The Spiral Staircase is autobiography, actually her third, in which she describes the first one as being okay for the time in which she wrote it and the second one as something she should not have written and at which she shudders any time she sees it.
This autobiography follows her entering a convent at 17, leaving it at 24, studying at Oxford and being denied a doctorate by a (apparently) not quite fair examination. She lived with a condition that caused disorientation and fainting (and terror), and later she would unconsciously go somewhere and have no recollection of how she got there. It was not properly diagnosed as temporal lobe epilepsy for about thirteen years, which included years of psychiatric counseling. It took a while before the physician who made the diagnose was able to determine the right medication to alleviate the condition. For Karen Armstrong, though, knowing what she had lifted an incredible burden of fear, particularly once the correct medication had been figured out.
But I don't want to reiterate her life story, other than to say that she expected to experience God as she entered and subsequently struggled through Roman Catholic convent life and she didn't. She came to believe in no God and no religion. Then, in the meandering path of her life, through helping to care for a young man with a different form of epilepsy (before she knew she had a form of it herself) who found a peacefulness in Catholic mass, through the practice of research and writing, through teaching English literature which taught her to speak extemporaneously, through being asked to resign from that job, through a British TV program called "Opinions," and her several books on religions, she has come to the place she is today, a renowned authority on religions.
More to the point, I was caught by her movement from belief to unbelief for I, too, have travelled that road, though far more gently than she. The October 1999 SkyEarth column tells how that occurred.
And then I was caught by her journey into understanding religions and the foundation of each. It began with writing a television series called "The First Christian," her first critical look at an organized religion. In researching for it, she discovered that there was much she hadn't been taught in the convent about Paul of the Epistles of the New Testament, much in the way of "modern New Testament criticism." She soon realized that to know St. Paul, she needed to know Judaism, of which she said, "I had been taught that Judaism had become an empty faith; wedded to external observances and with no spiritual dimension; it was a religion that had lost its heart."
An important part of this book is Karen Armstrong's ability to acknowledge her lacks of knowledge and to seek out advisors. It was her Jewish advisor who opened a new window: that you didn't need belief to be religious. He explained that it was "right practice" rather than "right belief" that was the teaching to follow, as he repeated the story of Rabbi Hillel, leader of a school of Pharisees in the time of Jesus. For a group of pagans who challenged him, Hillel summed up the "whole of Jewish teaching" as "Do not do unto others as you would not have done unto you."
When she pointed out that Jesus dropped the "nots" in his teaching, he commented that "it takes more discipline to refrain from doing harm to others. It's easier to be a do-gooder and project your needs and desires onto other people…when they might need something quite different."
In Israel to work on the filming, Karen Armstrong discovered that there was another religion of which she knew next to nothing. Islam's Dome of the Rock and mosques and Muslims listening to Koranic chants caught her attention. Some years later, research for a series on the Crusades led her to an in-depth probing of Islam and eventually, after the fatwa on Salman Rushdie was issued, to writing two books Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet and Islam: A Short History.
The series on the Crusades did not get completed, although its companion book Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World which she authored was published. Wading through all the recorded horrors of the Crusades, she said, "broke her heart," finally enabling her to feel emotionally involved with what she was writing about.
Even though Karen Armstrong professed to have no belief in God, still she felt that she and God had "unfinished business." When the Crusades series fell apart, she was left to find another source of income, a new piece of work to do. As she described the search for her next life step, she talked about the hero's mythical journey into the unknown and the knights' search for the Holy Grail (a metaphor of the search for the mystical God in the interior of the soul), leaving the paths of society and inauthentic living. At last, she realized that all her years of trying to fit into the various forms of religiosity and academia and sociality were not actions coming from her personal truth. Not an easily won or acknowledged realization, but it gave her the impetus to wade into the research for A History of God.
At the end of The Spiral Staircase are fine kernels of discernment from Karen Armstrong's journey, discernment gained during the writing of A History of God and, in the midst of working on that book, the task of writing about Muhammed (mentioned above) in a manner that would explain it clearly to Western ears without being offensive to Muslims.
She described the silence that filled her writing study as she worked on the book.
At first this silence had seemed a deprivation, a symbol of unwanted isolation. I had resented the solitude of my life and fought it. But gradually the enveloping quiet became a positive element, almost a presence, which settled comfortably and caressingly around me like a soft shawl. It seemed to hum, gently but melodiously, and to orchestrate the ideas that I was contending with, until they started to sing too, to vibrate and reveal an unexpected resonance. …Silence itself had become my teacher.
The reopening of compassion within herself underlay her research, allowing her to not only read the words of the many books she read but to feel an empathy for whatever was being described. Compassion, not pity or condescension, involves "an emptying of self that would lead to enlargement and an enhanced perspective….It was not enough to understand other people's beliefs, rituals, and ethical practices intellectually. You had to feel them too and make an imaginative, though disciplined, identification."
Finally, she concluded;
Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment. It dethrones the ego from the center of our lives and puts others there, breaking down the carapace of selfishness that holds us back from an experience of the sacred.
Empathy, compassion, both come from practicing the Golden Rule of refraining to do or say hurtful things that you would not want to have said or done to you. If practiced daily and on every scale from personal to global, it would so change our world, would so change our selves, that at last we would recognize the Godliness within and be it. Belief or unbelief in "God out there" would be moot.
I will close with this final quote:
"All the traditions insist that the sacred is not merely something "out there" but is also immanent in our world….Our task is to learn to see that sacred dimension in everything around us —including our fellow men and women.…Our task now is to mend our broken world; if religion cannot do that, it is worthless. And what our world needs now is not belief, not certainty, but compassionate action and practically expressed respect for the sacred value of all human beings, even our enemies.
I will end with a link to a Christian Science Monitor article, Koranic Duels Ease Terror by James Brandon: www.csmonitor.com/2005/0204/p01s04-wome.html.
This article describes the challenge by a group of Islamic scholars to al-Quaida prisoners in Yemen to go to the Koran and prove their particular positions. If the scholars won, the prisoners would renounce violence; the prisoners won, the scholars would join in their struggle. This was a debate of Koranic teachings. Hopefully the link still works and you can read the article for yourself. If you can't, send me an email and I'll forward the email I received with it.