Carolyn Weber Archives - Bob on Books

Sex and the City of God, Carolyn Weber. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2020.

Summary: A story of how the decision to choose “the city of God” transformed love, sexuality, and relationships for the author.

At first glance, the title of this book feels like a teaser, playing off the title of another book by Candace Bushnell and the popular television series that followed. But the book really is about one woman’s sexuality and how her choice to live as a citizen of the City of God led to a larger vision of love, healing of her relationship with her father, and a deeper understanding of the meaning of her sexuality. Add to that a heart-warming love story told by a gifted writer, and you have a truly great read.

The story begins with the father, hospitalized and near death. In his last years, he had come to faith, and drawn close to his daughter, the author. Her mind flashes back to the absentee father of her childhood, and her seventh birthday party, a picture of her in a dress he bought her, waiting for him to come home. He didn’t come.

The story moves forward to her graduate studies at Oxford, and the summer at home after she had started following Christ. In the background of that story is TDH (Tall, Dark, and Handsome) who had shared with her about God, one of the Christians she’d met with but a remote hope for anything more than a good friendship. Back home is Ben, an ex who shows up. A drive in his truck ends at a summer cabin, interrupted by a knock at the door, and a box of books. In the months ahead, she begins to live into not merely a single, but singular life belonging to Christ, a life oriented around Augustine’s City of God rather than the human city.

Through Bible studies at St. Ebbe’s and reading Augustine, she finds her understanding of sexuality reframed, oddly enough through biblical genealogies. The begotten are not merely part of a human family but the created and adopted family of God:

Sex as the template for genealogy is important because sexuality is a reflection of God’s relationship with us. Our relationship to sex speaks of our relationship to God. And because our relationship to God must precede our relationship with everything else, including our own selves, working from this first relationship changes everything. As a result, more often than not in a culture that neglects our dignity as spiritual beings, pursuing this foundational relationship can feel countercultural, though it is God’s norm, for in becoming children of God we become who he intended us to be (p. 63).

It was not as straightforward path. Many frustrating dating relationships. A tempting episode in another cabin with the heat out. Meanwhile, the conversations continued with TDH, who always treated her and other women with respect, was candid in discussion about his own temptations, and his commitment to a chaste life as a Christian. And then he moved back to the States…

The rest of the story, as they say, is a lovely courtship, and then an honest account of marriage with its ups, downs and temptations (including a writing retreat that turns out a walk through the forest from Ben’s cabin, complete with his truck parked in the drive!).

The story ends as it began, with her father, his last voice message and a reflection on how the choices we make in love may well shape who is with us in our last moments. Along the way, Carolyn Weber’s writing draws us into her life, her longings, her temptations and her struggle with them, her hopes and growing faith. Her writing draws us by her descriptions of scenes and places in which we enter into disappointment, into turmoil, into the cold of the cabin, the wildness of a windstorm, the insistent knocking upon a door. This skillfully written narrative, punctuated with poetry and Augustine, invites us into the the aching wonder of human love shaped by the growing pursuit of the City of God. We are left wondering if God has something better on offer, even when it comes to human sexuality.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Holy Is the Day: Living in the Gift of the Present by Carolyn Weber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How often have you’ve been in a conversation where you’ve felt like the person you were speaking with was distracted? It could be something they were anxious about or somewhere they needed to be next. Perhaps you were that person. So often in the breakneck pace of modern life, we are constantly tempted to live in the future.

Carolyn Weber’s book, Holy is the Day, explores this temptation and the gift that living in the present, and being present to the Presence of God can be. She does this through a memoir style of writing, focusing around significant ‘days’ in her life over a several year period, beginning with the day she was sliced open without time for anesthetic for an emergency C-section during the delivery of one her twin boys–and experiences the presence of God as she is facing a situation that threatens her life and that of her unborn son.

Succeeding ‘days’ include the decision to write her conversion story while facing tenure consideration as an English professor, surviving an excruciating migraine with a “U-turn” friend, struggling with the harried life of a mom with three children under three and being reminded that “even Jesus went out on a boat” and so she also could take moments, walks, retreats to remember the Presence. We follow her and her husband on sabbatical, to a visiting faculty appointment and the “exclamation point” house, and the decision to leave faculty life to return to her Canadian home to care for parents and the day of the wonderful news that she was pregnant when physicians said this was impossible, and the day she learn of possible birth defects in her child. The book ends leaving us uninformed of the outcome but conscious of someone who is living in the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter, awaiting with hope the One who is Present to her.

The book is written by one who loves words, literary allusions, and the metaphorical use of language, and word play. I found that because of this, I needed to slow down to be present to this writing, to reflect on the metaphors and the poetry of MacDonald and Wordsworth and others. This is a book to be savored slowly and thoughtfully but doing so can take one into a place of being present to the present moment, and to the One whose Presence matters above all else.

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(I should also mentioned that my good friend and colleague Jamie Noyd, has just written a review of this book as well on her blog, “Walking the Path of Story.”)