At 29, Reba Riley struggled with a debilitating chronic illness she dubbed "The Sickness." It baffled everyone she consulted--doctors and chakra healers alike--forced her to sleep away her days and challenged her sunny disposition. Stymied by her physical ailments, she decided to focus on her wounded spirituality, sampling 30 different doctrines before her 30th birthday, seeking a cure for her self-diagnosed Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome.
She carefully orchestrated her "30 by 30" foray into the "Godiverse"--"That's God plus the Universe"--at the start of her quest in 2011. There was no returning to the fundamentalist "believe-it-all-or-believe-it-none gospel" of her childhood, and in spite of the Sickness, she identified 30 spiritual beliefs practiced near her Columbus, Ohio, home. She told her supportive law-student husband, "I'm not going to find a new religion. I'm going to find myself."
She started, and almost stopped, with Word Alive, the dreaded church of her past, limping away afterward "feeling worse than Word Dead." But she moved on, from Baptists to Buddhists, Christian Spiritualists to the Amish. Her humorous internal monologues are often self-deprecating but never judgmental of her hosts, and her journey is filled with insights, coincidences and thoughts that came unbidden to her mind. (Sitting in her car, "a parade of words manifested in my mind--fully formed and strung like beads on a necklace: Jesús-Rama-Krishna-Christo-Abba-Allah-lleluia... my mantra.")
Both memoir and survey course on 30 belief systems, Reba Riley's quest for healing is an entertaining and enlightening story with a well-deserved happy ending. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco