The Spiral Staircase. Karen Armstrong

Mother House in Sussex and went to London for two further years of training, known as the Scholasticate. During the novitiate, we had concentrated on our spiritual lives. We had spent most of the time learning about prayer and the meaning of our Rule. Ironically, considering my aversion to domesticity, we also spent our days doing simple, manual tasks, though in the second year we had been permitted to read a little theology. In the Scholasticate, however, we began our professional training. Since our order was dedicated to the education of Catholic girls, most of us were destined to become teachers in one of the society’s many schools. I had already completed the matriculation requirements for college, and it was decided that I should now prepare for the competitive entrance examinations to Oxford University, where the order had been sending nuns ever since women had been allowed to take degrees. For the next twelve months, I attended classes and tutorials at a ‘crammer’ near Marble Arch. My subject was to be English Literature. That meant that I had to take two three-hour papers in literature, one paper in English language and philology, two translation papers – one in Latin and the other in French – and a paper on topics of general interest. I loved it. I am a natural student and like nothing better than immersing myself in a pile of books. After the years of dreary domestic toil, I was in heaven. I also took a correspondence course in theology, scripture and church history.

      In the autumn of 1966, I sat the entrance examinations for St Anne’s College, Oxford, passed the first round, was summoned to interview, and to my own and my superiors’ intense delight, succeeded in winning a place. In 1967, the Scholasticate completed, I arrived at Cherwell Edge in South Parks Road, the Oxford convent of my order, to begin my university studies. And my life fell apart.

      Intellectually, everything was fine. I lived at the convent, but attended lectures and tutorials with the other students and did very well. I got a distinction in the preliminary examinations, which we sat in the spring of 1968, won a University Prize, and was awarded a college scholarship. So far, so good. But as a religious, I felt torn in two. My elderly superior was bitterly opposed to the new ideas, and I fought her tooth and nail throughout the entire year. I am sure that I was quite insufferable, but I found it well-nigh impossible to think logically and accurately in college, where I was encouraged to question everything, and then turn off the critical faculty I was developing when I returned to Cherwell Edge, and become a docile young nun. The stringent academic training I was receiving at the university was changing me at just as profound a level as the religious formation of the Noviceship, and the two systems seemed to be irreconcilable. I was also increasingly distressed by the emotional frigidity of our lives. This was one of the areas of convent life that most desperately needed reform. Friendship was frowned upon and the atmosphere in the convent was cold and sometimes unkind. Increasingly, it seemed to me to have moved an immeasurably long distance from the spirit of the gospels.

      Nevertheless, I struggled grimly on. To say that I did not want to leave would be an understatement. The very idea of returning to secular life filled me with dread. At first, I could not even contemplate this option, which was surrounded with all the force of a taboo. But the strain took its toll and in the summer of 1968 I broke down completely. It was now clear to us all that I could not continue. Everybody was wonderfully kind to me at the end and, in a sense, this made it even more distressing. It would have been so much easier to storm out in a blaze of righteous anger. But my superiors let me take as long as I needed to make my decision. I returned to college, and after a term of heart-searching, I applied for a dispensation from my vows, which arrived from Rome at the end of January 1969.

      Writing Through the Narrow Gate some twelve years later was a salutary experience. It made me confront the past and I learned a great deal. Most importantly I realized how precious and formative this period of my life had been, and that, despite my problems, I would not have missed it for the world. Then I attempted a sequel: Beginning the World was published in 1983. It is the worst book I have ever written and I am thankful to say that it has long been out of print.

      As its title suggests, this second volume attempted to tell the story of my return to secular life. But it was far too soon to write about those years, which had been extremely painful, even traumatic. I had scarcely begun to recover and was certainly not ready to see this phase of my life in perspective. Yet there was another reason for the failure of Beginning the World. At almost the exact moment when I sent the manuscript off to the publishers, my life changed completely in a most unexpected way. I started on an entirely new course, which took me off in a direction that I could never have anticipated. As a result, the years 1969 to 1982, which I had tried to describe in this memoir, took on a wholly different meaning. In that first, ill-conceived sequel, I had tried to show that I had put the convent completely behind me, had erased the damage, and completed the difficult rite of passage to a wholly secular existence. I had indeed ‘begun the world’.

      But I had done no such thing. As I am going to try to show this time around, I have never managed to integrate fully with ‘the world’, although I have certainly tried to do so. Despite my best endeavours, I have in several important ways remained an outsider. I was much closer to the truth at the end of Through the Narrow Gate, when I predicted that I would in some sense be a nun all my life. Of course, it is true that, in superficial ways, my present life is light years away from my convent experience. I have dear friends, a pretty house and money. I travel, have a lot of fun and enjoy the good things of life. Nothing nunnish about any of this. But although I tried a number of different careers, doors continually slammed in my face until I settled down to my present solitary existence, writing, thinking and talking almost all day and every day about God, religion and spirituality. In this book I have tried to show how this came about and what it has meant.

      As soon as it was published, I realized that Beginning the World had been a mistake and that I would probably have to rewrite it one day. It was not a truthful account. This was not because the events I recounted did not happen, but because the book did not tell the whole story. The publishers were concerned that I should not come across as an intellectual. So I had to leave out any kind of ‘learned’ reflection. There could be no talk of books or poems, for example, and certainly no theological discussion about the nature of God or the purpose of prayer. I should stick to external events to make the story dramatic and accessible. I was also told to present myself in as positive and lively a light as possible, and, as I was still very unsure of myself as a writer, and assumed that my publishers knew what they were doing, I went along with this. But most importantly, I wanted this cheery self-portrait to be true. It was, therefore, an exercise in wish-fulfilment, and, predictably, the result was quite awful. Today I can hardly bear to look at Beginning the World, which has a hearty, boisterous and relentlessly extrovert tone. It is like reading my life story as told by Ruby Wax.

      The reality was very different. During those years, I did in fact live a great deal inside my head, and approached the world largely through the medium of books and ideas. To an extent, I still do. And I was not a lively, positive girl. Much of the time, I was withdrawn, bitter, weary, frightened and ill. And while I was writing Beginning the World, I was particularly scared – with good reason, because, yet again, my latest career had collapsed, and the future looked most uncertain. The book was badly conceived, and could be nothing but a distortion of an important and ultimately valuable period of my life.

      And so I have decided to try again. We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter. Reviewing my own story has made me marvel at the way it all turned out. I am now glad that after all I did not simply ‘begin the world’. Something more interesting happened instead – at least, I think so. T. S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, a sequence of six poems that trace the process of spiritual recovery, has been central to my journey. Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent. Catholics have ashes sprinkled on their foreheads to remind them of their mortality, because it is only when we have become fully aware of the frailty that is inherent in our very nature that we can begin our quest. During Lent, Christians embark on six weeks of penitence and reflection that lead to the rebirth of Easter – a life that we could not possibly have imagined at the outset.

      In Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, we watch the poet painfully climbing a spiral staircase. This image is reflected in the twisting sentences of the verse, which often revolves upon itself, repeating the same words and