How to Begin When Your World Is Ending: A Spiritual Field Guide to Joy Despite Everything
Moving, witty, and probing, Molly Baskette's practical and spiritual perspective will appeal to readers of Lori Gottlieb's Maybe You Should Talk to Someone and Kate Bowler's Everything Happens for a Reason.
As a progressive parish minister, Molly Baskette has been a companion during the most vulnerable, traumatized, 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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"Anne Lamott fans will find Baskette a kindred spirit." --Publishers Weekly, starred review
"How to Begin When Your World Is Ending is one of those books you didn't know you needed until you've been laughing and crying through it. It is brave and true, vulnerable and wise. Your brain, heart, and soul will be better off for having spent some time in Molly Baskette's extraordinary company." --Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, author of On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World and other books
"If you like to read beautifully written chapters that are every bit as funny as they are wise, that's reason enough to read How to Begin When Your World Is Ending. A gift and a delight!" --Brian D. McLaren, author of Faith After Doubt and Do I Stay Christian?
"Don't let Molly Baskette's ebullient prose and cheeky wit fool you: this book is as chock full of spiritual wisdom and hard-won truth as it is with belly laughs. Baskette whirls her reader through her own and others' stories of hardship with a light step and a deft hand, all to the rhythm of grace. This book is for anyone flirting with God or learning to dance through difficult days." --Emily Scott, founding pastor of St. Lydia's Dinner Church and author of For All Who Hunger: Searching for Communion in a Shattered World
"What the world needs, Howard Thurman tells us, is people who have come alive. This is the summons. Molly Baskette has received it. She knows how to grieve, laugh, question, and celebrate. In a sometimes-nightmare world of exclusion and domination, Baskette invites us to dance and risk arrest, to be the therapeutic context we want to see in the world. Receive her witness and get blessed." --David Dark, culture critic, teacher, and author of Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious
