flotsam
27th April 2005, 09:28 PM
Hi All,
I just finished reading Karen Armstrong's The Spiral Staircase, and I found some things that I thought would interest you folks.
In case you haven't read it, The Spiral Staircase is the story of a woman exiting a convent, going through levels of ambivalence and downright disgust for Catholicism and then Christianity and finally religion itself, and then finding all the spiritual things she had originally sought. But rather than finding them in a convent, or the secular world, she finds it in writing about religion.
She tells about a practice she and her fellow nuns did each morning of settling on a scripture, picturing the event using all the senses, judging its call to you, and finally acting on it. Apparently she was just terrible at this practice. She was terrible at nunning in general, actually. She has pretty harsh words for the methods her particular convent used. It was quite anti-intellectual, where you had to obey superiors as if they were God himself, where questioning was entirely inappropriate. She found herself struggling to escape this mindset when she left the convent, but it took her about a decade to do so.
So she goes through like 20 years of non-religiosity, but through her stints as a television documentary host on religious subjects she starts to find something interesting. She spends a year doing a show on Saint Paul, whom she started out thinking was a sexist pig, bureaucrat of the worst sort, and a tainter of Jesus’ original compassionate philosophy. But as she studies, she starts to get to know Paul on a deeper level until, at the end of the series, she feels like she knows Paul, and finds him fascinatingly human.
“I started to love the genius and pathos of the man. I was moved by his passion, his brilliance, his inventiveness, and the affection that he clearly felt for his converts. The second epistle to the Corinthians showed his extraordinary vulnerability, and when we finally got to Tre Fontane, just outside of Rome, where – legend has it – Paul was executed by the emperor Nero, I found that was almost tearful. … Paul, a difficult, prickly genius, had stormed his way into my affections, and now I felt so much at one with him that I could almost share his convictions. Almost, but not quite.”
During her travels and studies she starts to notice the similarities between the three monotheistic religions. And eventually writes a book on the subject: “A History of God.” Then, when she sees the difficulty the western world is having with understanding Islam, she writes a book about Muhammad and one about religious fundamentalism.
“While writing Muhammad, I had to make a constant, imaginative attempt to enter empathically into the experience of another. This was a kind of ecstasy. For six months I was intent all and every day on trying to understand a man’s search for sanctification. Even thought I was not a believer, I had to think myself into a religious frame of reference, and enter the mind of a man who believed that he was touched directly by God. Unless I could make that leap of sympathy, I would miss the essence of Muhammad. Writing his life was in its own way and act of Islam – a “surrender” of my secular skeptical self, which brought me, of only at second hand and at one remove, into the ambit of what we call the divine.” (280)
This is fascinating to me. My own journey has been somewhat similar to Armstrong’s in structure. I came from quite a fundamental environment, where metaphysics described reality. I was mentally stunted by my training, the way she was. The only way I found out of it all was to distance myself from everything that represented that repression. I did continue to go to church, but only to resist everything that was said there. Even if I agreed with something a speaker or teacher said, I had to resist it, find a counter argument. Because I was trained to believe that if just one thread fit, the entire tapestry held together. One instance of spirit feeling would condemn me to belief and obedience. I had to do this for a few years to untrain myself. I had to escape the “authority” the church had over me. I admit, it still has authority over the deepest most primal parts of me. The parts that houses fear and grief. I don’t know if it will ever leave.
The next step in my path seems to be an opening. Before, if I opened myself, I was probably too weak to fend off any good story that came along. I’d just be sucked into yet another fundamentalist attitude that would give my life meaning. But now I’m opening in a different way. Kind of in the way Armstrong describes with her experience of Paul and Mohammad. Opening to understand; to let things, ideas, people pass through me, and for me to pass through them. Because I’ve changed one fundamental premise of my life: to let an idea or a person engulf me does not mean that I must follow them. As Armstrong writes:
“The great myths show that when you follow somebody else’s path, you go astray. The hero has to set off by himself, leaving the old world and the old ways behind. He must venture into the darkness of the unknown, where there is no map and no clear route. He must fights his own monsters, not somebody’s else’s; explore his own labyrinths, and endure his own ordeal before he can find what is missing in his life.” (page 268)
I thought it was interesting to see how well Armstong’s story could be interpreted by the Stages of Post Mormonism we’ve been hashing out here. She certainly went through the niggles, the research, the destabilizing events, the break, and finally, the stage of constant revolution. And she did a really swell job describing all the stages of her journey in an empathetic way. I’d highly recommend this book to all of you. It made me feel not so alone. But at the same time, it gave me added strength to set off on my own path. It doesn’t need to be hers. It doesn’t need to be anyone else’s. In fact, it shouldn’t be. How exciting.
