SIN BRAVELY

How an overly zealous religious imagination hampered the author’s life.

From a very early age, Rowe, a comedy writer and producer, knew she was a Christian. She had her own Bible complete with commentaries that she spent hours reading and quoting. She tried hard not to sin, and she made sure to be a silent and then direct witness. However, despite her best attempts to accept Jesus as her savior, she always had a nagging sense of doubt that her best efforts were not good enough. She felt that Jesus could “turn on me at any moment; that He is kind until He is not, that He is absolute love until He is absolute vengeance. I know He could effortlessly toss me into hell for all eternity before turning back to nuzzle his beloved sheep—all without messing up His Pantene hair.” Rowe’s obsessive worries about her faith plagued her as a young child, and she takes readers through the years leading up to and through a three-month stint in the evangelical psychiatric center she attended when she was 19. Full of the normal angst that most adolescents experience, Rowe’s stroll down Memory Lane contains the added layer of her religious fanaticism. Her worries about whether she had truly accepted Jesus grew progressively worse as time passed, especially when she reached college and began to date. Love, lust, and religion all comingled in the author’s mind, creating a mixture of stress and fear that made her sick. Rowe is candid throughout the book, giving plenty of details about her psychotic break and of how she began to find her way back to some semblance of balance, supported by her fellow group members in the rehab center. Devotees of Rowe’s comedy and those with a strong interest in born-again Christianity will enjoy learning about her strife and road to redemption.

An enthusiastic chronicle of how one woman’s religious passion almost swallowed her whole.