Karen Armstrong's Through The Narrow Gate--Religious Life continued

This post will continue my thoughts on why religious life didn't work for Karen Armstrong, as she describes in her book Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery. I will begin by repeating the quote from my last post that sums up the difficulty with Karen's religious training. On page 252, a nun whom Karen calls Mother Melinda tells what she had heard from a priest who was a psychologist: " 'He was saying that the traditional way of training nuns has been to keep them in a prepubescent state by treating them like children--you know, do as you're told, no responsibility, no mention of sex, no men, no freedom.' "

The religious life, or the caricature of it presented as an ideal to Karen, asked nuns to do the impossible--to live in a way that was utterly incompatible with who we are as human beings. Some nuns were able to live the religious life because they could ignore the humanity-denying trivia and concentrate on the essentials. Others were only able to live a soul-less cartoon of the religious life by strongly suppressing their humanity. Unfortunately, these latter nuns were the ones who trained Karen. Karen, with the humanity-suppressing example before her, simply couldn't do it. Her effort led to a nervous breakdown. Here are some of the difficulties that Karen experienced.

OVER-EMPHASIS ON EMOTIONAL SELF-EMPTYING. The professed religious life involves emptying oneself so that one can be filled by God. One works to purge oneself of attachment to preferences and to emotional states. The goal, though, is not the self-emptying but the union with God.

Unfortunately, many of the practices specified by Karen's superiors led to a pre-occupation with self. For example, Karen and the other nuns were required to exam their consciences in minute detail twice a day and to record their failings in a notebook. For Karen, this was a constant reminder of her self-absorption. She kept seeing how full of self she was and how far from the ideal of self-emptying. She was constantly discouraged.

This emphasis on emptying, emptying, emptying simply kept the focus on how full I am of self, self, self. It practically guaranteed that one would never move beyond self-emptying into experiencing God's filling. In addition, it produced empty, shell-like nuns, all of whom were focused on self-emptying.

NO PARTICULAR FRIENDSHIPS. Everything about the religious life was set up to discourage particular friendships. Silence was the norm except at communal recreation. Nuns were not to engage in conversation in twos but only when a third was present. Each nun was to communicate solely with God.

This, of course, ignores the fact that humans are social beings. One hugely important way that we experience God's love is through the love of a friend. Not to allow friendship produced nuns starving for love. Karen recounts the story of the two rival convent cats, Ming and Sebastian. Certain nuns of Karen's convent favored Ming while others favored Sebastian. One day, when Sebastian tore Ming's ear in a fight, a nun whom Karen calls Mother Imelda became so distraught over her dear wounded Ming that she couldn't stop weeping, had to receive sedatives from a doctor, and was given bed rest for three days. The need for tangible love came out in this exaggerated way with cats.

Karen suffered greatly from the prohibition of friendship. She also saw that the constant self-policing to avoid particular friendships produced an aloofness or even coldness in many of the nuns. The convent was an emotionally cold place, lacking the warmth of friendship. Karen was isolated and lonely.

Adding to Karen's isolation was the fact that her superiors, to whom she was allowed--even required--to talk freely about her spiritual progress, simply would not listen to her. These superiors had fixed ideas and rejected anything that didn't fit. For example, when Karen confided that she absolutely never experienced consolation in prayer, her superior replied that she was exaggerating. Thus, the one person in whom Karen was allowed to confide--her superior--simply rejected Karen's difficulties as impossible. Karen really had no one to turn to.

MENTAL DISTORTIONS. Karen was forced to perform mental distortions in the area of obedience. Obedience requires that nuns do whatever their superior asks without question, no matter how much the nun may disagree with the command or even find it absurd. Karen, for example, was ordered to practice sewing daily on a machine that had no needle, to scrub the pavement with a tiny nailbrush, and to eat cheese even though it caused her to throw up. She struggled constantly to convince herself that such pointless or even harmful orders were God's will.

Karen also struggled mentally with Catholic doctrines. At one point, she produced an essay proving incontrovertibly that Jesus physically rose from the dead, all the while knowing that her essay lacked intellectual integrity.

Such mental distortions became all the more difficult as Karen's mind began to awaken through her study of English literature at Oxford. It became nearly impossible for Karen to use her keen mind in her Oxford studies and then to shut off her mind upon her return to the convent.

EPILEPSY. Karen began to suffer epileptic seizures while in the convent. To the nuns, she was engaging in a disgusting display of emotions by fainting, and she was sternly admonished to control herself. Of course, this was impossible, since the electric impulses in the brain of a person with epilepsy are not under conscious control. Karen herself, though, believed that her fainting was a shameful failure, and this led to deeper discouragement because she simply could not control it.

SEXUAL REPRESSION. Another area outside Karen's control was sexual arousal. Karen first noticed this when using the discipline. The discipline was a set of cords with which the nuns flagellated themselves to subdue their bodies and to offer penance for sins. The discipline was supposed to be physically painful. Karen, however, found the discipline to be sexually arousing. This was a great conflict for her. She was commanded under obedience to use the discipline daily and she was also supposed to shun sexual pleasure, yet the discipline created sexual pleasure for Karen!

KAREN'S DREAMS. Immediately after her breakdown, Karen experienced a very pointed dream, which she describes on page 245: "Sometimes trying to kill something growing. A plant that keeps putting out new shoots, huge monstrous growth, stabbing and thrashing at it, feeling its pain as the green sap falls in huge drops. But it never dies."

