi from 1526, when the coastline of western South America was nothing but a watery blur.

      But there were also practical books and charts, called derroteros (in English, courses or pathways), made by rutters or coastal pilots. These guides, with their close focus, aided mariners who plied both local and more international waterways and provided a bird’s-eye view of shoreline elevations. The journals accompanying the maps had notes on the stars and entries regarding harbors and ports. One particular derrotero was displayed with its original hand-stitched hemp case. It was a painstaking map of a shoreline, with hundreds of tiny inscriptions and notes and small perfect houses drawn along the water’s edge.

      Only by reading back and forth between different maps was a sailor able to orient himself.

      In Leonard Cohen’s song Suzanne he sings, Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water…and when he knew for certain, only drowning men could see him…

      After I drowned, I began to see that I was navigating between the larger mappa mundi of organized religion and philosophies—Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and, not to ignore, the Church of Atheism—big cosmologies with so much history, tradition, and many power struggles behind them. Firm ideas. Fixed points. And my own derrotero, my firsthand experience of my own sea, my own subjective truth.

      What principally drove the makers of the large maps was conquest; the smaller ones, discovery. Take what I say here as one of those derroteros.

      My derrotero would be of the smaller coastline, an individual rock. I draw it to share with others what to watch out for, what I learned. Or what I knitted together, what sufficed. Not a doctrine, but a geography worth recording.

      Our desire to apprehend this world is often couched as a passive state, as Belief, a dumb acceptance. And sometimes I suppose it is. But the struggle to grasp what lies just beyond our firm knowledge is in fact energetic. Reason runs out, and we reach beyond it, toward the blur at the edge of the map. And beyond that, toward what cannot be known. And this urgent need to reach beyond ourselves is not real until it has been worked through a human life, in its specificity, its particulars. Our lives, our bodies, are its mediums. Whatever the reality of this thing beyond us, the struggle toward it remains, oddly, individual. Like truth, what we sometimes call faith is alive. It changes. What drives us, as it drove those sixteenth-century sailors, is discovery. Who knows in the end what we shall find out to be true; perhaps it’s

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