In 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left her order to pursue English literature at Oxford. But convent life had profoundly altered her, and coping with the outside world and her expiring faith proved to be excruciating. Her deep solitude and a terrifying illness–diagnosed only years later as epilepsy—marked her forever as an outsider. In her own mind she was a complete failure: as a nun, as an academic, and as a normal woman capable of intimacy. Her future seemed very much in question until she stumbled into comparative theology. What she found, in learning, thinking, and writing about other religions, was the ecstasy and transcendence she had never felt as a nun. - from the publisher

The first half of the book is only valuable as stage setting and showing the arc of Armstrong's spiritual development. The real meat of the volume comes later and continues to the end. ( )

I read this memoir through the night last night, under the covers, by the light of the iPad. It’s title is taken from a T.S. Eliot poem, Ash Wednesday.

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.

On spiral stairs, each step provides a shift in perspective, and Karen Armstrong has had many perspectives in her long life. This autobiography details those abrupt shifts.

Born in 1944, she grew up in Birmingham, England. Armstrong’s story really begins when she is 17, and joins a Catholic religious order to become a nun. This first stage lasts 7 traumatic years. While a novice and postulant she is repeatedly scolded and, she says, abused. Her personhood was attacked; complete submission was required. However, during that time she matriculates to St. Anne’s College of Oxford University, pursuing a degree in literature, and is still attending when she leaves the order, and loses her faith in God.

The next 7 years she spends at Oxford. She does well, but during this time, she has fainting spells, and times when the world becomes surreal, or when she has no idea how she ended up in a place doing a particular thing—great chunks of amnesia or sleepwalking or some other mental malady. She sees psychiatrists, and spends occasional weeks in mental hospitals, all the while being successful academically, but emotionally distant, apart, the other.

Her career in Oxford ends in bitter disappointment—she drew an unsympathetic professor on her PhD examination board, and her dissertation on Tennyson was rejected.

After this failure, she finds a position at a private high school for girls. During this time she discovers her psychological problem—she has epilepsy. Another 7 years, and she is let go from that position owing to many missed days.

Then she embarks on a television career, making series about St. Paul, about Islam, about Judaism, until that falls apart, and finally she begins to engage in her true calling, lecturing and writing books on comparative religion, the most successful of which is A History of God.

Writing A History of God results in a reacquaintance with the presence of God in her life. The final chapter of The Spiral Staircase details her spiritual beliefs, although she doesn’t like the word “belief.” In her reading she finds that the greatest theologians “insisted that God was not an objective fact, was not another being, and was not an unseen reality like the atom, whose existence could be empirically demonstrated. Some went so far as to say that it was better to say that God did not exist, because our notion of existence was too limited to apply to God.” She would define God as “practical compassion,” as recognizing the inexpressible awe of encountering the essence of being human. She aligns herself with the mystics, and with the elusive truth of myth. She insists one cannot think or reason God; rather, one has to feel it.

I’m rather firmly entrenched in rationality as a life strategy, so this kind of rejection of reason makes me nervous, conjuring up, in its extremes, snakes and speaking in tongues and such. But Armstrong’s skill in developing her argument belies an approach devoid of reason, and I have to admit, the idea of religion without the “personhood” of God does have its attractions. ( )

Karen Armstrong continues to be one of my favorite writers about religion. Reading her books, one may wonder how she ended up the sort of person who could write so deeply and compassionately about faiths she doesn't share.

The Spiral Staircase is Armstrong's autobiography. She'd written a couple of others at the beginning of her writing career, but as this volume shows, this is the one that really captures her transition to the Karen Armstrong of her well known books on religion. Without spoiling anything, I will say that the path wasn't easy. ( )

Found this disappointing. ( )