Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion: Memoir in Action

A few months ago I read and reviewed Karen Armstrong’s memoir The Spiral Staircase here. At the time I never imagined that I would have the opportunity of meeting her. Imagine my delight, then, when she announced that she would use her TED (Technology, Education, and Design Prize Money) to create a Charter for Compassion–and even greater excitement when I learned that the Fetzer Institute would become a partner in that effort.

I encourage you to watch the video below and promise the 21 minutes will go by fast.  If you don’t have that much time, you can watch the wonderful short video of the charter itself, read by people from many countries, religions, and all ages.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJMm4RAwVLo&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

As a result of our partnership with TED and Karen,my colleagues Susan and Gillian participated in the Launch of the Charter, and the three of us traveled to NYC to talk with TED folks and Karen herself to plan another meeting in January.

I hope to ask Karen about the role her memoir writing played in the selection of the Charter as her life work. In the TED prize video above Karen reiterates the stories she tells in her memoir about how failures led to finding her calling in life. Her love of learning, distaste for fundamentalism and oppressive hierarchy, and discovery of compassion as the root of all religion eventually overcame all the obstacles to her first two career choices–the nunnery and the academy. Today she is one of the most widely known writers and speakers on the subject of religion in the world.

Memoir writing done well leads to a clarifying of one’s purpose in life. I can think of no better example of this than Karen Armstrong’s memoirs leading to the Charter for Compassion.

Perhaps career counseling should include the writing of a memoir. What was the shape of your spirit in your youth? Are you answering the call of your own uniqueness in your life and in your work?

Around the World in 80 Days: Reflections on Recent Travels

Pittsburgh:  Saturday morning. Post-Starbucks and pre-wedding planning day with Kate and Nik, Anthony and Chelsea, Ila and Neal.In a mellow, grateful, Thanksgiving Weekend mood.

It occurred to me, as I was returning from my third trip to NYC last week, that perhaps I have been around the world (24, 901 miles) in the last 80 days. Using rough estimates of round-trip mileage, it appears that I can claim Jules Verne’s title if not his characters’ adventures: Here were my trips since September:

1. NYC Sept. 10-13

2. Vancouver Sept. 24-28

3. Los Angeles Oct. 9-11

4. Tulsa Oct 15-17

5. NYC Oct. 22-26

6. Prague Nov. 9-15

7. NYC Nov. 19-20

8. Pittsburgh Nov 25-28

Travel extends the mind’s eye like no other experience, even the “frigate” of a book, to borrow Emily Dickinson’s phrase.  When outer journeys lead to inner journeys and inner ones extend out into the world, growth happens. Does the “inner imprint” of growth justify the outer impact of a big “carbon footprint”? I can’t claim that it does. I feel an obligation to the earth to become a better person if I expend the personal and business expense (not just in dollars but in time and carbon also) of travel.

One way to make travel worthwhile is to “ponder it in the heart,” which is one reason I value blogging.  Already readers of 100Memoirs.com have learned about the wedding trip in September to NYC.  And along the way Stuart and I have shared on FaceBook a number of slideshows intended to be “frigates” for friends and readers who are interested in either the places we visit or our experiences of those places.

For now, I will simply offer you links to slideshows and then ask you to share your own reflections on travel and self-exploration.

Wedding weekend slideshow:  New York, Sept.

Vancouver Peace Summit/Fetzer Prize for Love and Forgiveness to Archbishop Tutu and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Second slideshow featuring Vancouver.

Tulsa, OK, weekend with our new daughter-in-law Chelsea’s family.

Combo slide show of LA, Tulsa, and NYC-all October weekend trips.

Personal/business trip to New York with Anthony,Chelsea, Bill Moyers, Judith Moyers, Judy Collins

Prague business (for me) and personal (for Stuart with me squeezing in a little tourist time also)

NYC quick business trip to see Karen Armstrong at TED headquarters. No slides.

Pittsburgh. Slides will follow.

Stuart traveled to Lithuania right before I went to Vancouver. Here are his pictures from that trip.

