The Search for Self, with Margaret Eastman Smith

"It's not selfish to want to find a sense of self. It's not selfish to really be pushing the question of what is deeply etched in my heart that leads me to take the decisions I take."

— Margaret Eastman Smith

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Margaret Eastman Smith was born into a remarkable and complicated inheritance. Her parents met inside Moral Re-Armament — the Christian-based global movement once known as the Oxford Group — and Margaret grew up with no home of her own, moving between continents, living in community, and absorbing the movement's demand for total commitment and unselfishness. It took until she was thirty-five for her to admit that a world she genuinely loved wasn't serving the person she was becoming. In this conversation, Margaret and Mike talk about what it means to have your adolescent crisis and your midlife crisis at the same time, why leaving a group is only half the work (building a new life is the other half), the surprising things she chose to keep, and how a memoir forty years in the making became a story about untangling family, faith, and self — and finally learning what love actually asks of us.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Wanting a self is not selfish. Raised inside a movement that prized total commitment and unselfishness, Margaret had to unlearn the idea that seeking her own identity was a moral failure. Discovering what was "deeply etched in her heart" — and telling it apart from phrases she'd simply absorbed — became the real work.

2. Leaving late is its own kind of hard. Margaret didn't walk away as a rebellious teenager. She left at thirty-five, which meant her adolescent search for identity and her midlife reckoning arrived at the same moment. Some doors were open, some had closed, and she had to start over anyway.

3. Getting out is only half the story. She argues that too many accounts of leaving powerful groups stop at the exit. The harder, less-told chapter is building a new circle of friends, a new set of values, and a new place to put your feet down.

4. You don't have to reject everything you were given. The subtitle — What I Kept and What I Left Behind — is literal. Margaret kept a gift for hospitality, an instinct for reading a room, and a quieter, less literal faith that there's still a path worth listening for.

5. A path reveals itself by trying, not by waiting for a sign. She grew up believing God would make the way obvious. Instead she learned you have to test things — journalism, medicine, history, counseling — and only afterward sense whether they fit.

6. The scholar and the subject were the same person. Margaret spent nearly two decades studying how divided societies reckon with contested history, including Northern Ireland. Writing this memoir, she was finally turning that same lens on her own family.

7. Love starts with acceptance. "Absolute love" was one of the movement's standards, but Margaret felt it was never truly explored there. The book ends where her own understanding landed: love means accepting a person — and yourself — as you actually are.

GET THE BOOK

A Spectacular Inheritance: What I Kept and What I Left Behind by Margaret Eastman Smith

Publisher: Sibylline Press

Release Date: August 4, 2026

ISBN: 9798897400201

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G6S4R5R6?linkCode=ll2&tag=rettocasgra-20&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl

Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/54587/9798897400201

Also by Margaret Eastman Smith: Reckoning with the Past: Teaching History in Northern Ireland

CONNECT WITH MARGARET

Website: https://www.margareteastmansmith.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=