The future life of a

self-hating nun
Beginning the World by Karen Armstrong (Macmillan, £7.95).
A FEW years after leaving her convent, Karen Armstrong wrote "Through the Narrow Gate". Those who read it with compassionate interest will turn eagerly to the sequel. Others who rejected it as "just not true" would be wiser to wait until she turns, as she surely will, to her natural art form of the novel.
In a sense, no autobiographical account can ever be strictly "true". We can only see our own past subjectively, and events which we see as black can be white or vermillion to the other characters involved. But that Karen Armstrong writes with great subjective truth is unmistakeable, and so too is the fact that in her heart she sees the subjectivity.
She can never quite decide whether her former community were "splendid, brave women" (p57), or unloving, uncaring "professional Christians" (p152). Does it not occur to her, at least subliminally, that it may well be her own feelings of selfdisgust and hatred that made her feel "cold anger and contempt . . . always greeted my return to consciousness", when she had fainted?
A profound understanding of the religious vocation can lead her to say: "If a nun ceased to pray and be silent inside herself, where was she? Perhaps she ended up like me, no longer able to meet the huge demands her vocation made upon her" (p37).
Yet on page 2 she can feel that to be "the obedient and selfeffacing nun" is incompatible with freedom to "criticise and think", apparently unaware that obedience and self-effacement are meaningless until the mind is fully alive and free. A nun is more open to life because of her vows, more receptive, more ardent.
But this is not to blame Karen Armstrong. As with her first book one feels great compassion. For someone who so clearly lives "on the edge" and, despite all her theology, has never come to personal friendship with Our Blessed Lord, her struggles and interior contradictions strike one as heroic.
Much of the anger and resentment that was the fundamental impression left 1her first book has now bIG
itself out, though there still linger here and there desolate puddles of impatient generalisation that she has yet to clear away.
Why, for example, the silly sweeping condemnation of Catholics: "In Catholic circles an ex-son-in-law would never be welcomed over the threshold again"? And she see-saws about the Faith, half rejecting and half accepting, as we see in her attitude to the autistic child she befriends. When she says of this boy. Simon, "it was almost as if his damaged brain got straight to the heart of the Mass, and was not short-circuited by too much irritable reasoning about it", we can see him as her alter ego.
Spiritually, things come right for Simon, and in this symbolic and beautiful fashion, they come right for her too. "I saw again the large crucifix and suddenly saw it in a new way. It wasn't just a proclamation of suffering; it was meant to be a shock. This was what God was said to mean by victory and by love. An overturning of all human expectations. And, I suddenly felt, of all preconceptions. Perhaps God hadn't, after all, quite finished with me yet" (p196).
Speaking of not getting married which "would certainly provide a very neat fomale to this book", she adds significantly, "as it has to so many novels". The book has, again in novel-fashion, a happy ending, with her sanity guaranteed, as it were, and it is impossible not to feel warmed, moved, consoled and closer to God for having read it.
There is a genuine gift here which will flower in the explicitly fictional.
Sister Miriam ODC