Spiral Staircase at the Art Gallery of Ontario

Karen Armstrong is a respected historian of world religions, and 2008 winner of the TED prize, for which she created The Charter for Compassion.

I have been following her work on compassion for quite some time now, but just finished reading her thoughtful and thought-provoking, autobiographical story, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (paid link).

The book begins with T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, Ash Wednesday.

The title of the book is connected to Eliot’s poem. Eliot’s turning again and again represents the spiritual journey, and is like a spiral staircase.

Armstrong’s own spiral, spiritual journey takes her from being a nun in a convent to turning away from religion, from academia to television journalism, from anxiety and psychiatry to a diagnosis of epilepsy.

Finally, her unbelief leads her to study and write about world religions, and paradoxically, from an intellectual view to one of compassion.

Here are some of my favorite excerpts.

On the danger of certainty.

As far as I could see, certainty made people heartless, cruel, and inhuman. It closed their minds to new possibilities; it made them complacent and pleased with themselves. It also did not work.

On refraining from harm as opposed to doing good.

It take more discipline to refrain from doing harm to others. It’s easier to be a do-gooder and project your needs and desires onto other people.

The ability to experience pain and sorrow is the sine qua non of enlightenment.

The great myths show that when you follow somebody else’s’ path, you go astray. The hero has to set off by himself, leaving the old world and the old ways behind. He must venture into the darkness of the unknown, where there is no map and clear route. He must fight his own monsters, not somebody else’s, explore his own labyrinth, and endure his own ordeal before he can find what is missing in his life. Thus transfigured, he (or she) can bring something of value to the world that has been left behind.

The wasteland in the Grail legend is a place where people live inauthentic lives, blindly following the norms of their society and doing only what other people expect.

All the world faiths put suffering at the top of their agenda, because it is an inescapable fact of human life, and unless you see things as they really are, you cannot live correctly. But even more important, if we deny our own pain, it is all too easy to dismiss the suffering of others.