Between the two of us we may have circumnavigated the world twice in the last 80 days. We feel blessed and stretched. And obligated to you and to the rest of the world. Travel is a great privilege. We hope to settle down for a few weeks in the Advent season and “ponder these things in our hearts.”

What have you learned from your own travel? What would you like to know about the trips described above?

The Spiral Staircase: Spiritual Memoir the Second and Third Time Around

Karen Armstrong’s life story illustrates the hero’s journey described in my previous post.  Her memoir’s title follows the traditional pattern of separation and hints at the initiation and return that happens within the pages of the book: The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness. Armstong builds her book on the scaffolding provided by T. S. Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday.”

With an archetypal pattern embedded in both her life and in the poem, Armstrong launches the story of her double voyage–leaving home to go to the convent and leaving the convent to enter the world.  What makes her story fascinating, and inspiring, is that she speaks frankly of the two failures that launched her into her true vocation. She wanted to be a nun and had to leave the convent in order to save her life.  She wanted to be a professor and was denied access to that profession by her examination committee.

The failure to become a nun occupies the first three chapters of the book and evidently retraces some of the story Armstrong has already told in two previous memoirs:  Through the Narrow Gate and Beginning the World.  Armstrong’s first two books were memoirs written in comparative youth.  The latter book is no longer in print, a fact which gladdens the heart of the author because she now considers that story to have been told prematurely.  In fact, The Spiral Staircase is a deliberate rewriting of that second book, a way to retell the story of her newly secular life.

Her failure to become an academic seems quixotically sad, equal in many ways to the tragi-comedy of her seven years in a convent.  Though she excelled in her work in English literature at Oxford, Armstrong had the misfortune of having a hostile examiner with enough political power in the university to fail her on her doctoral exams, even after she had completed a dissertation on Tennyson.

Very few people with two career failures, a suicide attempt and several visits to a mental hospital go on to find a vocation which has a place for all those experiences built right into it.  But that is exactly what Karen Armstrong did.

Before she could become the bestselling author, media maven, and public speaker she is today, she needed two things:  to hit bottom spiritually and academically and to have her first gran mal epileptic seizure in the Baker Street Tube Station.  The failure to pass her Oxford doctoral exam led her to a new love of reading for its own sake and new depth of perception in what she read.  The seizure, at the age of 31, finally led her to a neurologist, the kind of doctor she had needed all along.

Once she lost her fear of losing her mind, she gained not only her mind but also her heart and spirit.  Eventually, she became a student of religion instead of a devotee.  She found God in the Many as well as in the One.  She fulfilled her vocation by helping herself and others probe the mysteries of the spiritual life within the religious traditions of the world.

Armstrong’s story has all the drama of a fairy tale–terrors, villains, struggles, as well as magic–fairy godmothers in the form of colleagues who tell her she is a writer, introduce her to editors, and even one who buys her a typewriter and then leaves her alone with instructions to write the first two pages of her book.  Similarly magical synchronicities lead her into her first television programs and later into writing books on world religions.

Through the Narrow Gate, her first book, published in 1981, before the word “memoir” was all the rage in the literary world,  became the portal through which a new Karen Armstrong began to climb the spiral staircase to her new vocation of public intellectual and spiritual guide.

The author admits in her conclusion that the spiral form is actually a circle.  That admission brought to my mind another T.S. Eliot poem even more famous than “Ash Wednesday.”  At the end of the Burnt Norton cycle, is the poem “Little Gidding.”  Below is the whole last section, including the very oft-quoted first lines but also the conclusion:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Through the Narrow Gate was first an “unremembered gate” which became remembered through the power of language in Armstrong’s first memoir.  This sequel, as the author calls The Spiral Staircase in her introduction, comes close to achieving “a condition of complete simplicity” in many places.  But it leaves me with one question.

What will happen in another 20 years?  Armstrong’s first memoir was written when she was 31, this one when she was 59.  Will she tell the whole story again when she is 80?  I hope so!

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.