Karen Armstrong's Climb from Darkness to Light

by Lael

If you've been alive and listening to public radio in the US or UK since September 11, 2001, chances are you've heard the voice of freelance religion scholar Karen Armstrong weighing in knowledgeably and sympathetically about either Islam or another one of the world's major belief systems. When trying to communicate reasonably about faith to their listeners, broadcast producers and programmers gratefully relied and continue to rely upon the expertise of this author of, among other works, Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World and A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The same keen intelligence and ear for language that Armstrong brings to her studies of major figures like the prophet Muhammad, the Buddha and St. Paul, she also brings to the examination of her own life experience. Her lovely 2005 autobiography The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness paints a compelling portrait of a challenging and unusual life. One of three memoirs that Armstrong has written, The Spiral Staircase charts her reintegration into the secular world after several formative, youthful years as a Roman Catholic nun.

In Armstrong's 1960's British convent, isolation and regimentation were the rule. (Even simple friendship among the sisters was discouraged.) The painful aftereffects of this intense discipline and restraint were only exacerbated by years of undiagnosed frontal lobe epilepsy, a condition that led the young woman to question her own sanity. For all the difficulty the book recounts, it is Armstrong's clear-sightedness and honesty that makes The Spiral Staircase such a touching and gripping read. Her way of capturing the stumbling evolution of her consciousness and growing acceptance of her own uniqueness may well return readers with greater gentleness to a consideration of their own early experiences.

Fortuitously, the world of religion abandoned by Armstrong returned to her in an entirely new way when the BBC asked her to write and host a show on St. Paul. This exhilarating assignment that took her to Jerusalem also started an intellectual odyssey that eventually led Armstrong to expertly grasp the underpinnings of religion while partaking of its wisdom in her own idiosyncratic and bookish way. By the memoir's end, for instance, we learn how a moment from one of the Christian Gospels reminds her "that our fellow men and women are themselves sacred; there is something about them that is worthy of absolute reverence, is in the last resort mysterious, and will always elude us."

Many apparent, seemingly unjust and inexplicable failures were part of Karen Armstrong's path to her satisfying current existence. The way all this messy personal history is transformed in the light of hindsight and resolves into a life that suits her true nature makes for hopeful reading. Everything, both the seemingly good and the seemingly bad, prepared her to become the font of insight she now is. Delving into religion's holy and its unholy side has left its mark on Armstrong, not just intellectually but spiritually as well. As she tells her readers in the book's final pages, "...compassion is a habit of mind that is transforming. The science of compassion which guides my studies has changed the way I experience the world."

| 12/20/07 | Book Club