Novel
Sermons: The Gospel in Literature and Life
“To
Hold the Posts of the Huppah”
Good in Bed by
Jennifer Weiner
John
8:3-16
First
Presbyterian Church
The
Reverend Donald E. Ray
September
6, 2009
Well, the title of the book is revealed! Does
it grab your attention? I won’t
ask if your reaction is - “Wow, I never heard that talked about in church
before” with perhaps anticipation of some spicy details. Or
if it’s - “Ahhh, he’s not going to talk about that in church, is he???”
Since Tom raised the bar last week with his 363
page novel, let me say that I read three whole novels in preparation for today. Two
of them I read as possible replacements for this one, because of its title. I
am looking forward to reading a novel without having to think—“sermon.”
But I kept coming back to this novel, in spite of
its title. My reason for not
disclosing it was to give me opportunity for some explanation. I
think the title was a publisher’s idea to grab attention and boost sales. It
really has very little to do with the content of the book. A
more fitting title might have been the phrase attributed to sports caster, Ralph
Carpenter when the Aggies rallied from far behind to tie the Raiders - “the
opera ain’t over ‘til the fat lady sings.”
My intent for this summer series that has been
enhanced by the actual experience of Gospel in literature has been to broaden
the horizons where we are aware of God and good news.
For this last in the series, I deliberately sought
a book that would not be considered religious. Weiner’s
book deals with a reality of how we see each other and how the image with which
others frame us impacts how we think of ourselves. As
I have discovered in the novels I have read this summer and suspect is true of
many works of fiction, this one too has sparks of gospel shining through. While
the book’s title, I confess, stirred my curiosity, it was a description of the
story that led me to read it.
Cannie, Candace, is a large woman. She
and Bruce had lived together for three years when Cannie felt the need for some
space. Bruce interpreted that as a
break up and took the opportunity to move on. A
writer, he lands a job writing a male column in a super market check out style
magazine. His initial column,
“Good in Bed” - thus the book title - he headlines, “Loving a Larger
Woman,“ describing it as an act of
courage. “I’ll
never forget the day I found out my girlfriend weighed more than I did.”
he opens. Cannie is incensed by this
public humiliation for her already size burdened self-esteem. But
she still struggles with her fond feelings for Bruce because he was one of the
few who showed love for her.
Resolving to do something about her size, she
explores a new weight loss program. In
the midst of all this, Bruce’s father dies. Cannie
goes to support Bruce and offer her comfort. In
the tangled web of their feelings, the comforting becomes intimate.
Through the testing for the weight loss program,
Cannie learns she is pregnant. The
physician who directs the program, Dr. K (because his name has too many
syllables to pronounce) informs Cannie that the diet pill which is a major
element of the program is contra-indicated for pregnant women. If
she decides to have the baby, she would have to drop out but Dr. K hopes she
will keep in touch, perhaps switch to a nutrition program for pregnancy.
Through the succeeding months, Cannie writes a
letter to Bruce and receives no reply. Cannie
is a journalist and an aspiring writer. An
interview leads to a friendship with a movie star, Maxi, whose contacts result
in the sale of Cannie’s screen play - a morale booster as well as needed
financial security for her and her baby.
After months in
The baby is delivered C-section. Cannie’s
uterus is so injured it must be removed meaning she can bear no more children. Premature,
the baby is critical, tiny; it’s uncertain if she has been deprived of oxygen
which might result in handicapping, if she survives. Through
the succeeding weeks, Cannie rages against Bruce and the “pusher.” She
walks, and walks, and walks, finally losing the weight she has seen as her
nemesis all he life. One night, the
sole flaps loose from her sneaker as she realizes she is in a section of the
city she doesn’t recognize. She is
lost. She is lost. A
kindly black man sitting on his door step tells her how to get the bus back to
University City, gets a roll of duct tape to re-attach the sole of her sneaker,
and gives her a bus transfer for the ride.
When she sees the
Cannie is a large woman in a culture that prizes
slim. The issue of obesity and
health aside, this book is about the stereotype labels and bigotry through which
the person outside the norm suffers.
John, uniquely in his Gospel, tells us of the woman
who was outside the norm of dutiful wife and mother. She
was charged by the religious as an adulterous, taken in the act. I’ve
long wondered about the man found with her. When
artists picture this scene, the woman is cowering on the ground, awaiting the
stones she deserves. Jesus levels
the field, refuses to condemn, and offers forgiveness to go and not sin again. There
is gospel in the freedom of the opportunity to move on and to make better
choices.
Cannie, the writer, sat at her computer and wrote
her own column: Loving a Larger Woman.
When
I was twelve, I learned that I was fat. My
father told me, pointing at the insides of my thighs and the undersides of my
arms with the handle of his tennis racquet. . .You’ll need to watch that, he
told me, poking me with the handle so that the extra flesh jiggled. Men
don’t like fat women. . .I carried his words into my adulthood like a
prophecy, viewing the world through the prism of my body, and my father’s
prediction. (1)
Her father abandoned the family, dropped out of
their lives altogether, and in her mind she blamed herself for failing to please
him. Only when she inadvertently
found him in
“Why?”
I asked him. My voice was cracking. “Why
have kids and leave them? That’s
the part I don’t understand. What
did we do. . .”I gulped. “What
did any of us do that was so awful that you never wanted to see us again?” I
knew, even as I was saying the words, even as I was thinking them, that it was
ridiculous. I knew that no child
could be that bad, that wrong, that ugly, could be anything to cause a parent to
leave. I knew that it was no fault
of ours. We weren’t to blame, I
thought to myself. I could let it
go; I could set the burden down, I could be free. (2)
Rearing children is fraught with difficulty. Growing
up isn’t easy. There are settings
evidently where parental tough love is necessary. There
are definitely points where we must grow beyond blaming ourselves, parents,
life--and be free.
