Karen Armstrong - The Spiral Staircase

Next came ‘Judge’, when the intellect was brought into play. This was the point when you were supposed to reflect on the topics you had listed the night before. Finally you proceeded to ‘Act’ which, for Ignatius, was the real moment of prayer. As a result of your deliberations, you made an act of will, applying the lessons you had learned to the day that lay ahead. There had to be a specific resolution. It was no good vaguely vowing to live a better life from that day forward. You had to settle for something concrete: to try harder with your sewing, for example, or to make a special effort not to think uncharitable thoughts about a sister who irritated you beyond endurance. Prayer, Ignatius taught, was an act of will. It had nothing to do with pious thoughts or feelings; these were simply a preparation for the moment of decision. Ignatian spirituality was never an end in itself but was directed towards action and efficiency. He wanted his Jesuits to be effective in the world and their daily meditation ensured that their activities would proceed from God.

But this did not work for me. Every morning I resolved that this time I would crack it. This time there would be no distractions. I would kneel as intent upon God as my sisters, none of whom seemed to have my difficulties. I had never before had any problems of concentration. I had always been able to immerse myself in my studies for hours at a time. But to my intense distress, I found that I could not keep my mind on God for two minutes. The whole point of the careful preparation was to prevent this. It was acknowledged that at 6.00 a.m. we were likely to be less than fully alert and would need help in focusing our thoughts. But as soon as I sank to my knees, my mind either went off at a tangent or scuttled through a maze of pointless worries, fears or fantasies, or else I was engulfed by the torpor of physical malaise. Like most adolescents, I craved sleep and experienced the 5.30 a.m. call as a violent assault. I often felt queasy with hunger and fatigue, and clung dizzily to the pew in front of me. At 6.30, the clock in the cloister chimed and we could sit down. But this sweet relief gave way to another trial, as I battled against sleep, and was comforted to see that even some of the older nuns listed and slumped in such a way that it was clear that they had succumbed. The minutes crawled by until the sacristan appeared to light the candles on the altar as a welcome signal that mass was about to begin.

At breakfast, an hour later, we were supposed to examine our meditation, going through a ten-point questionnaire. Had I made myself fully conscious of the Presence of God? No. Had I made sufficient effort in the ‘composition of place’? No. Had all my senses been fully engaged? No. And so on. I didn’t need the fifteen minutes we were supposed to devote to this self-appraisal. I didn’t have to spend any time grading my performance on a scale of one to ten. I was just a Big Zero.

Meditation was only the first spiritual exercise of the day. Four times daily we chanted our version of the divine office in choir. Twice a day, for fifteen minutes, we examined our consciences, according to Ignatius’s five-point plan: this involved marking off one’s faults and achievements in a little book, and counting the number of times we had failed to perform the special task for this week (in Ignatian terminology this was called the ‘particular examen’): there was half an hour’s spiritual reading, a community exercise during which one of us read aloud and the rest continued our everlasting needlework; half an hour’s silent ‘adoration’ in the chapel in the early evening; and the private recitation of the rosary. Yet again, I flunked. Throughout my seven years, I hugged to myself the shameful secret that, unlike the other sisters, I could not pray. And, we were told, without prayer our religious lives were a complete sham. For several hours a day on every single day of the year, I had to confront and experience my abject failure. In other ways, my mind was capable and even gifted, but it seemed allergic to God. This disgrace festered corrosively at the very heart of my life and spilled over into everything, poisoning each activity. How could I possibly be a nun if, when it came right down to it, I seemed completely uninterested in God and God appeared quite indifferent to me?

I don’t know quite what I thought should be happening. Certainly I didn’t expect visions and voices. These, we were told, were only for the greatest saints and could be delusions, sent by the devil to make us proud. But all the books that I read about prayer spoke of moments of ‘consolation’ that punctuated the inevitable periods of dryness. Periodically God would comfort the soul, make it feel that he was near and enable it to experience the warmth of his presence and love. God would, as it were, woo the soul, offering this periodic breakthrough as a carrot, until the soul outgrew this need and could progress to the next stage of its journey. Gradually the soul would be drawn into the higher states of prayer, into further reaches of silence, and into a mysterious state that lay beyond the reach of thoughts and feeling.

That was the theory. But far from progressing to these more advanced states, I never left base-camp. Of course there were moments when I felt moved by the beauty of the music or uplifted by a rousing sermon, but in my view this did not count. It was simply an aesthetic response, something that even an atheist could experience at a concert or when she was exposed to skilful rhetoric. I never had what seemed to be an encounter with anything supernatural, with a being that existed outside myself. I never felt caught up in something greater, never felt personally transfigured by a presence that I encountered in the depths of my being. I never experienced Somebody Else. And how could I possibly hope to have such an encounter when my mind was unable to wait upon God? Prayer, we were always told, was simply a way of quieting the soul, enabling it to apprehend the divine. You had to gather up your dissipated faculties, bring them together and present yourself, whole and entire, to God, so that every single part of your mind and heart could honestly say with the prophet Samuel: ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ But my mind, heart and faculties remained scattered. Try as I would, I could not re-collect them, so there was no way that God could get through to me.

I tried to discuss this with my superiors, of course. On several occasions, I explained that I never had any ‘consolation’ and could not keep my mind on my meditation. But they seemed frankly incredulous. ‘You’re always so extreme, Sister!’ Mother Frances, the Mistress of Scholastics, had said with irritation. ‘You’re always exaggerating. Everybody has consolation at some time or another. Are you seriously telling me that in all the six years of your religious life you have never once experienced consolation?’ I had nodded. She had looked baffled. ‘Well, I really don’t know what to say to you,’ she had said, clearly at a loss. ‘That’s most unusual. I don’t know how anybody could go on without some consolation. But I’m sure that things aren’t really as bad as you say,’ she had gone on briskly. ‘You probably just feel a bit down at the moment, that’s all, and being you, you have to make a major drama out of the whole business.’ This was not reassuring. I must be a particularly hard case, I thought miserably. As for my confession that I could never keep my mind 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?