Through the Narrow Gate: A Nun’s Story

Through the Narrow Gate: A Nun’s Story
Karen Armstrong

Through the Narrow Gate is Karen Armstrong’s memoir of life inside a Catholic convent in the 1960’s.With gentleness and honesty, Armstrong takes her readers on a revelatory journey that begins with her decision, at the age of seventeen, to devote her life to God as a nun. yet once she embarked upon her spiritual training, she encountered a frightening and oppressive world, fossilized by tradition, which moulded, isolated and pushed her to the limit of what she could endure.

KAREN ARMSTRONG

Through the Narrow Gate

A Nun’s Story

Copyright (#ulink_c43f9b77-1888-5b87-bf0b-a4e970c73217)

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)

First published in Great Britain by Macmillan in 1981

Copyright © Karen Armstrong 1981, 1995

Karen Armstrong asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006550549

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2014 ISBN: 9780007382880

Version: 2016-02-22

In memory of my father

CONTENTS

Cover (#u0db48df2-93f6-58bf-a0a0-0400f5bb5a53)

Title Page (#ue162ca52-c11c-598e-9c70-af3a5f11b74b)

Copyright (#u038f27d7-c3d4-5dab-b9d1-15f09c68f875)

INTRODUCTION TO THIS EDITION (#u9d1ed29e-2422-5451-a30c-26ee07767fad)

1 BEGINNINGS 1962 (#u1f5bfd2e-c323-5eb0-8a33-aedd58301b2b)

2 POINTERS 1956-1961 (#uc6808776-954f-5114-9af5-0a754dd9e93c)

3 A NEW LIFE 1962 (#u77f143f1-1190-527d-af1b-a07948d28bd8)

4 TRIPTON (#litres_trial_promo)

5 POSTULANT (#litres_trial_promo)

6 A NUN TAKES THE VEIL (#litres_trial_promo)

7 “THE DEATH I HAVE TO DIE” (#litres_trial_promo)

8 BURIAL 1963-1965 (#litres_trial_promo)

9 THE SCHOLASTICATE 1965-1967 (#litres_trial_promo)

10 OXFORD (#litres_trial_promo)

11 THROUGH THE NARROW GATE (#litres_trial_promo)

AFTERWORD 1980 (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Karen Armstrong (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

INTRODUCTION TO THIS EDITION (#ulink_d5485b85-0d95-5237-b92b-221e370bc18f)

Writing Through the Narrow Gate proved to be a watershed for me that was, in its way, every bit as important as those crucial years in the convent. I had decided to write the book because I was becoming uncomfortably aware that a period of my life that had been extremely significant was becoming trivialized. Friends would beg me to tell them about the convent, and I would usually respond by recounting some funny story (and, indeed, a lot of amusing things did happen) because it was easier than exposing memories that were still raw and painful. Yet I knew that I would have to discover what those years had meant for me before the memories disappeared beyond recall.

In fact, the process of writing redeemed the past for me, in ways that I could not have imagined. I have written several books since, but none has proved as difficult as Through the Narrow Gate, with the possible exception of its sequel, Beginning the World. Autobiography must be one of the most challenging genres because it becomes impossible to keep humiliating glimpses of one’s former self at bay. Not surprisingly, I tried to avoid this but was prevented from doing so by June Hall, whom I had met at a dinner party and who had agreed to act as my literary agent.

The first draft of the book was very black and angry. June read it, said that it was probably publishable but that she couldn’t help wondering why, if things had been that bad, I had stayed in the religious life for seven whole years. I could see that she had a point, and I started all over again. During the next two drafts, I began to remember the things that had made me stay so long—things that I no longer wanted to recall because I thought that I had lost them forever: the beauty of the liturgy, the belief that every single moment of the day had eternal significance, and, above all, the sense of a spiritual quest for meaning that would make my life wholly significant. I had gone into the convent searching for Something that remained tantalizingly elusive but that, with the optimism of youth, I felt certain I would one day find.

I did not find that Something (which, for want of a better word, we call “God”) in the convent. These pages explain why. The 1960s were a difficult time for religious orders, and I must have been one of the last people to be trained before the Second Vatican Council reforms were implemented. At that time, it had unfortunately become customary to train young nuns by making them excruciatingly aware of their failings. This meant that most of us lived in a state of such acute anxiety and preoccupation with ourselves that a positive religious experience could become well nigh impossible. After all, the great masters of the spiritual life insist that the true spiritual path leads us away from the ego. Guilt and an undue concentration on one’s own performance can only further embed the struggling soul in the self that it is trying to transcend. There were certainly nuns in my order who were well aware of this problem, but as a mere teenager I lacked the maturity or the confidence to see the particular obsessions of my superiors in a larger perspective.

When I wrote Through the Narrow Gate, I thought that I had finished with religion. Yet because of the book, I was invited to write and present a documentary series for British Channel 4 Television about Saint Paul. Much of the filming was done in Jerusalem, and there, for the first time, I confronted Judaism and Islam, Christianity’s two sister religions, as living, integral faiths. In order to understand the early church founded in large part by Saint Paul, I had also to learn about the Jewish world that gave birth to it. For the first time, Judaism became more to me than a mere prelude to Christianity, and I was increasingly fascinated by the differences and similarities between the two faiths. In the same way, living and working so intensely in the Middle East made me want to learn about Islam, and I was frequently enthralled by what I found. After I had finished the television series, other assignments followed—all concerned with religion. I began to flesh out the grounding in scripture, theology, and church history that I had acquired in the convent, but this time I was seeing it in conjunction with the development of other faiths.

At first my new involvement in religion remained on an intellectual, critical level. But as I went deeper into the history of religion, I began to experience that sense of being on a quest that had impelled me to become a nun and had kept me in the convent for all those years. It was different, of course, because I was an older and—I hope—wiser person this time around. Though particularly drawn to the study of mysticism, I knew from my attempts at meditation in the convent that I did not have it in me to be a mystic. Yet occasionally, when I am studying—either at my desk at home or in the British Library—I have what can only be described as a glimmer of transcendence. It only lasts a fraction of a second, but it gives one the sense that life has some ultimate meaning and value for that brief moment, in much the same way as a great piece of music or an inspiring poem. There is no way of categorizing that Something any more than it is possible to explain why art or music has this power; it cannot be summed up in a message or doctrine. But I now know enough to realize that what I am engaged in is what the Benedictine monks call lectio divina (divine study), which, they say, yields occasionally an inevitably brief second of oratio (prayer).

When I spoke of this experience to some of my colleagues at the Leo Baeck College in London, where I do a little teaching, they laughed and told me that I was very Jewish in my spirituality. Jews, they explained, immerse themselves in the Bible and the Talmud not simply to gain information; they see the text as a place where they can encounter the ineffable God. Sometimes they like to speak the Hebrew words aloud, savoring the words that God himself used when he revealed himself to Moses on Mount Sinai, until they have learned them “by heart” (a revealing phrase). They sometimes sway backwards and forwards while they recite the Hebrew words, as though they were blown by the breath of the Holy Spirit, pliable before God as a flame before a breeze. Occasionally, they get a sense of Something greater that lies behind and within the words but defies explanation.