The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

259 Pages·2004·1.21 MB·English

by  Karen Armstrong

Table of Contents
Title Page
Praise
T. S. ELIOT, - Ash-Wednesday, I
PREFACE
1. Ash Wednesday
2. The Devil of the Stairs
3. I Renounce the Blessèd Face
4. Consequently I Rejoice
5. Desiring This Man’s Gift and That Man’s Scope
6. The Usual Reign
7. Infirm Glory
8. To Turn Again
About the Author
ALSO BY KAREN ARMSTRONG
Copyright Page
International acclaim for Karen Armstrong’s
THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE
“A powerful memoir. . . . Buoyed by keen intelligence and unflinching self-
awareness and honesty. . . . Armstrong is an engaging, energetic writer.” —The
Christian Science Monitor
“A minor masterpiece.” —Elle
“Exceptionally impressive. . . . Karen Armstrong’s account of her spiraling
journey provokes thought and inspires respect.” —The Daily Telegraph
“The story of the making of a writer. . . . It manages to dramatize the writer’s
process of intellectual development and to find in it genuine interest, and,
indeed, suspense. . . . As an account of the intellectual journey of an intelligent
and unique individual, the book is often gripping.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Candid and compelling, and the sentences are flawless.” —The Dallas Morning
News
“Unputdownable—absorbing, moving.” —Daily Mail
“Remarkable. . . . Unflinching. . . . This candid memoir will clarify thinking
about the search for the sacred.” —Booklist
“Gripping. . . . Uplifting. . . . Utterly compelling.” —Edmonton Journal
“Armstrong writes with sensitivity and wisdom. . . . She employs a breadth of
learning that reflects the scintillating, shifting light and shade of human
experience.” —The Times (London)
“Absorbing. . . . Profoundly inspiring and engaging.” —Tallahassee Democrat
“An honest and affecting book.” —The Independent
“The Spiral Staircase . . . is great. Armstrong is a marvelous writer and her
subject matter is meaty. Her subject is the meaning of life.” — Deseret Morning
News
“Open and accessible, Armstrong manages to put into words something that
most of us cannot express.” —New Statesman
“Moving, insightful. . . . Compulsively readable.” — Library Journal
“A subtle and funny memoir.” —The Sunday Telegraph
PREFACE
This is the sequel to my first book, Through the Narrow Gate, which told the
story of my seven years as a Roman Catholic nun. I entered my convent in 1962,
when I was seventeen years old. It was entirely my own decision. My family was
not particularly devout, and my parents were horrified when I told them that I
had a religious vocation. They thought, quite correctly as it turned out, that I was
far too young to make such a momentous choice, but they allowed themselves to
be persuaded because they wanted me to get it out of my system as soon as
possible. I was usually quite a biddable child but I was anxious to test my
vocation immediately, instead of waiting until after I had been to university, as
my parents would have preferred. My unusual resolution in the face of their
opposition impressed them, and they feared that I might spend my college years
in a state of mulish obstinacy, failing to make the most of the opportunities of
university life and longing for it all to be over so that I could do what I really
wanted. So on September 14, 1962, I packed my bags and joined twelve other
girls at the novitiate.
Why was I so determined to take this step? The motivation behind this type of
decision is always complex, and there were a number of interlocking reasons. It
is true that at this time I was very shy and worried about the demands of adult
social life, but even though the religious life might seem a soft option, it was
tough, and I would not have lasted more than a few weeks if it had simply been a
means of escape. I wanted to find God. I was filled with excitement and
enthusiasm on that September day, convinced that I had embarked on a spiritual
quest, an epic adventure, in the course of which I would lose the confusions of
my adolescent self in the infinite and ultimately satisfying mystery that we call
God. And because I was only seventeen, I imagined that this would happen
pretty quickly. Very soon I would become a wise and enlightened woman, all
passion spent. God would no longer be a remote, shadowy reality but a vibrant
presence in my life. I would see him wherever I looked, and I myself would be
transfigured, because, as Saint Paul had said, my puny little ego would disappear
and Christ, the Word of God, would live in me. I would be serene, joyful,
inspired, and inspiring—perhaps even a saint.
This was, to put it mildly, an eccentric career option. I was almost the first
student of my convent high school to become a nun. Birmingham, my
hometown, was a materialistic place, where money was king. Most of my
immediate family and friends were nonplussed—even slightly irritated—and I,
of course, reveled in the sense of striking out and being just that little bit
different. But I may have been more in tune with my times than I realized, since
many of my generation, born in the last years or in the immediate aftermath of
the Second World War, had the same inchoate yearning for transformation.
Postwar Britain was not an easy place to grow up. We may have defeated Hitler,
but the war had ruined us. Britain was now a second-rate power, and food,
clothing, and petrol were strictly rationed well into the 1950s. Because
thousands of homes had been destroyed during the blitz, there was a grave
housing crisis. Our cities were scarred with desolate bomb sites and filled with
towering heaps of rubble. The center of Birmingham was not completely rebuilt
until after I left for the convent. After the war, we were in debt to the United
States for 3 billion pounds, our empire was dismantled, and though we were fed
on a surfeit of films celebrating Britain’s endurance and victory, nobody seemed
prepared to look facts in the face and decide what our future role in the world
should be. Young Britons, like myself, who came to maturity in this twilight
confusion of austerity, repression, nostalgia, frustration, and denial wanted not
only a different world but to be changed ourselves.
In 1948, 60 percent of British people under thirty wanted to emigrate. We
wanted to be somewhere else. Hence (as the music historian Jon Savage
explains) the quasi-religious fervor inspired by the rock ’n’ roll records that fell
like manna from heaven between 1954 and 1959 on a country that had no