It’s, I recognize, something of a digression, but
reading a novel can sometimes take an unanticipated turn. Forty-one
years ago, almost to the day I was reading Weiner’s book, I was walking the
streets of
We had been outside the gift shop at Luray Caverns
in
I walked with helpless anger at a boy who I had no
way of knowing or reaching but may have caused the placenta-abruptio that
resulted in the pain and bleeding of that fateful Saturday night.
I went into minister mode during Philip’s
struggle for life and eventual death, burying my feelings, questions, blame,
doubts while playing the role I thought was expected of me. Across
the years working in the hospital, I wrestled with the pain of my own loss as I
tried to comfort others with similar occasions for grief. I
felt guilty over pangs of jealous resentment that, with medical advances babies
now survive the respiratory difficulties of premature birth that took Philip’s
life. While 40 years have dimmed
memories and I do not always consciously think of that August, it is uncanny how
often something around that anniversary date leads to another step in healing. This
year it was a novel - a work of fiction, but how true to life. Be
careful reading novels. It may be
good for your health.
In her writing venture after the traumatic birth
and her frantic weeks of walking in vengeful rage, Cannie writes:
Ultimately,
I learned, there is comfort. Comfort
in reaching out to people who love you, comfort in asking for help, and in
realizing, finally, that I am valued, treasured, loved, even if I am never going
to be smaller than a size sixteen;
even if my story doesn’t have the Hollywood-perfect ending where I lose sixty
pounds and Prince Charming decides that he loves me after all.
The
truth is this - I’m all right the way I am. I
was all right, all along. I will
never be thin, but I will be happy. I
will love myself and my body, for what it can do - because it is strong enough
to lift, to walk, to ride a bicycle up a hill, to embrace the people I love and
hold them fully, and to nurture a new life. I
will love myself because I am sturdy. Because
I did not - will not - break. . . .
And
most importantly, I will love my daughter whether she’s big or little. I
will tell her that she’s beautiful. I
will teach her to swim and read and ride a bike. And
I will tell her that whether she’s a size eight or a size eighteen, that she
can be happy, and strong, and secure that she will find friends, and success,
and even love. I will whisper it in
her ear when she’s sleeping. I
will say, Our lives - your life - will be extraordinary.
(3)
I said my intent for this sermon was to use a novel
not readily identified for its religious, faith, or spiritual bent. Perhaps
because I am not totally indiscriminate in my choices, ready to read anything in
spite of outrageous content and language, that is not easy to accomplish. Cannie
is Jewish - only nominally, but she does observe the holy days of her faith and
she does arrange for the traditional naming ceremony for her Jewish baby girl.
Joy’s
naming was on December 31, on a crisp, perfect winter morning in
The
rabbi asked for silence, then asked for four people to come forward to hold the
posts of the huppah. It was my
grandmother’s, I saw, recognizing the fine old lace from my cousins’
weddings. It was the huppah I would
have been married under, had I gotten things in the right order. At
naming ceremonies the huppah is meant to shelter the baby and the husband and
wife. But I’d made prior
arrangements, and at the rabbi’s request everyone crowded under the huppah
with me. My baby would get her name
surrounded by all of the people who had loved and sustained us, I decided, and
the rabbi had said it sounded fine to her.
After
a short speech about Jewish tradition, the rabbi chanted a blessing and said,
“Now Joy’s mother, Candace, will tell how she chose the name.”
“I’ve
learned a lot this year,” I began. I
took a deep quavering breath. Don’t
cry, I told myself. “I learned
that things don’t always turn out the way you planned, or the way you think
they should. And I’ve learned that
there are things that go wrong that don’t always get fixed or get put back
together the way they were before. I’ve
learned that some broken things stay broken, and I’ve learned that you can get
through bad times and keep looking for better ones, as long as you have people
who love you.” I stopped and
swiped my hand across my eyes. “I
named my baby Joy because she is my joy,” I said, “and she’s named Leah
after her father’s father. His
middle name was Leonard, and he was a wonderful man. He loved his wife, and his
son, and I know he would have loved Joy, too.”
(4)
In an interview included at the end of the book,
Jennifer Weiner admits that Cannie’s story is much like her own life of love
and losses. She decided if she had
to live with the misery in her own life, she would at least try to turn it
toward a positive end. Weiner could
be accused of creating a fairy tale ending for an otherwise real life novel. Peter,
the weight and eating order doctor calls Cannie “special,” and on the last
page is on the verge of proposing marriage. Weiner
says that it felt like she was predicting what has become her own happy ending.
It is the nature of a novel to dream. One
could ponder what life would be like had not the science fiction writers of a
half century ago dreamed. Would
science have gone beyond plodding through experiments to expand upon the known,
to stretch its borders into that which seems but a glimmer of possibility?
A theme seems to be emerging these last weeks of
Novel sermons: Lou Maytree taking her deserting husband and Deary in to care for
them in their need; Jayber Crow loving Mattie Chatham with the purest kind of
love; Peter, the weight and eating order doctor calling Cannie, the larger
woman, “special” and caring for her and her baby. Is
it just fiction? Or is that gospel?
In a final effort to redeem the book title, perhaps
good in bed is not in achieving ecstasy of the moment but sharing in the act of
creation that bears joy. Whatever
the arena, whatever stigma it is we have been saddled with, good is in the spark
of life and hope, surrounded and immersed in love that brings joy to life.
Amen.
(1) Good in Bed by
Jennifer Weiner, pg. 364
(2) Pg. 300
(3) Pg. 365-6
(4) Pg. 369-70
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