The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong: A Review - Part 1
This is a book which is a reflective memoir of part of Karen Armstrong's life. Karen became a nun in the 1960s, before the changes of Vatican II, when nuns had a severe dress code; that was symptomatic of the repressed and disciplined servility of their society. Seven years later, she left that life as a nun, and returned to the outside world, trying to make sense of the strange cultural landscape she found herself in, and trying to find her own path in life. In this, she describes her journey in a vivid image used by T.S. Eliot in his sequence of poems called "Ash Wednesday"; she says that "the experience of spiritual progress and illumination was represented by the symbol of a spiral staircase", in a slowly turning movement, changing perspectives, "slowly ascending to one new insight after another".
There is much in the book that is interesting, and here I select a few instances at random. One of the areas that she began to notice, and later to research in some depth, was the rise of religious fundamentalism - not just Christian fundamentalism, but a growing movement, reacting against the strain of civilization, and the barren spirituality of modernity. "The old ways had been dismantled, but as yet nothing new had appeared to take their place. Traditional boundaries and markers had come down, and many lacked a clear sense of identity. In America such people followed Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, in Iran, they turned to Ayatollah Kohmeini. In Britain they voted for Margaret Thatcher." That was significant because she epitomised "an attitude of unquestioned and unquestioning superiority", and influenced a culture of money, with little time for the "large numbers of homeless men and women now sleeping rough on the streets"; the economic and political certainty had "pushed people on to the streets". Karen Armstrong comments that "certainty made people heartless, cruel and inhuman. It closed their minds to new possibilities; it made them complacent and pleased with themselves." In this was a special danger for religions of all kinds, because "religious people seemed particularly prone to this dogmatism" which "made people ride roughshod over other people's sensitivities."
When looking at the lives of some of her friends who were not particularly religious, she notes that they kept diaries, and "in every evening they record the events of their day". She comments that "it was, I could see, another form of meditation, or even an examination of conscience; it was a way of making sense of their lives".
There is a wonderful anecdote about one of her friends who was commiserating with an elderly couple who were moving house about the trials and upheavals it caused. "Moving is hell, isn't it", he said, and the old man replied that it was terrible, but "fortunately I have a friend who makes the whole thing bearable"; her friend was utterly perplexed and confused when the "friend" turned out to be Jesus, and told her he could not understand it. She comments sharply that she agreed "especially as the historical Jesus would have been more likely to tell the couple to give all their possessions to the poor rather than help them convey their worldly goods around the country in heavily insured vans!"
She tells of her encounter with Judaism during the making of a religious programme for television, and how for Judaism, belief was not as much of an issue as with Christianity, with "orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy" - "right practice rather than right belief", as Judaism saw their beliefs more as "poetry, ways of talking about the inexpressible". Her Jewish friend cited the story of the Jewish teacher Hillel to illustrate this: "Some pagans came to Hillel and told him they would convert to his faith if he could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. So Hillel obligingly stood on one leg like a stork and said 'Do not do unto others as you would not have done unto you. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn it.' "
As time went on, she came to see that she had to follow her path: "The great myths show that when you follow someone else's path, you go astray. The hero has to set off by himself, leaving the old world and the old ways behind. He must venture into the darkness of the unknown, where there is no map and no clear route. He must fight his own monsters, not somebody else's, explore his own labyrinth, and endure his own ordeal before he can find what is missing from his life. Thus transfigured, he - or she - can bring something of value to the world that has been left behind. But if the knight finds himself riding an already established track, he is simply following in somebody else's footsteps, and will not have an adventure. In the worlds of the Old French text of the quest of the Holy Grail, he must enter the forest 'at that point he himself had chosen, where it was darkest, and where there was no path'." Against this, she sees a "waste land" where "people live inauthentic lives, blindly following the norms of their society and doing only what other people expect".
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