The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness
by Karen Armstrong
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Book Summary Information
Author: Karen ArmstrongEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-02-22
ISBN: 0385721277
Number of pages: 305
Publisher: Anchor
Book Reviews of The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness
Book Review: One woman's moving account of the struggles outside convent walls.
Summary: 5 Stars
When is a religious vocation a gift from God versus when is it self created? In Karen Armstrong's The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of the Darkness, she presents just such a scenario, giving a compelling and eloquent account of what led her to believe-to her parent's correct contrary belief-that she had a genuine vocation. As a sequel to her first memoir on convent life-Through the Narrow Gate-and as a revision to the original sequel-Beginning the World-Armstrong states in the preface: "...I was very shy and worried about the demands of adult social life...and...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." Though Karen Armstrong did have a genuine intellectual curiosity, her reasons for entering convent life, at a remarkable youthful seventeen years of age, she did not at all possess the true hallmark signs of one who has a religious calling: an unexplainable yearning for things that are religious yet relational to humanism, the all enveloping feeling and or mystery of love-love being the paramount word here, as well as the genuine understanding of self-sacrifice and all that it is attached to it. Not once before entering the convent is the word love brought up. She did not have the basic emotional and religious foundation to survive a life of austerity, contemplation, prayer and stringency. If she did, this would have been an entirely different book. Being one of the last groups to enter the novitiate before the emergence of Vatican II, Karen Armstrong was taught under the 'old' school. And indeed, under the old system, some of the behavior and actions could have been considered bizarre, especially the matters of the sewing machine and the casting aside of genuine medical issues and the careless ascription of them to psychosomatic hysteria and self-glorification, among other things. The intense drilling and scrupulousness of sometimes incorrect theology with no room for questions and correct, caring discipline altered what should have been religious joy and love into trauma and unending sorrow. Karen Armstrong wanted to know and feel God, thus her entering into convent life. But she should have felt the loving mystery of God's vocation first. Convent life would have been the enhancement to the religious gift that was imbued within her. So, in essence, she inadvertently used religion in order to create something that was nonexistent in the first place: a religious vocation. What Karen Armstrong managed to achieve when she left the convent is nothing short of the miraculous: teacher, documentary filmmaker, writer, traveler, explorer, scholar. Some people have crosses within religious life, and they grow from it. And it was no different for Armstrong, who suffered from bouts of Anorexia nervosa, jaunts to various psychiatrists, habitual restlessness, firings and epilepsy. But through it all and by studying various faiths-Islam, Judaism, Buddhism-she came full circle to what her vocation really was: writing. But through the process of writing about various religions, her faith was, bit-by-bit, restored and renewed, and in essence, she discovered and felt who she was looking for all the while: herself and God. The Spiral Staircase, though sad in some respects, is also very uplifting, because it clearly illustrates that despite our flawed actions and rash decisions to go against the inherent truth of what is right for us, happiness, as in Armstrong's remarkable case, can still prevail; we just have to meet God halfway.
Summary of The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness
In 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left her order to pursue English literature at Oxford. But convent life had profoundly altered her, and coping with the outside world and her expiring faith proved to be excruciating. Her deep solitude and a terrifying illness?diagnosed only years later as epilepsy?marked her forever as an outsider. In her own mind she was a complete failure: as a nun, as an academic, and as a normal woman capable of intimacy. Her future seemed very much in question until she stumbled into comparative theology. What she found, in learning, thinking, and writing about other religions, was the ecstasy and transcendence she had never felt as a nun. Gripping, revelatory, and inspirational, The Spiral Staircase is an extraordinary account of an astonishing spiritual journey.Karen Armstrong speaks to the troubling years following her decision to leave the life of a Roman Catholic nun and join the secular world in 1969. What makes this memoir especially fascinating is that Armstrong already wrote about this era once---only it was a disastrous book. It was too soon for her to understand how these dark, struggling years influenced her spiritual development, and she was too immature to protect herself from being be bullied by the publishing world. As a result, she agreed to portray herself only in as "positive and lively a light as possible"---a mandate that gave her permission to deny the truth of her pain and falsify her inner experience. The inspiration for this new approach comes from T. S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday, a series of six poems that speak to the process of spiritual recovery. Eliot metaphorically climbs a spiral staircase in these poems---turning again and again to what he does not want to see as he slowly makes progress toward the light. In revisiting her spiral climb out of her dark night of the soul, Armstrong gives readers a stunningly poignant account about the nature of spiritual growth. Upon leaving the convent, Armstrong grapples with the grief of her abandoned path and the uncertainty of her place in the world. On top of this angst, Armstrong spent years suffering from undiagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy, causing her to have frequent blackout lapses in memory and disturbing hallucinations---crippling symptoms that her psychiatrist adamantly attributed to Armstrong's denial of her femininity and sexuality. The details of this narrative may be specific to Armstrong's life, but the meanin! g she makes of her spiral ascent makes this a universally relevant story. All readers can glean inspiration from her insights into the nature of surrender and the possibilities of finding solace in the absence of hope. Armstrong shows us why spiritual wisdom is often a seasoned gift---no matter how much we strive for understanding, we can't force profound insights to occur simply because our publisher is waiting for them. With her elegant, humble and brave voice, she inspires readers to willingly turn our attention toward our false identities and vigilantly defended beliefs in order to better see the truth and vulnerability of our existence. Herein lies the staircase we can climb to enlightenment. --Gail Hudson
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