Customer Reviews

Beginning the World

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I got this book to see if Karen Armstrong faced many of the same obstacles I did after leaving the convent's "protected" enviroment. The book was engrossing and in many ways close to my experiences after leaving. I had to laugh as we both faced the drafty mini-skirt experience and relief when skirts lengthened. But that adjustment to secular dress is minor to the real adjustments to the secular world.

The hardest journey is the slow and painful shedding of convent life and not recreating it in the new world entered. Like her I stayed in the academic world and recreated a convent life by attending a woman's college. She studied literature, I studied religion. She lived with a special needs child and I taught in a special needs program. The similarities were so shocking as I read I both had to put the book down and pick it upagain. I could not let go of the book and the book of me. At times I felt we were in the same place but I was not as she was in a Roman Catholic convent in England and I was in an Anglican/Episcopalian convent in the United States.

We both shared the convent's abuse rooted in a life of emotional repression as best described by one of her superior's as well as mine. "Feelings do not count." Even our abuse had similarities and life long consequences.. that is why the hardest journey is after leaving. The convent veils had to be cut,torn, penetrated and sugically removed to enter life, human life.

Thank God, we both did.

I have a great debt to Ms. Armstrong for her writing this book. I was astounded how my cult experience in Jehovah's Witnesses was parallel to that of a Catholic nun: living in a closed religious group and suddenly being out in a world we did not know how to live in. The book details Ms. Armstrong's struggles to adjust in "the real world" and move forward. She opens even the most personal details of her life for you to know as she pours out her story in vivid detail. To have gone from a desperate woman who seriously attempted suicide to a successful best-selling author has been a pleasure to see. Her books "A History of God" and "The Battle for God" along with her excellent "Buddha" helped free me from the clutches of fundamentalism. Thank you, Karen. I look forward to reading the updated version of this book, "The Spiral Staircase."

"Beginning the World" was written by a former nun and this is the memoir of her painful, but triumphant, journey into secular life. In this 243-page hard bound book, Ms Armstrong presents the fascinating account of her life after leaving the convent ~~ the story of a young woman of 24 years who was totally unprepared for the shock of confronting the real world. Writing with both sensitivity and humor, she describes the agonies of adjustment to a world in which people touched each other ~~ laughed, drank wine ..... made love. She tells of the painful realization that her body and even her mind were resisting the changes she was imposing upon them ~~ to the point that she began to doubt her sanity. But ~~ she also writes of the tenderness of friendship and the awakening of passion .... the growing understanding that the soul could not be saved at the expense of the body. It has been said that Karen Armstrong faced many of the same obstacles faced by other former nuns after leaving the convent's "protected" enviroment. The hardest journey was the slow and painful shedding of convent life and in not recreating it in the new world entered. "Beginning the World" has been praised by many former nuns who have called it "..... emotive, spiritually intimate and often a quite moving memoir ...", "..... Her (Karen Armstrong's) book has the fascination of any DETAILED descripiton of an unknown world ...". Ultimately, this is the story of a woman's growing awareness of the possibilities that life offers ~~ a triumph neither of flesh nor spirit alone, but of humanity.

I have not read this book, but I am in the middle of reading Armstrong's "Spiral Staircase". It appears that "Staircase" is essentially Armstrong's effort to write "Beginning the World" again, only with the wisdom and perspective of time. In the preface to her newest book, the author (probably too harshly) describes "Beginning the World" as "the worst book I have ever written," and says that it was created too soon after she left the convent. In fact, she says, she never actually "began the world", and still has not managed to fully integrate herself into the secular world, despite her apparent belief that she could at the time. I appreciate her honesty and willingness to go back again -- no easy thing for a writer. And I do recommend "The Spiral Staircase", as well as its predecessor, "Through the Narrow Gate", quite highly (at least thus far). It might be interesting to compare the latter book's two sequels, written a generation apart. (I have given a 4-star rating because Amazon requires something in that field)

Beginning the world is as Karen Armstrong admits not her best but I am pleased that I managed to get copy to read, it does tend to be heavy on masochism, and leaves you expecting more at the end but your left wanting, the Spiral Staircase fills the gaps but doesn't include the original names of certain individuals and certain events as she also admits to, I still recommend it though.