Swinging On The Garden Gate: A Memoir of Bisexuality and Spirit, Second Edition

By Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

• Foreword by Bishop Karen Oliveto. Oliveto is the first openly lesbian bishop to be elected in the United Methodist Church.



• Resonates with young people as it is both a memoir of coming of age and of coming out.



• Readers looking for queer stories—Cultural shifts in the last twenty years have greatly impacted the book industry and reading public. Readers are actively looking for queer stories and this memoir of bisexuality and spirituality is one of a kind.



• Award-winning and beloved writer and teacher—since the initial publication of Swinging on the Garden Gate, Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew has gone on to become a respected teacher and writer. She has published award-winning books on the craft of writing spiritual memoir and revision as a spiritual practice and so it is a wonderful tribute to her career to bring back into print her own stunning memoir.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skinner House Books
• Release date: Apr 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781558968790

Book preview

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

IN MY EARLY TWENTIES, when my sexual identity was a frightening mash-up of unnamed, forbidden longings, I had an intuited sense, completely unsupported by my Christian upbringing, that sexuality is a fundamental, trustworthy, and deeply wise spiritual faculty. Without sexuality’s stirring aliveness, I would never have begun my spiritual quest. The energy that drew me toward others regardless of their gender, that sometimes flashed on a crisp blue winter day or rose during the silent focus of writing, that began in my groin but could tingle my fingertips or sink to my toes and pulsed with significance—this confusion of desire and potency and animal impulse drew me to God. I’d had a good liberal Protestant upbringing, I’d even had a few mystical encounters, but until I began the work of naming these bodily experiences I didn’t know I could deliberately participate in my own becoming. I credit my bisexuality for launching what is now the centerpiece of my life: the evolution of who I am, in this body, interconnected to a glorious, sacred, and evolving universe of bodies.

Over the eight years I wrote Swinging on the Garden Gate, I found my way out of the closet into a joyous, enfleshed experience of holiness. I had to dig past millennia of church conditioning that God is out there to discover for myself Jesus’ basic teaching: God is in here, even in this bisexual, white American woman’s body. In the process, my construct of God got dismantled. God became mystery, and dynamic, loving, justice-seeking relationship, and being, the great I Am, an engendered and genderless creator who created us to participate in creation. I stuck with the language of Christianity in part because that was all I had and in part because, despite its propensity to be misused and wildly misunderstood, it nonetheless named my experience. At its core, my faith tradition proclaims the union of spirit and matter. Reconnecting with this lineage has been profoundly liberating.

Twenty-two years since the first publication of Swinging on the Garden Gate, a lot has changed. Same-sex couples legally marry. Younger generations embrace gender fluidity with awe-inspiring confidence. The United Methodist Church has splintered over LGBTQA rights; inclusive congregations now offer overt and radical welcome. Yet despite our cultural strides, we humans seem further than ever from recognizing sexuality as a seat of sacred knowing. The religious right’s condemnation of non-hetero sexuality has had the sorry consequence of alienating the hearts of queer folk from our rightful, natural relationship with our Source. By evicting the LGBTQA community from places of worship, not just Christianity but most major religions have severed mystery from the wondrous ways it manifests in our bodies. Secular leaders of the national LGBTQA movement respond in kind, dismissing the religious impulse as passé, anti-intellectual, or morally questionable—despite the significant role faith plays in culture for its countless members, especially people of color and immigrants and others at the margins of our communities. The dominant culture’s cynicism toward all things interior and intangible, and its misconception that sexuality is what happens in bed, aggravate the problem. We’re taught to segregate the sexual energy within us, preventing it from informing our creativity, our nonsexual relationships, our drive and purpose, our on-going growth. We don’t live much in our bodies. Everyone suffers as a consequence.

But queer folk are especially hurt. On a recent tour of community colleges in rural Wisconsin, I was repeatedly asked by anguished young students, Is it possible to be both queer and spiritual? The question makes me weep. The rift between body and spirit, I believe, is best bridged personally through spiritual practice and collectively through story. Stories, Thomas Moore writes, have the uncanny ability to raise the spirit out of the flesh like bread rising yeasty in a warm place. The stories with the greatest bridging power come from those most wounded by the separation, who have nonetheless reunited body and spirit and speak with consequent, life-affirming agency. I told those young queer students, and tell them again here, Yes! You already are both queer and spiritual, and not only that: Do your healing work and you’ll be our best ambassadors back into wholeness.

We queer folk are beautifully poised to navigate the dynamic intersection between matter and energy. By virtue of our bodies, we’re accustomed to traversing multiple worlds. We know how to heed hidden, internal truths and allow them to transfigure our bodies, identities, and relationships. We’re not afraid of change; we can play, we can embrace contradictions. We have the potential to bring the both/and of our experiences into arenas desperately in need of unity. And in one of the more difficult spiritual realities to comprehend, the further we are pushed by difference or discrimination to the edges of society, the deeper the well of grace made available to us—if only our hearts are open to it.

