Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome

One Woman's Desperate, Funny, and Healing Journey to Explore 30 Religions by Her 30th Birthday

Reba Riley

• Publisher: Howard Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781501125676
• eBook ISBN: 9781501124044
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Written with humor and personality, this debut memoir recounts a woman's spiritual quest of experiencing thirty religions before her thirtieth birthday. Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome is for questioners, doubters, misfits, and seekers of all faiths, and tackles the universal struggle to heal what life has broken. On her twenty-ninth birthday, while guests were arriving downstairs, Reba Riley was supposedly upstairs getting dressed. In actuality, she was slumped on the floor sobbing about everything from the meaning of life to the pile of dirty laundry on the floor.Life without God was crashing in on her. And she was sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. She uttered a desperate prayer, and then the idea came to her—thirty by thirty. And thus she embarked on a year-long quest to experience thirty religions by her thirtieth birthday. During her spiritual sojourn, Riley: -Was interrogated about her sex life by Amish grandmothers-Disco danced in a Buddhist temple-Fasted for thirty days without food—or wine-Washed her lady parts in a mosque bathroom-Was audited by Scientologists-Learned to meditate with an urban monk-Snuck into a Yom Kippur service with a fake grandpa in tow-And finally discovered she didn't have to choose a religion to choose GodIn a debut memoir that is funny and earnest, Riley invites questioners, doubters, misfits, and curious believers to participate in the universal search to heal what life has broken. Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome takes you by the hand and reminds you that sometimes you first have to be lost in order to be found.

PART 1

Summer

1

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Falling

What’s a girl like you doing stuck in a place like this?” the bartender asked, muscles straining against his hotel uniform as he threw down a cocktail napkin in front of me.

I looked around: three barstools, four fake dusty palm trees, fluorescent lighting. This was the kind of joint that offered vending machines in lieu of room service.

“It was a bad day, Josh,” I replied, reading his name tag. “You have any pinot grigio back there?”

“Of course, honey!” Josh moved his toffee-colored hands to pour me a glass. “Why was it a bad day?”

Rocking a Vin Diesel–style bald head over a broad grin and big brown eyes, Josh the bartender seemed like the perfect person to spill my story to. (It helped that he was a captive audience and I his only customer.)

I twisted into a bar stool, unloaded my laptop bag, and sighed. “Okay . . . so this morning I left my house in Columbus to drive to a rural Kentucky lumberyard for a sales presentation—I sell nails and power tools—” Josh arched one brow in surprise. “I know, I know. I don’t seem like the kind of woman who would hang around in lumberyards. But remember the job market in 2009?”

“Why do you think I’m behind this bar?” Josh laughed, gesturing dramatically to our surroundings.

I dropped my head and groaned. “ ‘Our nails penetrate thirty-three percent faster due to superior lubrication.’ I regularly have to say those exact words to the kind of men who drink beer for breakfast and have girlie calendars in their work trucks.”

Josh pursed his lips in a sour look that read: I may like men, but not that kind. “Lubricated nails?”

I hid my face in mock shame.

“Oh, honey,” he said, patting my shoulder. “It’s okay. We do what we have to do.”

“So true.” I raised my glass in a faux toast. “Anyway—today, after four hours in the car, I arrived in the parking lot of a strip club. I checked the address and called the lumberyard. The owner said, ‘Ma’am, you’re at the right address in the wrong state.’ ”

Josh put a hand on his hip. “You should have just gone right on in. Strippers need lubricated nails, too.”

Mid-sip, I nearly snorted wine up my nose. “Josh, you’re exactly who I needed to talk to today.”

He gave a little bow. “I’m here all night, princess.”

“Just wait. It gets worse.” I took a long swig. “An hour later I hit a huge pothole, blew out two tires, and broke both axles. The tow truck guy who showed up was this little redheaded dude in green overalls who spoke in a thick Irish accent. He took one look at my car and said, ‘Lady, did you forget to have a beer on St. Patrick’s Day?’ ”

“Your knight in shining armor was a leprechaun?” Josh lowered his chin in disbelief.

“A leprechaun who chain-smoked the entire way back to Cincinnati.” I sniffed my hair. “Marlboros, ick! He dropped me off here while my car gets twelve hundred dollars worth of repairs.”

Josh clucked with concern.