The convent is killing the ways in which Karen's soul is striving to grow. She keeps putting out new vibrant intellectual shoots with her literature studies, but the convent life keeps stabbing at these shoots, calling them monstrosities. The new life won't stop, though. It keeps growing, even in the pain of being stabbed again and again. It won't die.

Oh, my! Karen needs to GET THE HELL OUT before the convent life kills her. And she does.

Karen Armstrong's Through The Narrow Gate--Religious Life

In my previous post, I gave an overview of Karen Armstrong's Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery, which tells of Karen Armstrong's life as a nun from 1962 to 1969, ages 17 to 24, in the Society of the Holy Child Jesus in England. In this post, I will begin to look at why religious life did not work out for Karen.

On page 252, Karen pinpoints the crux of the matter. Karen is recuperating from an emotional breakdown, and a fellow nun whom Karen calls Mother Melinda comes to visit her in the infirmary. Mother Melinda had taken a course the previous year with a priest who was a psychologist and who had talked quite a bit with disturbed nuns. Here is what Mother Melinda reports the priest as having said:

" 'He was saying that the traditional way of training nuns was to keep them in a prepubescent state by treating them like children--you know, do as you're told, no responsibility, no mention of sex, no men, no freedom.' "

This method of training seemed to produce at least three types of nuns.

NUNS WHO ACHIEVED TRUE HOLINESS. First, some women, even highly intelligent women like Mother Katherine and Mother Bianca, achieved holiness under this system, probably by seeing through to the core of religious life and holding fast those things that supported union with God while holding loosely those things that were superficial and unhelpful.

NUNS WHO EMBODIED A CARICATURE OF HOLINESS. Second, other women, like Mother Walter and Mother Praetorita, became caricatures of holiness, holding fast to the letter rather than the spirit of the order's rules. Mother Katherine describes this on page 247 as a failure in courage. Here is how Mother Katherine says that these nuns failed in courage: " 'By clinging to the rules as to the rail of a swimming pool. Not being willing ever to go out of their depth and trust that God will hold them up.' "

In other words, these nuns never actually lived the religious life. They remained perpetually in training, and they didn't even allow the training to do what it was intended to do. Instead, they clung to the rules themselves as though rule observance were the religious life, whereas rule observance was simply intended to empty and free one for union with God. These nuns emphasized the emptying, emptying, emptying--but never the living in union with God.

This reminds me of what Frank Schaeffer says about Marine Corps boot camp in Patience With God. Much of what is done in boot camp, such as drills, is preparation for living the life of a Marine. No recruit wants to remain perpetually in boot camp! A recruit accepts the training so that he or she, after three months, can live as a Marine. Clinging to rules indicates fear of risk taking. I know the rules, they are familiar to me, I'll just blindly obey--no thinking, no risk required. This type of nun projected detachment, separation, aloofness, but not aliveness, interest, compassion.

NUNS WHO BROKE UNDER THE STRAIN. Third, some women simply couldn't fit the mold that they believed they had to fit to be a nun. This was the mold held up for them by the rule-obsessed nuns who trained them. Karen was one of these women. She deeply wanted union with God but simply couldn't master her emotions, mind, and body in the ways enjoined by her superiors. Yet she also believed that her failure to achieve this mastery would keep her separated from God. The strain of Karen's constant striving and failing finally led to a nervous breakdown.

In my next post, I will look into some of the specific aspects of religious life that caused difficulty for Karen.

Karen Armstrong's Through The Narrow Gate--Overview

I have just re-read Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery by Karen Armstrong. In this memoir, Karen Armstrong writes about her life as a nun. From 1962 to 1969, ages 17 to 24, Karen was a member of a Catholic religious order, the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, in England. This time period includes nine months as a postulant, two years as a novice, and the rest of the time as a professed sister.

The primary ministry of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus is teaching girls and women. Therefore, upon making her religious profession, Karen was sent by her order to study English literature at Oxford, in preparation for teaching. Karen deeply loves literature.

Karen writes of the joys as well as the difficulties of professed religious life, though admittedly, in her case, it was mostly difficulties. She speaks especially of the difficulty she experienced in mastering her emotions, her mind, and her body. Karen often experienced religious life as a struggle to empty herself of what she saw as self-centered emotions (pride in small spiritual victories, hurt at a superior's harshness, frustration at her lack of skill in sewing, boredom with hours of housework) so that she could be filled by God. For Karen, this struggle to master her emotions was consistently unsuccessful.

Karen also had difficulty subduing her mind to accept the religious ideal of blind obedience to superiors, even when their instructions were counter-productive, and the "truth" of Catholic doctrines, even when her mind told her that these doctrines weren't really true. With persistent effort, she forced her mind to stop thinking and just obey--but then came her literature studies at Oxford, which awoke her mind and her deep pleasure in keen thought. As her mind came more and more vibrantly to life through her study of literature, Karen began to question certain practices of the order that she saw were harmful for the nuns, such as the ban on personal friendships and the use of the discipline (a set of cords used by nuns to flagellate themselves as a means of subduing bodily passions and performing penance).

Finally, Karen had her first epileptic seizures in the convent. These were seen by her superiors as spells of fainting due to emotional weakness, and Karen was ordered to stop these emotional displays. Since epileptic seizures are absolutely beyond the control of the will, there was no way for Karen to obey this command. One simply cannot decide to stop the abnormal electrical activity in the brain that causes the seizure. Karen also began to experience sexual arousal while in the convent. This was another aspect of her body that she simply could not control.

In my next post, I will look more closely at why religious life in the Society of the Holy Child Jesus did not work out for Karen.