Two decades after Swinging on the Garden Gate’s release, the need for this story seems only to have increased. During this recent spell when the memoir has been out of print, I’ve routinely dug through boxes in my garage to find remaindered copies to give to queer youth and their parents, and each time my determination to reprint the story grew. I’m delighted that Skinner House Books has agreed.

The young woman who wrote these pages was God-addled; she hadn’t yet grappled with the shadow side of her family of origin; she didn’t yet know emptiness as a significant part of the spiritual landscape; heck, she’d hardly had any sex. The words queer and pansexual had not yet opened their generously ambiguous umbrellas. All she had was a word that initially felt harsh and bifurcating; only slowly, over years, did it become an inclusive, enduring, celebratory part of her identity. As far as that young writer knew, people came in two flavors—men and women—instead of the array of possibilities we now delight in. She was ignorant of the profound ways whiteness and wealth shaped her reality. She did not yet recognize how her coming out was made possible by the immense suffering, courage, and activism of her queer predecessors; that the LGBTQA movement was begun by trans women of color and sex workers; that the very mother of Pride, Brenda Howard, was bisexual. She had not yet found her way into the spaces, particularly within the United Methodist Reconciling Movement, where she would find LGBTQA mentors and friends—the community necessary to learn interconnectedness.

Nevertheless, that woman wrote an honest, trustworthy account of reuniting spirit and flesh. As I put her story forward today, grateful for my heritage, humbled by all I have yet to learn, I’m aware of the propensity for those with power to dominate public narratives. That this memoir makes its way into print (a second time!) is the consequence, in part, of the same racial and financial privilege that permeates these pages. With that in mind, I caution you not to read it as a guide to bisexuality or a prescription for coming out or as a definitive representation of bisexual or spiritual experience. It’s simply one story—the story of a middle-class, liberal Christian, white woman’s journey through sexuality and sexual identity toward a dynamic relationship with creation. I pray its shortcoming don’t stand in the way of its blessings.

Today, as I take steps toward dismantling my own racism, as my nonbinary friends teach me to see beyond gender categories, and as my awe grows for how vastly different one person’s reality can be from another’s, I find myself returning again and again to the years described here when, in the pages of a journal and on retreat, I found the freedom to explore my identity through bare, embodied experience. Solitude helped me set aside any need to define myself in response to my social environment. Solitude made space where descriptors (like woman and bisexual fell away), where I could listen to my breath, my heartbeat, my tingling skin, my limbs’ movement, and through my body, meet my essential self. I learned a creative freedom—not the freedom to choose between identity options but the free to be, to become, to generate.

Back then I might have called this essence child of God. Today I know it as my small part in the great I AM. There we meet nothing but love. It’s where our true identity lies, and it’s the only place from which the crises of our age—deeply ingrained inequities, environmental disaster, threats to our democracy—will be healed. I hope this book introduces you to this love and its generous welcome.

Only a multiplicity of stories can hope to encompass the truth, which is why I’ve dedicated my years since writing Swinging on the Garden Gate to helping others give form to their sacred stories. Christianity’s inclination to stake itself out as the only way is ludicrous; our experiences of the sacred are as diverse as our sexual expressions. So consider this book not so much a map as a witness. Here I testify that the mysterious attractive energy forever entangling self and other, longing and satisfaction, inspiration and creativity, is holy, and that the journey to integrate this energy, by whatever path, is also holy. There are few things the world needs more.

Today I’m struck by a scene from the end of the book where my sister and I play cat’s cradle during our family’s long road trips. We took turns with the loop of string, flicking our wrists, twisting our fingers, passing back and forth these amazing patterned webs. Cat’s cradle is a good example of being in a co-creative conversation. I receive what life makes of me. I make something with it, then pass it along. This is how I understand coming out and the spiritual path and all creative practice: as a playful dance between accepting what is and asserting what is to be. Only this exchange between receptivity and agency makes real transformation possible. This is what it means to be embodied spirit. Bisexuality showed me.

—Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, July 2021

PREFACE

EVERY STORY BEGINS WITH A WORD: a daunting word, a word that mars the blank white page or inks the air.

A word has upright bones and sinews; it is created the way a body is created—from dirt and spit. It walks about relating to other words until it is a part of an extended thought or metaphor or entire narrative telling how the world began. The world began in chaos, like a rough draft. It began with the faith that creation is good.

Once I carried within me a word so potent that it spread through every artery and vein until my tongue swelled with silence. I carried it into the faculty lounge at a middle school where conversation ranged from marriage to the two-car garage. The word sat rock hard in my stomach, beside the cafeteria lunch I wolfed down in twenty-two minutes. I carried it with me through the corridors, where one student called another queer and sent me raging, dragging him into the classroom by his shirt sleeve. Angled against the blackboard, arms crossed, he defied me with his eyes. My red-faced fury didn’t go far; I forced down the real word and ranted instead about inappropriate behavior and put-downs. I carried it with me through three years of semester reviews with my principal, as we hassled over the inclusive range of paperbacks on my classroom shelves. She was always cordial. The books that passed muster were those that didn’t make any waves. Sitting before her wide desk, the boundaries of my body became retaining walls while inside raged the tidal wave of a word.

