Coming full circle

Karen Armstrong shocked readers with her life story.Now the former nun finds herself returning to familiar territory, as she explains to Peter Stanford

Karen Armstrong settles back into a dainty armchair in her dazzlingly red north London sitting-room. She has just returned, she tells me, from a lecture tour in the United States, promoting her new autobiography, The Spiral Staircase. One of her talks was to 400 people at the Free Library in Philadelphia, the birthplace of Cornelia Connelly, the nineteenth-century founder of the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus. Armstrong was a member until 1969. In 1981 she published Through The Narrow Gate, a warts-and-all account of her departure from the order that pleased few former colleagues.

?At question time?, she says, ?a woman got up and pointed out the link with Cornelia Connelly. She said that there were seven of her sisters in the hall and that she was the provincial. As I sat listening, I braced myself. And then she said: ?I just wanted to tell you that Cornelia Connelly would be so proud to see one of her daughters undertaking such an honest and important quest, and to reassure you that you are one of her daughters. We think of you as one of us. I entered at the same time as you did and I know what struggles we had.? It was such a wonderful moment. I was quite overcome. It was very healing.?

Armstrong, now 59, has not always received the best of receptions from the Catholic Church since making public the pain behind her departure from the cloister. For many she remains simply ?the runaway nun? who washed the family?s dirty linen in public. I well recall, shortly after the first time I wrote about her, receiving a call from an exemplary, radical nun whom I much admired. She told me off for being ?taken in? by the ?manipulative? Armstrong.

Such a health warning seems curious sitting next to this open, self-deprecating woman. Armstrong?s only artifice seems to be a determination to make you think the worst of her. So she delights in stories about how clumsy or unattractive or impractical she is; it is one of the reasons she quotes in the new book why she has never married. When interviewed once about what she liked and disliked about her body, she dismissed the first part in two seconds flat, then launched into a half-hour monologue about the negatives. The reality is that she is elegant, well turned out and illuminating once she gets off the subject of looks and on to the body of work that has made her, for her many admirers, the leading historian of religion in our times.

Since the publication of her account of her convent days, she has blossomed in an inspiring fashion. In the 1980s there were more books and television series exploring religious themes and ideas, written as an occasionally caustic observer. And then, in the early 1990s, as she was pushing a shopping trolley up a suburban street, she hit on the idea of writing a book about how different faiths have developed and sustained the idea of God.

Publishers were initially sceptical, but when it came out in 1993 A History of God was a massive success in America and established her reputation there as a writer. It changed her life in other ways, too, starting a journey back towards a sense of the divine. ?I wrote the book with mounting excitement,? she recalls in The Spiral Staircase. ?It represented a quest and liberation for me. No wonder I had found it impossible to believe in God: the personalised God might work for other people but he had done nothing for me. I was not a chronic failure, but had simply been working with a spirituality and theology that were wrong for me.?

Subsequent books on Buddha, Islam, Jerusalem and fundamentalism cemented Armstrong?s reputation on the other side of the Atlantic and around the world. Her latest book is number one in the best-sellers? chart in Canada and riding high in the Netherlands. Her insights on the post-9/11 world have been shared in addresses to the United Nations and US congressmen and senators. She has been honoured in the Muslim world for her work in promoting understanding of its beliefs, and teaches intermittently at Leo Baeck College, the intellectual centre of Reform Judaism in Europe. Only in the Church of her upbringing does she feel shunned.

?In the States, I do find a welcome in the Catholic Church,? she tells me. ?Despite all its recent problems, there does seem to be greater confidence in the Church there. There is not that ghetto feeling you have here with Catholicism. So I?ve been invited to Georgetown University, for instance, and to Notre Dame. When I was there I explained to one of the priests that I was not persona grata in Catholic circles in Britain and he was horrified. ?You?re a national treasure!? he protested.?

She speaks his words in an American accent that makes him sound like a Hollywood producer. Armstrong has a gift for mimicry ? inherited, she says, from her slightly disreputable but adored grandmother ? and an engaging warmth. The hostility she has faced here no longer keeps her awake at night, but behind the funny accents it clearly saddens her. And no wonder, since it is so misplaced ? as those nuns in Philadelphia realised. For anyone reading The Spiral Staircase ? or listening to the abridged version broadcast earlier this month on Radio 4 ? will see that 25 years after that first book and over 35 since Armstrong left the convent, she has, as she puts it herself, ?come full circle?.

?My life has kept changing,? she writes at the end of the book, ?but at the same time I have constantly found myself revolving around and around the same themes, the same issues, and even repeating the same mistakes. I tried to break away from the convent but I still live alone, spend my days in silence, and am almost wholly occupied in writing, thinking and speaking about God and spirituality.? She uses the image of a staircase from T.S. Eliot?s sequence of poems, Ash Wednesday. ?I kept falling off, and when I went back to my own twisting stairwell I found a fulfilment that I had not expected. Now I have to mount the staircase alone. As I go up, step by step, I am turning, again, round and round, apparently covering little ground, but climbing upwards, I hope, towards the light.?

I quote her writing at length because encapsulated in her carefully weighed prose is a spiritual journey that many will recognise. Words, indeed, have been her route back to a sense of God that is constrained by no denominational ties, precise definition or institution, but is nonetheless very much alive, enquiring and vibrant. ?My writing has been a constant meditative process,? she reflects, ?a constant examination of conscience of where I stand now in relation to the unfolding vision I am creating academically. I am constantly reassessing. And my study of other religions has brought me back to a sense of what my own was trying to do at its best. I?m very grateful for it.?

But the ?runaway nun? tag is not Armstrong?s only hurdle in Britain. Indifference to anything to do with religion is a problem, too. ?It would be nice?, she says, ?to feel that I was able to talk to my fellow countrymen. I realise arriving back here, fresh from the States, how different is the perception of religion here. There it is a live issue. When people talk about religious questions there are often tears in their eyes. It goes straight from the head to the heart. Whereas here people tend to say, ?this is very, very interesting?, as opposed to being emotive. Interesting and irrelevant. I might as well be talking about the mores of some ancient Polynesian tribe.?

This dispassionate approach is really head-in-the-sand stuff, she says: after all, religion is becoming horribly relevant around the globe ? in Israel and the Middle East in particular and more widely in the consequences of Western society?s failure to engage with Islam. ?It is immensely important to learn how to distinguish good from bad religion,? she says. ?We now ignore religion at our peril. And I?m not sure you can approach it solely as an intellectual exercise. I think of religion as I think of art. It?s like sitting down and looking at the score of a symphony. Most of us are unable to enjoy that. We need it interpreted, played on instruments to make lovely sounds that move us. Likewise, religion and its mythology and rituals really make no sense unless we are interpreting them, doing them in some way, putting them into practice.?

Outside her writing, is there any other practice of religion in her life, I wonder. ?I enjoy the beauty of the liturgy. It remains with me as something very important. What I suppose I miss is community ? that sense of being a part of something. That is the weakness of my position because in all the traditions community has been crucial in the building up of a religious experience. I am alone. That is how it has turned out for me, but what I increasingly discover ? and again this is more true of the United States than it is here ? is that there is a community out there of people who don?t fit into an established religious position or who, if they do, want something broader.?

Talk of extended families brings her back to those nuns in Philadelphia. ?As they were leaving they said, ?Next time you come, please come and see us. Come for cocktails.? Things have certainly changed.? And will she go? ?Gladly. I?m looking forward to it.?

Karen Armstrong?s The Spiral Staircase is published by HarperCollins at ?20.