Climbing out of the darkness

The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong, New York, Alfred A Knopf, 2003.

In her own words, she was a lousy nun, but after reading her memoir, you would probably give her full marks for her trying, and a failing grade to the life-sucking rigidities of convent life just before the Second Vatican Council.

Karen Armstrong has made her writing career from a commonsense approach to the three great religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In a series of eminently readable books, the "failed nun" found her stride as a gifted and sympathetic writer. She has made it her mission to explain the often arcane world of the Middle East, its tortured history and the world religions which came out of its deserts.

Her biography of Mohammed, was praised in Muslim quarters for its objective fairness, and her Holy War, a history of the Crusades and The Battle for God were trenchant looks at the rise of religious fundamentalism within the great religions.

Before she hit her stride as a writer approaching her fiftieth birthday, Armstrong's life in many ways was set by her surprising desire to become a nun in the early 1960s. This "eccentric career option" surprised even her Birmingham family. Describing herself as "awkward, plain, bookish and unpopular with boys," the author was looking for something beyond "the disturbing beat of rock and roll."

But her timing was all-wrong. In the first chapter, she faithfully captures the radical spiritual disjunction of the period: "Practices that had no spiritual value but were cultural relics of the Victorian era had acquired sacred significance," she writes. These outmoded legalisms did little for Armstrong's interior life. Six years later, in 1969, she left, worn out and jaded. She has detailed this fully in an earlier memoir Through the Narrow Gate.

The Spiral Staircase, the author's fifteenth book, describes her life to the present. Based on the image in T.S. Eliot's poem Ash Wednesday, where the author keeps mounting the spiral staircase without apparent progress, Armstrong's life in the several years after she left the convent appears like "a hard Lenten journey without the prospect of Easter." The culture shock experienced by a naive young woman, previously cosseted by convent life makes for painful reading. "Love was beyond me, even friendship was difficult," she laments.

Moving into doctoral studies at Oxford, Armstrong grimly describes her desiccated world and her several "fainting spells, visits to psychiatrists and other discouragements. In 1973, a mini breakthrough occurred in the class of Professor Dame Helen Gardner. Unpacking the spiral staircase of Eliot's poem, Gardner helped release Armstrong's feelings at a deep intuitive level "which somehow involved my entire personality," and enabled her to believe that she could, like the poet, be actually ascending and moving to greater integration.

Moving away from her Catholicism, Armstrong was unable to call this moment "grace" but she knew she was not emotionally dead. In 1976, Armstrong discovered that the fainting spells were actually epilepsy, and though her life as a failed academic seemed to be at a plateau, she felt "that the world had been given back to her." This is what makes the second half of the book so lively and even inspiring.

Karen Armstrong found herself doing television documentaries on biblical personages and themes. In her work on the Crusades "for the first time in years I was able to feel the pain of other human beings," and unlike the author's bete noir, Margaret Thatcher whose iron absolutism symbolized a closed and arrogant heart, the author moved to the open-ended compassion which is reflected in her book and life.

As in the great myths, the author now entered her own spiritual journey instead of a predetermined societal one or an outdated religious one. She discovers silence which all the religious traditions privilege, so that one might meet that which resists words and conceptualization. As well, "it opened my eyes and ears to the suffering of the world."

The Spiral Staircase may well take its place as an important contemporary secular/religious journey which speaks to those who have not found solace or meaning in more traditional spiritual tomes.

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