tradition of Afro-American music. It seemed to promise a new world. The
unabashed rebellion and sexual explosiveness of these records was “so
transforming that nobody who heard them could find a language to explain them
except in the phrases of the songs themselves, which talked in tongues: ‘A Wop
Bop A Loo Bop,’ ‘Be Bop A Lula.’ ” People used to say of a record, “It sent
me!” as though they had been magically transported, without any effort of their
own, to another place. In the world conjured up by rock ’n’ roll, nobody had to
do national service or listen to endless stories about the war. People could reject
the self-sacrifice preached by their parents, live intensely, run wild, have sex,
consume freely, and “do as much as they could as soon as they could.”1
This might seem a far cry from the convent. But in my own way, I shared
what Savage calls the “first time intensity” of my generation. The raw, disturbing
beat of rock ’n’ roll had penetrated my convent school, even though I was neither
able nor equipped to answer its summons. I did not like being a teenage girl in
the 1950s. I was awkward, plain, bookish, and unpopular with boys. I looked
absurd in the fashions of the day: the wide, swirling skirts, pert ponytails, and
back-combed beehives. In 1961, the year before I entered the convent, my
parents tried to entice me from my intended course by talking me into joining a
young people’s group at the Birmingham Catholic Ball. It was a ghastly affair.
Encased in a stiff brocaded dress with a skirt that stuck out aggressively, my feet
squeezed into an agonizing pair of pink satin shoes with long pointed toes, I was
hobbled. On the few occasions when I was invited to dance, and grimly
quickstepped, waltzed, and fox-trotted with a herd of others, I felt like a prisoner
going round and round the exercise yard. At one point my partner and I left the
main room and for ten blissful minutes managed to escape. We weren’t doing
anything unlawful; we weren’t smoking, drinking alcohol, or kissing—just
sitting on the stairs and talking—but a friend of my mother’s pounced on me and
frog-marched me back into the ballroom. I felt like a Victorian girl who had been
compromised in some way. There had to be more to life than this.
Of course, there were alternatives to the convent. Young girls were told that,
within reason, they could do anything they wanted: they could study, travel, and
have a career—until they got married. But even though I shrank from the
appalling prospect of being an old maid, marriage did not look particularly
appealing either, since most of the women I knew spent their lives ceaselessly
cleaning, baking, and washing, chores that I detest to this day. When my father
had business problems, my mother took a job and started an interesting career in
the medical school of Birmingham University. I could see how she blossomed in
this new environment, but the cooking and washing up still had to be done. By
contrast, the nuns seemed remarkably unencumbered. They had no men to tell
them what to do, ran their own lives, and were, presumably, engaged in the
higher things of life. I wanted that radical freedom.
I was looking for the sort of transformation that others were seeking in rock
’n’ roll, an option that was closed to me. As a convent school girl, I was
protected from the street culture and lived in a separate world from most of my
fellow countrymen and -women. In the 1950s, most people in Britain still paid
lip service to religion, but Catholicism was beyond the pale. Its extravagant
statues with bleeding hearts and crowns of thorns, its Latinate ritual, its Irish
priests, and its orientation to Rome made it highly un-British, and therefore
suspect. Catholics lived in their own self-imposed ghettos: we socialized
together, went to separate schools, did not attend Protestant services, and were
taught to hold ourselves aloof from the non-Catholic mainstream. As a result of
this upbringing, I think that many of us have never felt entirely English, and
continue to feel outsiders in British society. My head was filled with the imagery
of Catholicism, with the lives and example of its saints and the soaring theater of
its liturgy. I too wanted to be “sent,” to experience an ecstasy that lifted me to a
different dimension, to go to another place and live more authentically than
seemed possible in the world I knew. Like my peers who loitered menacingly in
the El Sombrero Coffee Bar in Birmingham, I too could reject the values of
contemporary society. The cloister seemed a radical and daring solution. So
while my peers opted out in hippie communes, experimented with mind-altering
drugs, or tried to change the world politically, I sought intensity and
transformation in the life of a nun.
Needless to say, the convent was not what I expected. I entered in 1962 as an
ardent, idealistic, untidy, unrealistic, and immature teenager, and left seven years
later, having suffered a mild breakdown, obscurely broken and damaged. This
was nobody’s fault, even though I assumed that the failure was entirely my own
doing. I had embarked on the religious life at a particularly inauspicious
moment, since my superiors were involved in a painful period of change and
were trying to decide what exactly it meant to be a nun in modern society. The
Catholic Church also was seeking transformation in the postwar world. During
my first few months in the convent, the Second Vatican Council convened in
Rome. It had been summoned by Pope John XXIII to fling open the windows of
the church and let the fresh air of modernity sweep through the musty corridors
of the Vatican.
One of the areas tackled by the council fathers was the religious life, which
urgently needed reform. Many of the orders had got stuck in a traditional rut.
Customs that had made perfect sense in the nineteenth century, when my own
community had been founded, now seemed arbitrary and unnatural. Practices
that had no intrinsic spiritual value but were cultural relics of the Victorian age
had acquired sacred significance, and change was regarded as betrayal. The
council urged the religious orders to go back to the original spirit of their
founders, who had been men and women of insight and imagination, innovators
and pioneers, not guardians of the status quo. Nuns and monks should also let
the bracing spirit of change invade their cloisters; they should throw out the
rubble that had accumulated over the years and craft a new lifestyle that was in
tune with the times.