Armstrong, Karen. Through the Narrow Gate. St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Silence. Isolation. Repression of the senses and the intellect. Public humiliation.
Prison? No. Life in a Roman Catholic convent, a life that leads through a narrow gate.
I came to this book in a roundabout way. A bad cold kept me home one recent Saturday and I cuddled up on the couch to indulge in an afternoon of BookTV (C-SPAN2 on weekends, www.booktv.org). This particular Saturday Karen Armstrong was discussing the new edition of her biography of the prophet Muhammad. I was impressed by this engaging scholar with a stylish pageboy haircut. At the public library Web site, I discovered a long list of her books on the history of religion, but the title that jumped out at me was Through the Narrow Gate, her memoir of seven years as a nun. I was taught by nuns in junior high and high school, and ever since then I have been intrigued by the mystery that lay behind the tightly closed door to the cloister.
Karen Armstrong entered an English order in 1962, just before the Second Vatican Council called for sweeping changes in the training and community life of religious orders. Armstrong’s convent, located in a small village near London, still practiced the old ways. Her days were ruled by silence, ill-fitting clothing, poor food, few baths, and the cold hearts of the older nuns. The one hour assigned each day to recreation was carefully constructed to prevent meaningful communication with the other nuns.
Armstrong became a postulant (nun in training) at the age of seventeen. She took this step, in the face of her family’s bewilderment and reluctant acceptance, as a search for meaning that would make her life significant, but it proved to be an elusive quest. The new nuns were harshly criticized for even minor failings, required to publicly confess their faults and submit to degrading penances, and plunged into a constant state of stress caused by preoccupation with their every action and thought. Could my cheerful teachers have been subjected to this kind of training?
The great spiritual writers tell us that the true religious path leads us away from the ego, but Armstrong felt that all her experiences in the convent led back into the dark recesses of the self.
When Armstrong developed epilepsy, her superiors considered her convulsions to be self-indulgent and ordered her to stop, to cease calling attention to herself—and disrupting Mass. She was not sent to a doctor. Her physical deterioration and the anxiety it produced led to her mental breakdown.
Exhausted and in despair, Armstrong obtained a release from her vows. When she returned to secular life, she suffered profound culture shock. In the convent she had been deprived of access to newspapers, television, and books, and communication with her family had been restricted. During a mere seven years in the 1960s, a tremendous cultural transformation had occurred. Through the Narrow Gate ends in a room at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, on Armstrong’s first day back in the world of mini skirts, the Beatles, and protest marches. I wanted to know more about her life from that day, when she was spiritually broken and adrift, until the Saturday I saw her as a confident, elegant woman of the world on BookTV. I found her continuing story in The Spiral Staircase, My Climb out of Darkness.
This review originally appeared in the Redwood Coast Review.