The Spiral Staircase. Karen Armstrong
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on my prayers, this was also airily waved to one side. ‘Everybody has their off-days, Sister!’ Nobody would believe that I would love to have had some off-days, because it would have meant that some of my days were ‘on’.
So even in the convent, God had been conspicuous by his absence from my life. And that, I became convinced, must be my fault. My case seemed to be so peculiar that it could not be a mere failure of the system. If only I had tried a little harder, concentrated just that little bit more, or found more interesting topics for meditation. The quality of a nun’s commitment was reflected in the quality of her prayer. And how could I hope to sense God’s presence when I continually broke the silence, frequently had uncharitable thoughts, and, above all, constantly yearned for human affection, and wept when reprimanded? It was, of course, a vicious circle. The more empty my prayers, the more I sought consolation in mundane things and in people. Round and round. Then there were my secret doubts. Even though I tried to tiptoe gingerly around difficult articles of faith, I could not stop wondering whether the Virgin Mary really had been conceived without Original Sin and been taken up body and soul into heaven after her death. How did anybody know that Jesus was God? And was there even a God out there at all? Was that why I never encountered him in prayer? As I knelt in the chapel, watching my sisters kneeling quietly with their heads bowed contemplatively in their hands, I would sometimes wonder whether it wasn’t a bit like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Nobody ever experienced God but nobody dared to admit it. And then I would mentally shake myself. How could God reveal himself to a nun who harboured these shocking doubts?
And so came the morning when, just a few days after I had been dispensed from my vows, my alarm rang at six o’clock and instead of getting up and walking down the road to St Aloysius’s Church for early mass, I simply switched it off and went back to sleep. For seven years, each day had begun with prayer and Eucharist, but now there seemed no point in any of that. I would still go to mass on Sundays, of course, because this was obligatory, binding upon all Catholics. Leaving the Church as well as the convent was at present a step too far. But the very idea of kneeling silently in a darkened church – yet again – filled me with immense fatigue. I cannot do that any more, I told myself wearily that morning; I simply cannot do it. The accumulated failure had left me feeling not merely exhausted but also slightly sick.
I had tried, I told myself, as I turned over and faced the whitewashed brick wall of my cheerful college room. I had not been the best nun in the world, but I had honestly done my best, and my superiors had all tried to help me. But it was just no good. If God did exist, he clearly wanted nothing to do with me, and, right now, I couldn’t blame him. There was something in me that was proof against religion, closed to the divine. Let it go, I told myself sleepily. Don’t beat yourself up any longer. Just live simply as a secular, and give up these inappropriate spiritual ambitions. You’re in the world now. Make friends with it. One day at a time.
But soon even that would become impossible.
It began with the smell. It was a sweet but sulphury aroma, reminiscent of bad eggs and giving off an aura of imminent menace. Like any odour, it was also intensely evocative. I recognized it immediately. This was how it always started. In the convent, I had several times been assailed by this strange smell, had looked around for a cause and found the world splintering around me. The sunlight, the flickering candles of the altar and the electric light seemed to oscillate crazily; there would be a moment of pure nausea, and then nothing: a long, long fall into emptiness.
These fainting attacks had occurred four or five times, to the intense irritation of my superiors. Once it had happened on the day before Easter, and although afterwards I felt reasonably well, Mother Frances had sent me to bed in disgrace and I was forbidden to attend the midnight Vigil. The next day I had to go to mass at Our Lady of Victories in Kensington High Street, escorted as if under penal guard, and was subjected to a merciless scolding on my return. ‘Emotional indulgence. Exhibitionism … weakness of will’ – I knew the list almost by heart. Nuns were not supposed to faint like wilting Victorian ladies; we were meant to be strong women, in control of our lives, exercising an iron constraint over our emotions and bodily functions. Ignatius had wanted his Jesuits to be soldiers of Christ, and we were to cultivate the same virile spirit. Whoever heard of a soldier fainting on the parade ground, crumpling helplessly into a heap as he stood to attention before his commanding officer? And so these blackouts of mine had been greeted with cold disapproval. ‘You must pull yourself together, Sister,’ Mother Frances had concluded, tight-lipped.
But how was I supposed to do this? Whatever my superiors thought, I did not plan these bouts of unconsciousness. They terrified me. When I felt one coming on, I fought it to the last. And there seemed to be no reason for them. My superiors assumed that they were caused by my unruly emotions, but they rarely happened when I was upset. On that Holy Saturday night, for example, I had been feeling positively light-hearted. We were coming to the end of the penitential season of Lent and were all looking forward to the magical liturgy that evening: the lighting of the new fire, the strange unearthly chant of the Exsultet (the great theological hymn of the Easter mystery), the blessing of the baptismal waters, and the triumphant mass at midnight. The ritual re-enacted the passage from darkness to light, from death to life. There were also the simple earthly joys of Easter Sunday to look forward to: we had boiled eggs for breakfast, could talk all day long, and read our Easter mail. When the attack happened, I was feeling nothing but pleasurable anticipation. Where had it all come from: the smell, the fractured light, the sickness and the slide into unconsciousness?
Nobody ever thought that I should see a doctor. Fainting meant only one thing: hysteria. It had been the same at my school. When girls had fainted, they were subjected to a hostile inquisition and told in no uncertain terms to stop showing off. I had once watched my headmistress, Mother Katherine, grab a girl who had fainted during a seemingly interminable church service, seize her under the armpits, haul the inert body down the polished aisle, and dump it outside the chapel door, returning immediately, stony-faced. Over the years, I had imbibed this ethos, and though I could not account for these attacks, I assumed that even though I might not be feeling especially upset, I was displaying some subconscious need for notice, love or intimacy. The blackouts, I concluded, must be a bid for attention. And yet, I reflected wryly, my unconscious mind must be very slow on the uptake. You would think that by now it would have learned that, far from eliciting the tender concern I craved, the fainting simply inspired anger and disdain.
So my fainting, we all agreed, was emotional self-indulgence. And in my last year in the order, my body did indeed seem to be staging a rebellion all of its own. I wept uncontrollably, convulsed more by anger than grief; I found it impossible to keep my food down; suffered such severe nose bleeds that I had to have a vein cauterized, and … I fainted. It was as though my whole physical self had risen in protest and demanded that I take notice, telling me that, however much I might want to stay in the convent, something was badly wrong. Finally in the refectory of our convent in Harrogate, where I had been sent for the Long Vacation, I had given up the battle and succumbed to a breakdown. It was only logical to assume that there had been unconscious tension all along, which had finally and irrevocably surfaced and taken me out of the religious life. And now I was out in the world. I was no longer struggling to conform to a way of life to which I was not suited. I was free, fortunate, privileged to be attending one of the finest universities in the world, and even though I was having some trouble adjusting, I was now on the mend. Wasn’t I?
So why were the symptoms recurring, as though my body had not been informed that the battle was over? Why was it behaving in the same old way? I was not kneeling in a convent chapel this time, but sitting in a pleasant library in Merton College. The room was full but not unduly crowded; it was not stuffy, even on this warm summer day. The tall leaded windows were open and a light, fragrant breeze wafted into the room, gently lifting the threadbare curtains. I was listening to John Jones’s lectures on nineteenth-century England, enjoying the slightly eccentric cast of his mind and his delightful command of the language, when the familiar stench choked me, the voice of the lecturer became a confused babble of meaningless sound, the light