spiritual books – She Lit

Bamboozled by Jesus: How God Tricked Me into the Life of My Dreams by Yvonne Orji

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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Bamboozled by Jesus by Yvonne Orji is a comedic memoir designed for the reader to recognize the little miracles that help you on your path.

The star of HBO’s Insecure, Yvonne Orji takes her love for Jesus Christ to new heights by sharing some of her profound moments that led her to Hollywood from growing up in suburban Maryland to Nigerian parents. She shares the wisdom she obtained from these minor and major blessings and how they kept her motivated to reach her dreams.

Being bamboozled by Jesus is low-key, the most frustratingly amazing thing you’ll ever experience. It ain’t always sexy, but it is always worth it. But don’t feel bad for wanting to tap out midway through. Even Jesus looked for an exit strategy. He straight up asked God, If there be any other way, let this cup pass me by. In other words, Fam, this ain’t it!

Her dreams of becoming a doctor are shaped by her parents’ medical careers but watching her aunt recover from an ectopic pregnancy motivated her even more. Until she fails organic chemistry in college. Yet college is also the place she realizes she isn’t as connected with Jesus the way she thought she was being raised Catholic. This stabilizes her religious path, where she famously promises to stay a virgin until marriage. Though she knew being a doctor was not in the cards, she still pursues a career in public health, which takes her to Africa for work. When she returns to the U.S., she is determined to break into entertainment with a move to New York City then to Los Angeles, where in both places she receives shelter and transportation from friends and acquaintances practically free of cost. She wins small screenwriting and stand-up comedy gigs that grow in momentum and leads to a tryout for her breakout role as Molly on Insecure.

The author’s religious schtick is sometimes entertaining and sometimes perplexing. Amid describing her transitions, she recounts Bible stories, more in a ratchet retelling that has you questioning if that’s what you read in the holy book or what she calls Da Good Book. But she’s trying to be funny and relate it to modern times, so it’s hard to fault her with that attempt. When she auditions for Insecure, she prays for the role but worries her prayers will clash with other actresses’ prayers since they too were Christian. But is it Christian to pray for others to be eliminated from the competition?

The cultural references take a backseat to the religious theme. Though she says she’s leaning into her “Nigerianness,” it would’ve been nice to get more of a setting of her upbringing in the U.S. juxtaposed with her family annual trips to Nigeria. And she makes a few wisecracks toward Ghana, which may be taken as funny or offensive depending on your ethnicity.

Overall, the book’s inspirational message gets tangled in the repackaged biblical stories and random references to drive her point home like that blurb about basketball player Jeremy Lin’s Linsanity phase. The concept is interesting, but it comes off as overdone in this case where the reader has to stay on their toes but may have lost the depth of the content. The book may be more enjoyable if you know your holy book stories à la the Bible versions and your pop cultural references to understand how the small steps lead to the bigger picture.

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Rachel True, the unforgettable star of teen witch cult classic The Craft and weed cult classic Half Baked, has released a tarot-reading guidebook accompanied with personal essays and tarot cards she helped design.

Appearing with another well-known hippie “mixed chick” actress Cree Summer, Rachel discussed her new book set True Heart Intuitive Tarot, Guidebook and Deck on Crowdcast with Los Angeles indie bookstore Book Soup. Approximately 450 attendees remained online throughout the hour-and-a-half webinar.

On her website, she describes the book and card set as “22 memoir essays from my Mixed Black Jewish chick’s mystic minded Hollywood life” that includes 22 major arcana cards. She said the set gives lessons to readers just learning about tarot or wanting to expand their knowledge of tarot.

A set of 78 cards, tarot involves the practice of reading tarot cards to gain insight into the past, present or future by asking questions then interpreting cards. Arcana is defined as “mysterious or specialized knowledge, language, or information accessible or possessed only by the initiate,” according to Merriam Webster. The major arcana cards in a tarot deck represents big themes and changes at play in your current, past and future life. The minor arcana cards represent the current day-to-day aspects that affect making decisions.

Wearing her signature turquoise butterfly necklace, Rachel described in the webinar how she became an occultist, in this case a tarot reader, as a child. She said between the ages of four and five, she would access her parents’ bookcase and pull out Beyond Good and Evil by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung.

“When a few years later, when one of my parents’ friends gave me a deck, I was like, ‘Oh, I know these. Wait, er,'” she said. “It kind of connected with me and related back to those two books because some of them, especially Man and His Symbols, had some images in black and white and some images that are on the tarot cards. And that’s how I really began getting into tarot.”

Rachel and Cree, who admitted she really got into tarot practice only in the past two years, said that tarot doesn’t align with any religion, so it shouldn’t be seen as devilish. Even if you get The Devil card, which could mean sins such as greed may be overtaking one’s attention.

“Black people and ethnic people quite often went to the soothsayer or the card reader in the neighborhood because they didn’t go to doctors and we didn’t have shrinks, so this is a long tradition here,” Rachel said, calling the practice a “shrink in a box and spiritual Xanax.”

Released Tuesday, the book is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt with illustrations by Stephanie Singleton. Rachel dedicated the book to Pamela Colman Smith, a key person in the early tarot movement when she illustrated the Rider-Waite tarot deck in 1909 for fellow British mystic and writer Arthur Edward Waite which became known as a standard. Rachel and Cree, who both identify as biracial calling their mothers dark-skinned Black women and their fathers White men, said Pamela’s story got buried in history as a biracial woman.

From 2002 to 2006, Rachel starred in the UPN sitcom Half & Half, which started streaming on Netflix on Thursday.