As the first female senior minister of First Unitarian Church in Portland, Oregon, a venerable institution founded in 1866, Marilyn Sewell sees her work as a spiritual calling, one that brings together all her past learning and experience. The church grows under her seventeen-year leadership into one of the largest and most influential Unitarian Universalist churches in the nation. All is well. That is, until it's time to retire. She thinks she'll do retirement the way she has done everything else, exceedingly well. She finds she is drastically mistaken.
Sensing that she is in dangerous territory, she reads, consults, considers, and plans. But nothing has prepared her for the emptiness, the lack of purpose, the loneliness and loss of community she experiences when she actually hangs up her robe, turns over the keys, and walks out the door of her beloved church.
Marilyn had been the captain of a grand ship, but it sails on without her, leaving her on the shore, bereft. She finds 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, solutions, she finds practical advice for retirement but finds 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.