I carried my word into Sunday worship with a liberal congregation in the heart of Minneapolis. Adult education that morning was a panel discussion on bisexuality; should the church’s statement of intentional welcome include bisexuals alongside gays and lesbians? My eyes widened as several people described their experiences of being drawn to men and women and made a case for celebrating the expansive diversity of God’s creation. The word inside me turned restless and eager. I wanted to grow on my spiritual journey—to move forward after years of stasis—and I had a hunch that speaking my word would set me in motion.

I was terrified. Coming out in any form cracks the world open. When we come out, we take a buried truth, an inward reality residing near the soul, and pull it to the surface where it wreaks havoc on every perpetuated falsehood. We yank a piece of our essence out into the air, transforming in the process the self we thought we were as well as the community around us. I came out bisexual, claiming with pride God’s presence in the unique desires of my body. But as soon as I could recognize incarnation within my own skin, it was everywhere else as well—in my past, in the landscape, in each object, in the story itself…. The middle school where I taught seventh-grade English couldn’t accept my word, but (thank heavens!) my church did, and now the religious contingent marching in the Pride Parade is one person larger. Where the word is spoken, the huge creaking wheels of creation begin to turn.

What stuns me is how the word of God resides in each of us, carved into our very cells. I was taught to look for the word in the Bible, whose onionskin pages seem holier than those of a paperback novel and whose well-worn language we like to associate with the voice of God. After I came out, scripture stumbled down from the pulpit. It never belonged there in the first place: the word became flesh (not with Jesus, who simply reminds us of this fact, but in the very beginning) and it dwells among us, full of grace. When I sink into the sensual and relentless truths of my sexuality, and find there, hidden in the sticky recesses of my sex where I least expect it, holiness, it seems to me that all of creation’s bones and blood, vapor, soil, feathers, and solidity are infused with a sacred word. God is thoroughly, unabashedly incarnate. The spiritual journey is so physical that it makes me shiver. It sends me running barefoot on deer paths through the woods, and it shakes me awake during the blackest part of the night.

There are as many scriptures as there are stories told with integrity. The word of God inhabits our lived stories, the ordinary way our days unfold, and it inhabits the craft by which we give our stories form. What follows is my attempt to recognize that spark of spirit embedded in the solid matter of my life—in childhood, in coming out bisexual, in encounters with death and loss and wild growth—with the hope that my journey might be an invitation for others to do the same. The word comes alive when we claim what is sacred (life-giving, fundamental, charged with mystery, and frightfully beautiful) within our stories. This is how we become the word, moving about in the world. We breathe in deeply, down through the lungs and diaphragm to the core, and then release that intimate mingling of air and vibrating flesh into speech. We voice a truth. We create, and in so doing participate in our own creation.

I hunger to hear sacred stories. As a gift to encourage others, I offer my own.

SKIRTING THE GARDEN

THE MIXING BOWL IS HALF-FULL with cut broccoli heads. I work at the stems, slitting the knife under their tough skin, peeling the roughage away, chopping the tender core. The slices fall from my knife in neat rows of flowerlets. With the dull back of the blade, I scrape them into the bowl. The rubbery leaves I heap into the compost bucket.

The kitchen is bustling. This may be a contemplative retreat center, but today, in the kitchen, you’d hardly know it. Two kettles of soup are on the stove, the pile of dishes beside the sink is growing unmanageable, and Scott and MaryJo, my community members, dash in and out of the dining room with tray-loads of dishes. At noon we will feed lunch to over forty people. Most are seminarians on a silent retreat; from the kitchen window, I watch them walk past the garden with journals in hand, shuffling through the leaves on the lawn. The course they are taking is called Contemplative Living in Modern Society. They have come up from their frenzied academic schedules in the city to sample quiet and perhaps learn what it means to listen. Through the window I watch as one young woman climbs the red oak where the tree swing hangs. I imagine the coarse bark under her embrace and wonder what she is praying for. Another older man heads into the woods barefoot, despite the chill October air. For forty-eight hours, these students will not use their voices and have no scheduled activities other than morning and evening prayer. Outside this kitchen, the house feels as still as the waiting heart of God.

But inside, the knife hits the cutting board with rapid thwacks. I’ve forgotten to take the bread out of the freezer in time to defrost, and so a dozen loaves are lined up for their turn in the microwave. What these seminary students experience in a weekend retreat is what the small, ecumenical community residing here year-round strives for constantly: a balance between reaching inward and outward, between quiet attention to one’s own journey and active ministry in the world. It is work that begins in faith. Jesus took time away from the crowds to go up to a lonely place; he models a healthy means for us to sustain our own efforts. Those who join the community come from a spectrum of religious traditions, mostly Christian, and stay for varying lengths of time. Our commitment is the same: to live on the earth with care, to pray constantly, work radically, and create sacred space for others’ reflection. How, we ask, can faith shape our every choice, in lifestyle and occupation and relationships? In other words, how can we live from the center of our belief?