I just finished reading Karen Armstrong's The Spiral Staircase, and I found some things that I thought would interest you folks.
In case you haven't read it, The Spiral Staircase is the story of a woman exiting a convent, going through levels of ambivalence and downright disgust for Catholicism and then Christianity and finally religion itself, and then finding all the spiritual things she had originally sought. But rather than finding them in a convent, or the secular world, she finds it in writing about religion.
She tells about a practice she and her fellow nuns did each morning of settling on a scripture, picturing the event using all the senses, judging its call to you, and finally acting on it. Apparently she was just terrible at this practice. She was terrible at nunning in general, actually. She has pretty harsh words for the methods her particular convent used. It was quite anti-intellectual, where you had to obey superiors as if they were God himself, where questioning was entirely inappropriate. She found herself struggling to escape this mindset when she left the convent, but it took her about a decade to do so.
So she goes through like 20 years of non-religiosity, but through her stints as a television documentary host on religious subjects she starts to find something interesting. She spends a year doing a show on Saint Paul, whom she started out thinking was a sexist pig, bureaucrat of the worst sort, and a tainter of Jesus’ original compassionate philosophy. But as she studies, she starts to get to know Paul on a deeper level until, at the end of the series, she feels like she knows Paul, and finds him fascinatingly human.
“I started to love the genius and pathos of the man. I was moved by his passion, his brilliance, his inventiveness, and the affection that he clearly felt for his converts. The second epistle to the Corinthians showed his extraordinary vulnerability, and when we finally got to Tre Fontane, just outside of Rome, where – legend has it – Paul was executed by the emperor Nero, I found that was almost tearful. … Paul, a difficult, prickly genius, had stormed his way into my affections, and now I felt so much at one with him that I could almost share his convictions. Almost, but not quite.”
During her travels and studies she starts to notice the similarities between the three monotheistic religions. And eventually writes a book on the subject: “A History of God.” Then, when she sees the difficulty the western world is having with understanding Islam, she writes a book about Muhammad and one about religious fundamentalism.
“While writing Muhammad, I had to make a constant, imaginative attempt to enter empathically into the experience of another. This was a kind of ecstasy. For six months I was intent all and every day on trying to understand a man’s search for sanctification. Even thought I was not a believer, I had to think myself into a religious frame of reference, and enter the mind of a man who believed that he was touched directly by God. Unless I could make that leap of sympathy, I would miss the essence of Muhammad. Writing his life was in its own way and act of Islam – a “surrender” of my secular skeptical self, which brought me, of only at second hand and at one remove, into the ambit of what we call the divine.” (280)
This is fascinating to me. My own journey has been somewhat similar to Armstrong’s in structure. I came from quite a fundamental environment, where metaphysics described reality. I was mentally stunted by my training, the way she was. The only way I found out of it all was to distance myself from everything that represented that repression. I did continue to go to church, but only to resist everything that was said there. Even if I agreed with something a speaker or teacher said, I had to resist it, find a counter argument. Because I was trained to believe that if just one thread fit, the entire tapestry held together. One instance of spirit feeling would condemn me to belief and obedience. I had to do this for a few years to untrain myself. I had to escape the “authority” the church had over me. I admit, it still has authority over the deepest most primal parts of me. The parts that houses fear and grief. I don’t know if it will ever leave.
The next step in my path seems to be an opening. Before, if I opened myself, I was probably too weak to fend off any good story that came along. I’d just be sucked into yet another fundamentalist attitude that would give my life meaning. But now I’m opening in a different way. Kind of in the way Armstrong describes with her experience of Paul and Mohammad. Opening to understand; to let things, ideas, people pass through me, and for me to pass through them. Because I’ve changed one fundamental premise of my life: to let an idea or a person engulf me does not mean that I must follow them. As Armstrong writes:
“The great myths show that when you follow somebody else’s path, you go astray. The hero has to set off by himself, leaving the old world and the old ways behind. He must venture into the darkness of the unknown, where there is no map and no clear route. He must fights his own monsters, not somebody’s else’s; explore his own labyrinths, and endure his own ordeal before he can find what is missing in his life.” (page 268)
I thought it was interesting to see how well Armstong’s story could be interpreted by the Stages of Post Mormonism we’ve been hashing out here. She certainly went through the niggles, the research, the destabilizing events, the break, and finally, the stage of constant revolution. And she did a really swell job describing all the stages of her journey in an empathetic way. I’d highly recommend this book to all of you. It made me feel not so alone. But at the same time, it gave me added strength to set off on my own path. It doesn’t need to be hers. It doesn’t need to be anyone else’s. In fact, it shouldn’t be. How exciting.