I rubbed my face. “Today is only the latest in a string of bad car luck. In the past two months I’ve had four other tire blow-outs, one dead battery, one stopped starter, and two car break-ins. I’m on a first-name basis with the AAA dispatcher, and my mechanic gave me his cell phone number with great seriousness, like he was a surgeon on call.”

“Probably because you’re putting his kids through college. That’s like the reverse of finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” Josh sympathized. “I think you need another drink. This one’s on me.”

“Thanks,” I said, sitting back on my stool and considering my absurd day. “You know what the leprechaun tow truck driver reminded me of? The Smurfs. I wasn’t allowed to watch the Smurfs growing up because my parents thought they were demonic.”

I was surprised to hear these words leave my mouth; this was not a Fun Life Fact to be casually shared like cocktail peanuts with a bartender.

Josh’s posture changed from easy-listening bartender to Marine at attention. “No effing way! Me too! A teacher at my school said Papa Smurf was a symbol for the anti-Christ, just because he wore a red hat and all the other Smurfs wore white hats.”

I tilted my head sideways and said slowly, “Where did you go to school? It couldn’t have been . . .” Josh beat me to the punch line by breaking out into our small Christian elementary school’s fight song. I joined in melodically as we burst out laughing.

“Shut the hell up,” exclaimed Josh, his jaw slack. “You seem so normal and not Christian-y.”

“Thank you? The ‘normal’ part is up for debate.” I thought of the portion of my bad day that I hadn’t told Josh about, the part where I slumped over my steering wheel, sleeping at a rest stop because chronic illness made me too tired to drive three hours at a stretch. “But I definitely haven’t been Christian-y in almost a decade.”

Josh peered at me in belated recognition. “Wait. Are you the music teacher’s daughter? Rebecca?”

I nodded. My mom had taught at Bridgeville Christian all the years my younger sisters and I attended.

“It’s Reba now,” I said and smiled. “That’s Rebecca without the -ecc.”

“Reba. Girl. This is crazy.” Josh threw his towel over one shoulder and leaned back. “Remember the dress code? Bible classes? Scripture memorization? Never-ending altar calls? Oh, and the offense system—five offenses equaled a paddling? The principal once paddled me after I got caught making fun of the art teacher. I used to roll under the pews to escape chapel services, and then go smoke pot in the woods.” Josh laughed, but the sound was laced with something I knew too well: grief.

To understand our evangelical school, simply take everything normal and stir in a measure of God. Learning to read? Start with My First Bible and a recording of “Bible Stories for Little Ears.” Note the Proverbs-themed wallpaper in the reading group corner. Starting the school day? Pledge allegiance to the American flag, the Christian flag, and the Bible. Doing math? Enjoy lessons from Beyond Math: Arithmetic from a Biblical Worldview. (Even numbers weren’t neutral.) Truly, there was not any aspect of life that could not be improved by invoking Christ. Even bathroom breaks could be accomplished to the glory of God, if one flushed the toilet with a joyful spirit.

“Wow. I was way too spiritual and serious back then to even think about rebelling, let alone doing drugs. All I ever worried about was whether Jesus was proud of me. God was my everything.” I paused and looked into my glass. “Would you believe I was in ministry training? I wanted to be a Christian counselor. I even went through years of Christian college and studied at the Focus on the Family Institute.”

Josh winced at the mention of Focus on the Family, an organization known for encouraging people like him to “pray the gay away.” I exhaled a weary breath that far exceeded my rough day on the road. We both fell silent for a minute.

“God was my everything too.” Josh took a deep breath. “Until I came out. I mean, that’s the simple version. Losing faith happens by degrees.”

“You don’t have to tell me. I lived it. Not the coming out part—unless you count coming out as a nonbeliever. The losing faith by degrees part.”

Josh and I stared at each other in silent understanding. We hadn’t left our religion; our religion had left us.

We didn’t need to explain to each other what it means to lose your entire identity, or how it feels to lie to yourself—Faith doesn’t matter, I don’t need God, I can get along just fine on my own—even when you know the lies will never be true.

I lifted my glass in an attempt to brighten the mood. “To God,” I toasted, “the heaviest word in the English language, the word most likely to make me feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach!”

The joke fell flat. Even in jest, God was far too intertwined with a gray-haired father in the sky who doled out eternal punishment to anyone who didn’t pray to his shiny son, Jesus Christ.

I tried again. “To the Godiverse?”

