Freelance Monotheism.

I am back at the same place, same table even, and feel like reviewing once again, some great books. This time, in the area of non-fiction.
I like to have a book of non-fiction on the go at the same time as I am working through novels.
I carry around both types of books so that I can alternate from one to the other as my mood dictates. My non-fiction interests are varied, but they tend to gravitate towards books concerning religion and spirituality. I also like to read literary travel books (love Bill Bryson), medical/scientific stuff (love Sherwin B. Nuland), psychology (love M.Scott Peck, Viktor Frankl), history in general.... really, there are not too many aisles of the bookstore that do not interest me on some level.
But as I view my Reading List this evening, I can see that in the past year I have been immersed in some reading along the religio-spiritual lines.
For instance:
Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, as well as his Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor and his Pathways To Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation.
Catholic intellectual Richard John Neuhaus’s excellent memoir As I Lay Dying: Meditations Upon Returning.
Marcus J. Borg’s Reading The Bible Again For The First Time.
John Shelby Spong’s A New Christianity For A New World.
Bruce Feiler’s Walking The Bible: A Journey By Land Through The First Five Books of Moses. [Interestingly enough, Spong and Borg both argue that these “first five books” are not BY Moses in the first place! Ahh... reading is such fun!]
M. Scott Peck’s A World Waiting To Be Born: Civility Rediscovered.
Sherwin B. Nuland’s How We Die: Reflections On Life's Final Chapter.
When Jesus Came To Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today, by Harvey Cox.
And, a book that definitely spurred (kick-started) a neo-religious revolution in my own life, The Pagan Christ by Tom Harpur. One day, I must write about the effect this last book has had upon my understanding of faith and spirituality.

Tonight however, I want to briefly talk about two books not listed above.
A memoir and its sequel.
Karen Armstrong’s Through The Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Life In And Out of the Convent, and The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness.
I have seldom read anything that has been as insightful, moving, honest, and downright captivating, as these two books.
I inhaled them. Ate them.
They made me forget about fiction, for a while.
Publication-wise, they are separated by 23 years. 1981 and 2004, respectively.
In the first book, written twelve years after Karen Armstrong left her life as a nun, she describes the genesis of her vocation or “calling” and reveals how reluctant her parents were about letting her embrace a life of ascetism. She was a mere seventeen years old at the time.
What follows is a chronicle of what it was like to go through the rigors of becoming a nun. The nine months as a postulant, the two years noviceship, the two years of the scholasticate.... the mind-numbing discipline of achieving full-fledged nunnery-ness (my word).
She was one of the last people to go through the old system before it was reformed by the Second Vatican Council and Pope John XXIII. In what I consider extreme generosity, she admits that her own immaturity was the cause of many of her difficulties, but ultimately what happens is that Karen finds out that she is simply not suited for the life of a nun.
In the convent, God was conspicuous only by His perceived absence, and confessing this to her superiors was not helpful. It only sent her back into herself and confirmed her theory that God’s silence was her own fault. In all of the seven years on the inside, never once did she “hear from God” nor realize the pre-convent aspirations of her heart. It is a powerful story of religious devotion gone awry.
I could talk forever about how IMPORTANT I think this book is, but, moving on to its sequel....

Karen now describes her post-convent life in The Spiral Staircase.
After leaving the convent Armstrong became, basically an atheist.
She felt that she was done with God.
She knew almost nothing of the changed world she was entering, and she was tormented by panic attacks and inexplicable seizures. Her struggle against despair was fueled by a string of discouragements -- failed spirituality, doctorate and jobs, fruitless dealings with psychiatrists -- but finally, in 1976, she was diagnosed with epilepsy and given proper treatment.
The outside world did have something invaluable to offer Karen Armstrong. Freedom.
Freedom to explore her potential as a writer, which is what she would later come to understand as her true vocation, and place in the world. Through many circuitous events and experiences, Karen re-entered the personal quest for spiritual understanding by way of what can be termed “comparative theology.”
Focusing her studies on the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, her own true inner story began to emerge. In her writing she experienced the moments of transcendence that had eluded her during her years of intense nunnery-ness.
And the world has been the richer for the wonderful books that Karen Armstrong has produced, and continues to produce. She has become one of the world’s foremost religious scholars, her work having been translated now into more than forty languages.
Her memoirs are among the most gripping and hopeful of life histories I have ever read.

I love this comment that has been made concerning The Spiral Staircase:
“Opening this book is like sitting down for coffee on a first date with someone who is interesting and odd. Your conversation becomes unexpectedly intimate: painful tales of bafflement and illness, gleaming crystals of self-discovery and joy. By the time you get up from the table, you have fallen in love.”
—Rabbi Arthur Waskow, author of Godwrestling–Round 2: Ancient Wisdom, Future Paths.

I agree.
Truth be known, reading these books have made me feel as though I too..... no, I won’t say it.

In an interview with Bill Moyers, Karen Armstrong was asked:
Where are you in your own journey? You're not a practicing Catholic, are you?
She answered:
No. I usually call myself these days a freelance monotheist. I draw nourishment from all three of the religions of Abraham, uh, I spend my life studying these faiths, in a sense I'm still a nun. I live alone, and I've never married, and I spend my life writing and talking and reading and studying spirituality and God. And I can not see in essence any one of these three faiths as superior to any of the others. I suppose one of my hopes in life is to try to get Jews, Christians and Muslims to realize the profound unanimity, the unanimous vision that they share, and to join hands together to stop the kind of cruelty, violence and obscenity, moral obscenity that we saw on September the 11th.

I just love that.
A freelance monotheist.
This is what I want to be when I grow up.
A freelance monotheist Booklord!

These books are incredibly good.
I have gone on too long about it.
My coffee is cold.....