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Closer to light The Spiral Staircase:
A Memoir
I began buying her books. Once reading her book A History of God during a train journey, two college students giggled when they saw the title. One of them innocently asked me: "Uncle, how can anyone write the history of God?" Yet, that is exactly what she accomplished piecing together the understanding of God in the three Semitic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. When 9/11 occurred and the world could not square itself to the new phenomenon, it was to her book The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism that the world turned to understand it. She argued in her book, published less than a year before the catastrophic incident that for almost a century, Christians, Jews and Muslims had been developing a militant form of piety whose objective was to drag God and religion from the sidelines, to which they had been relegated in modern secular culture, and bring them back to centre stage. The Black Friday propelled the sale of her book and made Karen almost a cult figure. What is the secret of her success? She simplifies complex ideas without being simplistic. The Spiral Staircase is a sequel to her autobiographical Through the Narrow Gate. Karen was a sweet 17 when she startled her parents with her decision to become a nun. Seven years in a nunnery where she had spent most of her time in silence transformed her to such an extent that she felt out of place in the wide world when she left the Catholic haven. Her quest for God continued but not through the Rosary. As she enrolled herself at Oxford, she realised how different she was from the rest of her class. Failure after failure – the rejection of her Ph.D thesis, the knowledge that she can’t be an academic and the "compassionate" dismissal from the school where she taught – would have finished a lesser mortal. The worst were the years she spent suffering from undiagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy. She would have periodic blackouts and hallucinations which her idiotic psychiatrist diagnosed as the result of her suppression of feminity and sexuality. Fortunately for Karen, she had friends who stood with her through thick and thin. A friendly doctor was able to diagnose her disease – "lobe epileptic patients tend to be religious" – and restore some order to her life. It was difficult for Karen to reconcile to the fact that over the years she had lost her faith in the divinity, and prayers and sacraments had become meaningless rituals. Finally, she found her real vocation – reading and writing in her pursuit of the unknown. As she delved deep into other religions, she achieved a greater appreciation not only of Christianity but also of Judaism and Islam. In this, she seemed to have come full circle. This title is derived from T.S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, a sequence of six poems that trace the process of spiritual discovery. Ash Wednesday is the first day of the Lent. In Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, the poet painfully climbs a spiral staircase that takes him nowhere. Karen’s own life progressed in the same way – a hard Lenten journey, but without the prospect of Easter. Three hundred and forty two pages later, Karen says: "I tried to get off it and join others on what seemed to me to be a broad, noble flight of steps, thronged with people. But I kept falling off, and when I went back to my own twisting stairwell, I found a fulfilment that I had not expected. Now I have to mount my staircase alone. And as I go up, step by step, I am turning, again, round and round, apparently covering little ground, but climbing upwards, I hope, towards the light." Students of comparative religion will treasure her conclusion that compassion is pivotal to all religious traditions at their best. In monotheistic terms, compassion can bring us directly into the presence of God. It dethrones the ego from the centre of our lives and puts others there. When this happens, it does not matter whether Karen is a Catholic or an atheist. Reading The Spiral
Staircase is like listening to your sweetheart dwelling upon her
past, the crises in her life, the agonising disease that virtually made
her an outcaste, how she managed to overcome them to reach a stage of
discovery that her quest for God would take her up and up for ever. In
the end you are madly in love with her. |
IT was love at first
reading – Karen Armstrong’s Buddha: A Penguin Life. And that
took me to Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet. The way she
handled profound theological questions in these thin volumes in an
easy-to-comprehend layman’s language was indeed amazing. When I read
her, I felt as if I were listening to a story narrated by my
grandmother.