“The what-iverse?” Josh looked puzzled.

“Godiverse,” I explained. “That’s God plus the Universe—the word I came up with for Something that’s bigger than the Trinity we grew up with, but smaller and more personal than the great beyond.”

“To the Godiverse,” Josh agreed.

We clinked glasses, but our heaviness didn’t lift.

“Man. This Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome stuff sucks,” I exclaimed, slamming my glass down in emphasis. Josh cracked a smile at my phrase, so I continued. “C’mon . . . I know you know the PTCS symptoms: Prayer is out of the question; the Bible is something you use to mop up spilled coffee; you can’t darken the door of a place of worship without sweaty palms, vertigo, chest pains, nausea, and vomiting.” In an effort to keep things fun, I didn’t mention the more destructive side effects of spiritual injury: anger, grief, despair, depression, failure to believe in anything, moral confusion, loss of gravity, and emptiness. “You may also experience hives, dry mouth, and a general tendency to avoid church like an escaped convict avoids cops.”

Josh laughed. “Wow. I definitely had one major case of Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome.”

“Had? I must have missed something. It seems like you’re still suffering.”

He looked away, thinking. “I get upset when I think about all the years I lost because I let other people decide how I could find God. But a few years ago, I started going back to the Nazarene church I grew up in . . . and I’ve made my peace with it.”

I choked on my wine. Nazarenes weren’t exactly gay-friendly, and Josh wasn’t entirely subtle. “How does that work?”

“I realized my past didn’t have to shackle me.” The pain fell away from his features, replaced by peace. “I decided to believe what I believe, practice what I practice, and not let anyone or anything get in the way of how I choose to find God. I don’t let other people think for me.”

I tried very hard to be happy for Josh, but the best I could manage was a fake smile.

“Good for you,” I managed to stutter, my thoughts turned upside down. Peace . . . what a beautiful, unattainable state. Or was it? If Josh could find peace, could I? And what would it mean if I did?

I yawned and threw down some cash. “It’s been a really long day. I’m going to turn in. It’s been great talking to you.” Promising to keep in touch, we exchanged information and hugs.

“Reba,” Josh called as I walked away, “Rejecting someone else’s version of reality isn’t the same as creating your own.”

It’s a nice idea, I thought later, crawling into my hotel bed, but I’m way too tired to think about dealing with my spiritual issues.

When I fell asleep, I dreamed of a large, unmarked van parked on the street in front of my house. God, shaggy-haired and lanky, hung out in the van’s back cab smoking a cigarette. (Come to think of it, God looked a lot like Ashton Kutcher.) A black-and-white closed circuit television blinked on with a live feed of my life. God watched the screen for a minute before he blew out a slow smoke circle and turned to his divine camera crew: Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, and the entire cast of Full House.

“You guys ready?” God asked.

The crew nodded, serious as church.

“Okay,” God said as he put on his headphones and cracked his knuckles. “Ready. Set. Action . . .”

“BABY, YOU HAVE TO get up. Everyone is going to be here soon,” Trent whispered from the edge of the bed.

“Cancel,” I croaked from beneath the pillow.

“But it’s your party,” my husband insisted, nuzzling my neck.

I attempted to move my limbs. As usual for a lost day—a day I lost to chronic illness—my body felt full of lead. I lifted the pillow and looked into my husband’s clear blue eyes. “Is it really too late to cancel?”

“It’s 5 p.m. People are already on their way.” He flashed an encouraging Superman grin. “And I brought you espresso.”

Untangling my body from the sheets, I gritted my teeth and searched inside myself for birthday cheer. Nothing.

“I’ll be ready in an hour,” I promised, dragging my drink to the shower in hopes that the combination of steam and caffeine would loosen the Sickness’s painful grip on my body.

Wrapped in a towel, I stepped from the shower twenty minutes later and wiped steam from the mirror. My dripping reflection looked exhausted, so I forced a plastic smile and pantomimed a silent laugh until the mirror reflected the image I made sure everyone saw: a happy woman with green eyes and long, dark hair who had it all—great husband, successful career, new puppy, high credit score. A carefree woman who didn’t suffer from a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Part One: Summer
• Part Two: Autumn
• Part Three: Winter
• Part Four: Come and See
• Part Five: Spring
• Epilogue: Six Months Later
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Reading Group Guide
• About Reba Riley
• Copyright