Life Reimagined: Retirement as a Spiritual Journey

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.