Karen Armstrong reads

by John Vettese

books

British author Karen Armstrong repeatedly returns to imagery from T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" in her new memoir The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out Of Darkness (Knopf). In the poem sequence, Eliot uses spiraling steps as a metaphor for the twists and turns of spiritual recovery and, likewise, Armstrong's book details her own back-and-forth struggle with faith. A noted scholar of world religions -- and a fierce defender of Islam in the xenophobic post-9/11 world -- her broad worldview hardly developed with anything resembling ease. At 17, she entered an Oxford convent hoping to discover God, an experience detailed in her 1982 book, Through The Narrow Gate. The reforms of the Second Vatican Council were well under way, updating the practices of the Roman Catholic Church for 20th-century life, but had yet to trickle down to her group of nuns. Consequentially, Armstrong found the strict and repressive atmosphere too much to bear. Seven years later, she left the cloister jaded, emotionally warped and estranged from the outside world. Her life over the ensuing decade was something of a blur, as the nun years had stifled her persona so much that readjustment to secular life was all but impossible, marked by a frightening string of fainting spells (later diagnosed as epilepsy) and an ultimate rejection of God. It was with this cynical viewpoint that she approached a documentary project in the mid-1980s intended to discredit Christian theology by visiting the holy lands, but the experience wound up rejuvenating her interest in faith -- Christian, Jewish and Muslim. Since Narrow Gate her writings have mostly examined the gamut of spiritual perspectives, and in giving lectures and talks over the years -- like she will at the Free Library tonight -- Armstrong found audiences often wondered about her own beliefs. The Spiral Staircase addresses that journey and, like Eliot's circling poem, embraces the uncertainty of mortality.

Karen Armstrong reads Thu., March 11, 8 p.m., $8-$12, Free Library-Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-569-9700.

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