How to Begin When Your World Is Ending

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.