A memoir recommended for those facing challenges related to their sexual preference and who want to embrace the secret passages opening to mystery and the paradox of opposites.
Elizabeth J. Andrew is a writing instructor and spiritual director in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In this beautifully rendered spiritual memoir, the author uses experiences from childhood, adolescence, and college to reveal the surprises that await us at every stage of our lives. Andrew does a masterly job describing her bisexuality and the challenges of this lifestyle in our society. At one point she writes:
"All along I've been drawn to both men and women, aroused by how firmly a woman plants her feet on the ground or by the concentrated passion with which a man looks out a window. All along I've loved a multifaceted God. God creates by connecting disparate parts, by embracing paradox, by making of opposites (light and dark, death and life, male and female) an ever-changing whole. I can feel it in my body."
She also has much to say about the spiritual dimensions of desire, passion, and letting go. Her favorite guide to the journey of her life is Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden.
Andrew begins this spiritual memoir in the kitchen and ends it on her knees in a retreat center's garden. She remembers her childhood and the early escape she made into books. Her mother coached her through prayer and the church became her second home. What she likes most about this fellowship of believers is the "secret passages opening to mystery." Andrew does a fine job delineating the shut-down of her body during adolescence when "womanhood for me was about covering up the messiness we were given, the hair, the blemishes, the breasts, the blood." She sheds further light on her spiritual development in descriptions of her job as a teacher, a trip to Wales, her sessions with a spiritual director, her membership in an ecumenical Christian community, and her reactions to a devastating fire.
