A big day for reading in the hottest apartment in Toronto.
After I finished Bedlam, I wandered over to my friend's bookcase to look for something to preoccupy me. It seemed I had caught a mild flu so the question of socks was out the window for today.
My friend has made the interesting decision to put all the in-house spirituality books on one shelf, the shelf directly at eye-level. Since I am at heart a browser and not a searcher, I picked a book by Karen Armstrong and took it with me back to the living room.
10 hours later, here I am book finished, sweating and a little hungry. I did actually make some noodles, and I did in the immortal words of Sheryl Crow "scrape the mold off the bread", I made regular toast though.
The book so good I ate moldy bread is called The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of Darkness. It is Armstrong's personal account of the years, the career and the transformation of faith that followed her decision to renounce her vows at the age of 24 and leave the convent she had joined when only a 17 year old in in 1962.
Of course the book is not simply about leaving her faith. It is about regaining one's sanity after nervous collapse, living with failure, finding a vocation, and ultimately discovering a transformative faith and in my opinion a renewal of the self.
It is also about developing compassion, in a major way, but I will leave that for tomorrow's post which will doubtless be huge unless I have to actually spend time with my family who would probably like to see me.
For now I will leave you with the T.S Elliot poem that served as inspiration for Armstrong's journey, and is a fitting testament to all people who wrestle with lives that seem not to be a "broad, noble flight of steps", but a "twisted spiral staircase".
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