The Spiral Staircase. Karen Armstrong

of transformation that others were seeking in Rock’n’Roll, an option that was closed to me. As a convent schoolgirl, 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 unBritish, and therefore suspect. Catholics lived in self-imposed ‘ghettoes’: we socialized together, went to separate schools, did not attend Protestant services, and were taught to hold 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 theatre of its liturgy. I too wanted to be ‘sent’, to experience an ecstasy that would lift 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 difficult 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 was also seeking transformation in the post-war 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 were 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.

      This proved to be a monumentally difficult task. Nuns had to decide what was essential in their Rule, and then translate this into present-day idiom. But they themselves had been shaped by the old regime at a profound level and many found that they could not think in any other way. They could modernize their clothes, but they could not change the habits of their minds and hearts, which had been formed by a training that had been carefully designed in a different world and was meant to last a lifetime. For some, this was a time of great anguish. They saw a cherished way of life disappearing while nothing of equal value was emerging to take its place. I left the religious life in 1969, just ahead of a massive exodus of religious who left their convents and monasteries like flocks of migratory birds during the 1970s. The intense discussions surrounding the reforms had led them to call everything into question, even their own vocation. This, I believe, was a healthy development. The title of my first book, Through the Narrow Gate, comes from a text in St Matthew’s gospel, in which Jesus tells his disciples that ‘only a few’ find the narrow gate that leads to life. By the end of my seven years in the convent, I had come to the conclusion that only a very small number of people could live up to the demands of a life that requires the entire subjugation of the ego and a self-abandonment that, I realized sadly, was beyond me. I knew nuns who beautifully enshrined this ideal, but I realized that I was not of that calibre. I suspect that many of those who left during the 1970s had also faced up to this hard truth.

      So I arrived at my convent at a difficult juncture, and would be one of the last people to be trained according to the old system. The reforms set in motion by the Vatican Council came just too late for me. And I experienced the traditional regime at its worst. A young nun in those days had to undergo a long period of intensive training. In my order, we spent the first nine months as postulants, wearing a sober black dress with a little white veil, and practising selected portions of the Rule. The Postulantship was a period of probation, designed to test our resolve, and about half of us dropped out. I must emphasize that there was never any pressure to stay. We all knew that we were free to leave at any time, and often a girl would be sent home because it was clear that she was not suited to convent life.

      At the end of the nine months, we received the habit and began two years in the novitiate. This was a particularly testing time, and we were often told that if we did not find it almost unbearable, we were not trying hard enough. My superiors should, therefore, have been delighted with me, because I spent a good deal of my novitiate in tears. As if to fend off unwelcome change, they had appointed a particularly conservative nun as Novice Mistress the year before I arrived. In Through the Narrow Gate, I called her Mother Walter. She was unswervingly devoted to the old ways, and revived many disciplines that her two predecessors had discarded as unsuitable for twentieth-century girls. The system she devised, I now believe, was extremely unhealthy, but I threw myself into it because I was convinced that the harder I found it, the sooner it would bring me to God. Much later I was told that several nuns had been concerned about what was happening in the Noviceship during those years. As I shall explain in the early chapters of this book, the system was a form of conditioning. It was meant to change us irrevocably and it did – in my case, for the worse. I suspect that pressure was brought to bear upon Mother Walter, however, because towards the end of my novitiate, she relaxed some of her draconian innovations. A new batch of novices had arrived who were older and more worldly-wise than my own set and they simply would not put up with some of her more outrageous rules. But again, the change came too late for me.

      Yet Mother Walter, too, was undergoing a painful transition, watching the religious practices that she had known and loved for so long thrown aside. It must have been a period of great suffering for her. It would never, of course, have occurred to me at the time but I now suspect that she was not very intelligent, and therefore unable to understand the effect of some of her policies. I remember once that, towards the end of my Noviceship, when she was savaging us for what she regarded as a failure in obedience, I suddenly cracked and told her that I no longer knew what obedience really was. ‘We seem to swing, like a pendulum, from one extreme to another,’ I protested, ‘from one disorder to another! One day we will be told off for not obeying absolutely to the letter, however absurd the command may be, and the next day we’ll be in trouble because we did obey blindly instead of using our intelligence and showing initiative! What are we supposed to do? What is obedience?’ I was astonished at myself, because we were never supposed to challenge our superiors in this way, especially while we were being reprimanded. My fellow-novices were gazing at me in dismay, clearly waiting for a thunderous riposte. But Mother Walter looked shocked, and for a moment was quite lost for words. She soon recovered herself, though the scolding she gave me was not up to her usual standard of scathing invective. But during those few seconds, while she fumbled for a suitable response, I could almost see an unwelcome insight breaking the surface of her mind, and forcing her to question the wisdom of her methods of training in a way that, perhaps, she had never done before.

      Despite my difficulties, I was allowed to make vows of poverty, chastity and obedience for five years on 25 August 1965. It was a triumphant day. I felt that, like the heroes of myth, I had come through an ordeal and that things could only get better. I would soon get over the strains and tension that had made my life so miserable. Very quickly now, I would become mature and holy, and in five years’ time, if all went well, I would take the final vows that would commit me to the society for life.

      And at first, things did go