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Description
When Marilyn Sewell retired after seventeen years as senior minister of one of the nation's largest Unitarian Universalist churches, she expected to excel at this next chapter as she had in every other. Instead, nothing prepared her for the emptiness, loneliness, lack of purpose, and the loss of the community that she experienced when she hung up her robe, turned over the keys, and walked out the door of her beloved church.
Adrift, she found herself awash in profound questions of being: Who am I, without my identity as the minister of First Unitarian? Where will I find community that holds me? What, if anything, could life possibly hold for me now? Searching for signs and solutions, she discovers practical advice for retirement but little to soothe the grief that has invaded her body and spirit.
Unmoored, with a deep sense of loss and crippling anxiety, she is pushed to go deeper than she yet has gone, deeper than she wants to go, to get at the roots of her despair. She spends seven years wandering through the thicket, examining the family history that brought her to this place, looking at what has driven her lifelong frantic work ethic. The writing itself begins to reveal the answers she is seeking.
Ultimately, Marilyn realizes that she must radically change. She still has gifts to give, revealed only when she stops her fanatical drive to produce, when she learns to get quiet, to breathe, to listen, to be present to the nanosecond that life is, to respond to the moment-to embrace and live out a second calling.
Table of Contents
1. Clearing Out
2. What's It All About, Alfie?
3. Leaving Church
4. Breaking Free
5. Surrender
6. Starr King
7. Searching
8. Finding
9. Coming into My Own
II. FALLING
10. Losing
11. Growing Up Days
12. Grieving
13. Looking for Home
14. Surprised by Joy
15. Too Much, Too Soon
16. My Body, My Self
17. Falling into Despair
III. SEARCHING
18. Looking for Answers
19. Involuntary Job Loss
20. Males Are More Vulnerable
21. Some Age Out
22. Some Continue to Work
23. Work Ethic in my Family
24. Taking Care of Business
25. Who Are My People Now?
26. Letting Go
27. Creating a New Narrative
IV: REFLECTING
28. The More That Haunts Our Days
29. Dreams Change
30. What Must I Do to Be Saved?
31. Where Does the Light Lead?
32. When Less Becomes More
33. The Season of Loss
34. What Gifts Are Ours to Give?
35. Bestowing a Blessing
V: BECOMING
36. A Great Cloud of Witnesses
37. Do the Right Thing
38. Continuing to Minister
39. Ministry of the Word
40. A Journal of the Plague Years
41. What Goes, What Stays
42. Living in Love
43. Choosing Mercy over Judgment
44. The Scream of a Whistle
45. Nothing, No Matter How Precious, Can Be Kept
46. The Order of Things
Product details
| Published | 13 Nov 2025 |
|---|---|
| Format | Paperback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 232 |
| ISBN | 9798765157831 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Dimensions | 229 x 152 mm |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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