My Spiral Sister, Karen Armstrong
from Confining Community to Wide-Open World
I have long appreciated Karen Armstrong’s insightful, compassionate writing on religion — in books like A History of God, The Battle for God, and The Great Transformation: The Beginnings of Our Religious Traditions.
But it was Armstrong’s latest autobiography, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, that resonated with me like few other books have. Armstrong had been a Roman Catholic nun, in a particularly strict order, in the years just before the Vatican II reforms — and then had left. Her book found its way into my hands during my own years of post-ashram stabilization.
At that moment in my own unfolding story, Armstrong’s tale of leaving a cloistered community and reconstructing a life in the ordinary world included words I could have uttered myself:
“I had submitted to other people’s programs and agendas for far too long.”
“I still felt protective of the nuns, and still felt sorrow and regret for a lost ideal.”
“I don’t have anybody to help me deprogram myself.”
As it happens, last fall I read the two biographical works that preceded The Spiral Staircase (2004). Through the Narrow Gate (1981) was Armstrong’s first memoir, chronicling her experience inside her Catholic convent. Beginning the World (1983) was her first attempt to describe her transition back into the world, including the emotional, vocational, social, medical and spiritual aspects of that journey.
While taking a doctoral class on religious leadership last fall, I chose Armstrong as the subject for an Outstanding Leader Profile assignment. I take inspiration from her work on the Charter for Compassion, and more recently, tapping resources that spiritual traditions offer to help us constructively face our ecological crisis.
It was my interest in the latter that led me to take the class. I read all three of Armstrong’s autobiographical works in succession, not so much for the paper as with a renewed sense of kinship. I was struck again by Armstrong’s own hero’s journey — through and beyond a tightly structured religious community — which offered parallels to my experience.
The timing of this reading was fortuitous. A few weeks later I would learn startling allegations about the founder of the spiritual organization I had been deeply involved with as a young adult; as I reconsidered the group, the scales fell from my eyes. Now that I am familiar with high control groups, I put my former group squarely in that category. Armstrong’s life in a pre-Vatican II Catholic order exhibited many of the same characteristics.
Granted, my experience was far less extreme than Armstrong’s. The program I took to was presented not as an ascetic path but as a sort of Middle Way. Its authoritarianism was cloaked beneath a genteel learnedness and cross-cultural difference. The worldview was a sort of universalized, inter-spiritual mysticism of a Hindu teacher — and one with a supposedly matriarchal lineage.
On the surface, this was all quite a contrast to the orthodox Catholic Christian theology that Karen knew, with its rigid belief system, unapologetic authoritarianism and (to me) suffocating patriarchy.
I had only been at the ashram for a year, and as an employee, not a resident, vs. Karen Armstrong’s six years in her convent. The community I participated in was not my faith of origin — though I thought I had tested and vetted and gone slowly, deepening my meditation practice and getting to know the community over five years, before I moved there at 31. Whereas Karen had grown up Catholic, and joined her order at the tender age of 17.
So the differences were dramatic.
Yet, key aspects of her journey resonated with me:
· the discovery, only after arrival, that there’s a lot more going on under the surface than any outsider might guess (and often more than even one embedded could readily decipher or explain while in the midst of it)
· a culture of monasticism and renunciation that was in marked contrast to the message for the masses about what it looks like to practice the tradition
· an institutionalization of Surrender to a degree that could damage one’s sense of self, self-trust, and self-worth
· practices that shut down critical thinking faculties, blunt emotions, and cut one off from the wisdom of the body
· leaders who themselves may have regressed psychologically and spiritually — and whose own capacity for empathy may have been stunted — as a result of this way of life
· mysterious and painful physical and psychological responses to the unhealthy environment and spiritual practices, which led each of us to leave
· a complicated adjustment to “normal” life after the period of going deep into an alternative community and culture
· gradual renegotiation of meanings and identity, over many years
· a busy new outward life of work, friends and recreation, yet “increasingly, that was no longer where the action was… the real story was unfolding, at first imperceptibly and by slow degrees, within myself”
· a recurrence of “that old longing for a more intense existence, shot through with transcendent meaning” — even after the earlier attempt to answer that longing had ended discouragingly; you can take the seeker out of the spiritual community, but the homing beacon within continues to signal and search
· in fact, that persistent religious sensibility became, in time, the basis for a new — no less spiritual or valid — vocation
That’s a lot of common ground. If there’s shared good news in our similar-but-different stories, perhaps it is that a difficult early religious experience does not mean one is doomed to an empty existence as a survivor. There is life after spiritual trauma.
Armstrong found her way to a much healthier life situation. In time she found the companions, created the home, and discovered the vocation that suited her. I did too.
If you’ve been through your own particular trials or hurts in spiritual life, know that healing, joy, purpose and connection are real possibilities for you too.
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