Karen Armstrong - The Spiral Staircase

Yet could you behave like that indefinitely, without inflicting real and lasting damage on your mind? I remembered the moment, a year or so later, when I had realized that my mind no longer worked freely. It was the recreation hour in the Noviceship. We all sat around the long table in the community room with our needlework, Mother Walter, our Novice Mistress, presiding. That night we were talking about the liturgical changes that were being introduced by the Second Vatican Council: the mass was being said in English instead of Latin, for example, and that morning the children in the adjacent boarding school had played guitars to accompany a song they had composed themselves. Mother Walter had not enjoyed that song. She was devoted to the Gregorian chant and had taught us to love it too. Even though she once told me that I had a voice like a broken knife-grinder, I had to sing in the choir and, though I could never hit the higher notes and was ruefully aware of the tunelessness of my efforts, I was beginning to appreciate the spiritual quality of plainsong – the way the music circled meditatively around the words and drew attention to a phrase or obscure preposition that could easily have passed unnoticed, but which proved to have rich meaning. Now it looked as if the days of the chant were numbered and though Mother Walter would have cut out her tongue rather than criticize the Vatican, she was convinced that this would be an irreparable loss. ‘Of course the Council is inspired by the Holy Spirit,’ she was saying, ‘but it is hard to see how we can replace a musical tradition that goes back hundreds of years. Just think: St Bernard would have sung the same chant as we do. So would Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi. And now we have to listen to those silly children playing guitars.’ For a moment, the measured calm of her voice faltered and her face darkened in a way we had learned to dread.

‘But, Mother,’ Sister Mary Jonathan, a novice who was a year ahead of me and who had been my ‘guardian angel’ when I had begun my novitiate, spoke up eagerly. ‘Surely the changes needn’t necessarily be a disaster? After all, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with playing a guitar at mass, is there?’

Mother frowned. ‘I should have thought,’ she replied coldly, ‘that this is a matter we need not discuss.’ We all bent our heads obediently over our needlework, distancing ourselves. The topic had been closed. No one would dream of taking it any further, against the expressed wish of our superior.

‘But some people,’ Sister Mary Jonathan continued, to my astonishment, ‘might go to church initially to enjoy the guitar because they like that kind of music. We’ve learned to love the chant, but lots of people can’t understand the Latin, and the music is so different from anything they are used to that they can’t make anything of it.’

Mother Walter laughed shortly. It came out as an angry bark. ‘Anyone who needs a guitar to get them to mass must have a pretty feeble faith!’ Her eyes had hardened and her lower lip protruded in a scowl. The tension in the room was almost palpable. Nobody ever answered back like that and the rest of us were sewing as though our lives depended upon it. But I found myself looking hopefully at Sister Mary Jonathan, willing her to go on. I used to be able to do that, I thought wonderingly. I used to like exploring different points of view, building up an argument step by step, sharpening an idea against somebody else’s mind. But I could no more do that now than run naked down the cloister. Not only would I never have dared to cross Mother Walter – and, indeed, I hastily reminded myself, Sister Mary Jonathan was breaking several rules at once – but I wouldn’t be able to think like that any more. I no longer had it in me. But Sister Mary Jonathan did.

‘The guitar might give God a chance,’ she countered brightly. ‘People might come to listen and then find something more …’

‘Really, Sister!’ Mother’s voice was thunderous. ‘I would have thought that you of all people would understand.’ Sister Mary Jonathan was very musical. ‘Do you think God needs a guitar ,’ she uttered the word as though it were an obscenity, ‘to give him a chance?’

Sister was undeterred. ‘But surely Jesus would have used a guitar, if he’d been alive today?’

‘Nonsense, Sister! I’ve never heard such rubbish! He would have done no such thing!’

I had to bend my head quickly over the stocking that I was darning to hide an involuntary smile. I had a sudden mental picture of Jesus standing on a hill in Galilee, surrounded by his Jewish audience, singing plainsong. He looked pretty silly.

Mother Walter had spotted me. ‘I am glad that you find this amusing, Sister,’ she said with heavy sarcasm. ‘I find it extremely sad. Sister Mary Jonathan has committed a serious fault against obedience and against charity, by spoiling recreation for everybody!’

That had been the end of the matter; though, when Mother wasn’t looking, Sister Mary Jonathan had winked at me and pulled a face. With hindsight, that complicity had been prophetic. She had left the order shortly before I had. She had fallen in love with a young Jesuit, with whom she was studying at London University. Somehow she had held on to herself better than I had. I was quite sure that she would not find it difficult to tell anybody what she thought. My problem, as I wrestled with my highly unsatisfactory essay for Dr Brentwood Smyth, was that I had no thoughts of my own at all. Every time the frail shoots of a potentially subversive idea had broken ground, I had stamped on them so firmly that they tended not to come any more. True, at the very end of my religious life I had argued with Mother Praeterita, my Oxford superior, but the ideas I used against her had not been mine. I was simply parroting books and articles that I had read. It seemed that I could no longer operate as an intellectual free agent. You can probably abuse your mind and do it irrevocable harm, just as you can damage your body by feeding it the wrong kind of food, depriving it of exercise or forcing your limbs into a constricting straitjacket. My brain had been bound as tightly as the feet of a Chinese woman; I had read that when the bandages were taken off, the pain was excruciating. The restraints had been removed too late, and she would never walk normally again.

I knew that a good nun must be ready to give up everything and count the world well lost for God. But what had happened to God? My life had been turned upside down, but God should still be the same. It seemed that, without realizing it, I had indeed become like St Ignatius’s dead body or the old man’s stick. My heart and my mind both seemed numb and etiolated, but God seemed to have gone too. In the place that he had occupied in my mind, there was now a curious blank.

Or perhaps it was only now that I could admit to this God-shaped gap in my consciousness. One of the most painful failures of my convent life had been my inability to pray. Our whole existence had God as its pivot. The silence of our days had been designed to enable us to listen to him. But he had never spoken to me.

Every morning at six o’clock, we had knelt in the convent church for an hour of meditation, according to the method that St Ignatius had designed for his Jesuits in the Spiritual Exercises. This had been a highly structured discipline. As a preliminary step, we prepared the topic the night before. Each of us spent fifteen minutes selecting a passage from scripture or a devotional book, and making a note of the topics that we intended to consider in the morning. Ignatius’s meditation was based on a three-part programme: See, Judge and Act. First we all stood in silence for a few minutes, reciting to ourselves a prayer that reminded us that we were in the presence of God, and then we knelt down, took out our books and notes, and began with ‘See’. This meant that we had to use our imaginations to picture the gospel scene we had chosen, and even if the subject of our meditation was more abstract, we had to give it a local habitation and ‘place’ it in some concrete way. Ignatius had thought it very important that all the faculties be engaged, so that the whole man (Ignatius had a poor opinion of women) was brought into the divine ambience. This ‘composition of place’, as it was called, was also meant to ward off distraction. If you were busily picturing the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, evoking a sense of the Middle Eastern heat, looking at the sand dunes, listening to the braying donkeys and so forth, your imagination was less likely to stray to profane topics. At least, that was the theory.