Faith Evolving: A Patchwork Journey

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