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How to Begin When Your World Is Ending

A Spiritual Field Guide to Joy Despite Everything

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
As a progressive parish minister, Molly Baskette has been a companion during the most vulnerable and unsettled periods of many people's lives. She has also had a front row seat to remarkable human transformation, as many of the ruptures her people lived through turned out to be the way that God got in. But when she was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer at age thirty-nine, with two small children, her theology of and relationship to God was tested more profoundly than ever. Instead of becoming despondent, though, she engaged with her faith more deeply-seizing the opportunity to test the seaworthiness of the faith she had been practicing and preaching. In How to Begin When Your World Is Ending, Baskette shares the questions that confronted her along the way like: Is it true that prayer changes things? Does God care whether we live or die-and is there a damn thing God can do about it anyway? How can vulnerability, counterintuitively, be a strength? And the million-dollar question: is there life after death, and just what might it be like? Weaving together her own story and the stories of those she encountered in her life of faith, Baskette mines joy from all the hardest parts of being human. In doing so she reminds us that whatever you are going through, someone has been there before you, and found meaning in the madness.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from September 26, 2022
      Pastor Baskette (Bless This Mess) delivers a sincere and funny guide to surviving hardships. She weaves stories of people she’s met through her ministry with anecdotes about her treatment and recovery from cancer, recounting her struggle to care for her two young children and pastor her church after getting diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma at age 39. Touting the power of vulnerability, she tells of learning to trust that the “community that God and I had woven together over many decades would hold” while she underwent treatment and displays a spirited sense of humor about the ordeal (“I felt like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2,” she writes about her grizzled look while undergoing chemotherapy). Baskette excels at drawing life-affirming lessons from bleak circumstances, as when she discusses the suicide of a parishioner: “Facing death is what ultimately frees us to live more wholly.” Her accounts of ministering to people in prison—including a pedophile and a mother who killed one of her children during a psychotic episode—balance grace and mercy with nuanced moral understanding, and she suggests that an ideal faith community should be able to address dangerous urges before they become crimes. Anne Lamott fans will find in Baskette a kindred spirit.

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  • English

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