Faith Evolving(Kobo/電子書)

Trish’s trilogy – Faith Evolving, Exploring the Presence and A Love Quilt – are being republished in 2024. Read together, they document Trish’s 75-year life and faith journey from childhood to her 80s – a unique longitudinal record of women’s spirituality and thinking. They are both spiritual biography and contextual theology.

Along the way, Trish moves from a traditional Catholic faith to embracing feminist theology and on into a post-denominational, inclusive, integrated Gospel-centred spirituality.

She has used a patchwork metaphor across all three books, connecting writings of many colours, shapes and textures.

Her purpose in all three has been to encourage others to ponder and record their own faith journeys.

Faith Evolving description

How is religious faith affected by our life’s experiences? Trish McBride started with a traditional Christian faith. Over time this has evolved into a belief in a God who is free of denominational church boundaries. One poem and prose step at a time, Trish weaves the scattered patches of her life into a compelling narrative that will touch your heart, and invite you to ponder your own faith journey.

“My purpose in assembling the first edition of Faith Evolving was two-fold: to fill a gap in the spirituality literature by offering a sample longitudinal study of an ordinary woman’s journey of faith, and to encourage readers to reflect on their own journeys. This edition has the same aims!

The hard times are well and truly over and life is enjoyable and mostly peaceful. Good health helps with that, as do plentiful silence, solitude and simplicity – and more quilt-making. Another ten grandchildren have come along, all delicious buds on the family tree.

For me now God permeates everything as Life-Force, and is personally communicating and relational in Jesus, my life companion, and is Holy Mystery. Perhaps this approaches what the Church Fathers were trying to get at when they defined the Trinity!” Trish, From the Preface to the Third edition

Praise for Faith Evolving

“Faith Evolving: A Patchwork Journey is both spiritual biography and contextual theology. It is a work so much more contextual and potentially valuable for us in Aotearoa New Zealand than even those other great writings by Teresa of Avila or Gregory of Nyssa.

Using poems and articles, Trish McBride charts her journey over a thirty-year period from her identity and participation in the Catholic Church to her spiritual search elsewhere. The ‘patches’ of writing from across this time are threaded together with a brief text that connects them to the overall story. They reveal the struggle, courage, commitment and beauty of a woman’s intense relationship with God, family, church and community, and the changing character and understanding of those relationships.

Trish engages with philosophical and theological thought, with psychology and developmental theory as she reflects on the meaning of her experiences. Personal and professional encounters with alcoholism, pregnancies, widowhood, HIV / AIDS, sexual abuse by clergy, domestic violence, the mental health arena, and leaving her church have all provoked reflection. This book is a contribution to theological conversation in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Although Faith Evolving: A Patchwork Journey is a personal account, it mirrors the experiences and stories of other women in and beyond the Christian churches of Australasia. Though these churches provide person-al and community support through liturgical and spiritual nourishment, they are also responsible at times for heartbreakingly abusive attitudes and behaviour towards women and children. Trish reveals some of this underside and some of the healing that is probably never enough. However, the author’s voice is not bitter or unforgiving – it is much more compassionate and prophetic.” Dr Ann Gilroy, School of Theology, The University of Auckland

“A work of scholarship … profound, with wonderful everydayness and simplicity that shine through.” Helen Simmons, Women’s Studies Journal, spring 2006

“Fine, rich writing filled with metaphor and symbol.”
Mel Bogard, Friends’ Newsletter, April 2006

“A book to enjoy only if one is prepared to savour, mull over and meditate on it. I warmly recommend it.” Sr Mary Scanlon, LCM, Wellington

“Trish McBride has a sharpened awareness of someone who is sensitively in touch with the God who embraces every moment of her life. Her engaging book tells the power of story and the gift of the reflected life.” Joan McFetridge, Tui Motu, Nov. 2005

“Common threads – how amazing to read someone else’s story and find in it your own! Trish has journeyed from charismatic community, parish ministry and contemplative explorations through a crisis which propelled her into more radical questioning of the status quo. She is at home now, accompanied by friends, with a faith beyond church and institution.

Trish points out, through use of James Fowler’s ‘stages of faith’ that her story is also that of all who have gone on a spiritual quest – it is a path well-travelled, though sadly rarely understood by those within the church. Many have found that to keep travelling they have to leave the church that nurtured them and find other companions on the Way. Among those companions are books such as Faith Evolving: A Patchwork Journey – in them we see our own stories reflected, and known that we are not alone.”
Rosemary Neave, futurechurch

“This book is divided into three sections, each prefaced with a reflection on how she perceives, retrospectively, her faith journey:

Clothes-line Theology: 1974–1986
After That: 1987–1994
Turangawaewae: 1995–2005

The young adult Trish, who strived to fulfil the expectations of a traditional [Christian] marriage and parish, has passed through the crucible of pain and loss by 2005 to become a mature and joyful Trish. The God, who at the beginning is a demanding figure evoking total blind surrender, is by the end the One who seeks justice in solidarity with marginalised women and men, and who manifests not only in creation, but also as the Quiet within.” Anne Hadfield PhD, author and spiritual director

About the author

Trish McBride was born in Lancaster, England and came to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1952. For most of her life she was deeply involved in the Catholic Church. She has subsequently spent times with ExAlt, a women’s spirituality group, a Progressive Presbyterian parish, and the Religious Society of Friends, and now identifies as post-denominational.

Now retired, Trish has been a spiritual director, chaplain in various contexts, counsellor and supervisor. She is mother to 7 and delighted grandmother to 23, some acquired, and is now (2024) happily settled in a retirement village.

A high point in her writing career was as a prize-winner in a 1994 international competition for religious journalism awarded by The Tablet, London. Others have been contributing chapters to five Aotearoa Catholic-based theology books, (The God Book, A Thinkers Guide to Sin, Journeying into Prayer, But is it Fair? and Living in the Planet Earth), publication of two academic papers in USA, and completing her own unintended trilogy: Faith Evolving, Exploring the Presence and A Love Quilt.

Many of the articles and poems in her books have previously appeared in a variety of publications. Formal studies included MA (Hons) in Classics, Diploma in Pastoral Ministry and Recognition as an Associate in Christian Ministry (interdenominational).

Involvements include family, social justice, nurturing friendships, quilting, reading, swimming, walking and occasional painting.

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