Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Through The Narrow Gate by Karen Armstrong ISBN: 0-312-11903-8 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 15 November, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (22 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Hooked by A Nun Who Writes mit glorious adverbs!
Comment: I admit that I was really hooked when I got to Chap 3, page 62, when each of her fellow postulants began telling how they felt about their motives for being there. Best Example: "Marie, What brings you here?" (as though we'd met accidentally at a street corner.) Marie's answer, "It's such a beautiful life." Her black eyes which usually glinted in her face like shiny currants, misted over dreamily!" On the same page comes, "I smiled vaguely ... I nodded at her sympathetically...I told myself urgently!" On one page as in other places, Sister Karen uses 10 adverbs!
Again in Chap 6, "A Nun Takes the Veil..." Karen had the joyous task of ringing the Convent Bell... When she tries to get Mother Albert to hear her problem, as Mother is rushing down the hall "impatiently, shaking her heard "crossly and says, "I can't stop now, Sister," She said firmly. "I'm terribly busy!" When Sister Karen gets the words out, "I've broken the bell." Mother Albert was laughing helplessly, "You would, wouldn't you?"
Sister Karen not only lightened up in these early chapters but she gave far more seriously disappointing times that same touch of humor...even tho she was upbraided and reprimanded by Mother Albert. In her quandaries she comes forth with adverbs like "rebelliously." At her sewing machine with no neddle, "She knelt before the Mother and said, huskily." Next her feet treadled "busily" As she repeated, "mechanically, I cannot possibly spend my time more fruitfully!" Enough to show that it all seemed to become delightfully humorous, even tho she was surely thwarted and starved intellectually and many other ways!
Hooray for such a wonderful set-up to become an internationally famous OT Professor and an awesomely ingenius writer!
Retired Chap Fred W Hood
Rating: 4
Summary: An insider's look at a cloistered life
Comment: ....cloistered in a psychological as well as a physical sense.
Karen Armstrong, a woman of prodigious intellect and talent, a woman who has written seminal books on the subject of religion, goes inside her own personal experience as a cloistered nun in Through the Narrow Gate.
It's not a particularly pretty picture, this story of her seven years immersed in a life full of bleakness, medical neglect, sexual frustration, and mindless negation of intellect. For someone of Armstrong's mind-set, that last privation must have been hardest to bear. Outside the walls of the cloister, meanwhile, the chaos of the 60s was raging, making the life within more inexplicable - and ultimately, irrelevant.
There is one bright, kind, and encouraging Mother Superior, however, who provides the necessary window of light, a person who provides Armstrong with both a reason to stay and a reason to leave the convent.
It's a blessing for us that she did leave and go on to live her life as a scholar, teacher and author. It's almost an equal blessing, however, that she endured those 7 years and writes about it so poitnantly; it makes her presence in the world all the more valuable.
Rating: 5
Summary: thank you, karen
Comment: Behind the walls of the cloister, religious life goes on, hidden, and it is difficult for the lay person or anyone who has never attempted religious life to understand or imagine its character. For this reason, Karen Armstrong's Through the Narrow Gate (1981) provides an uncommon, precious look into religious life not simply in its externals but more importantly from the perspective of the individual psyche of the member of the religious community.
Several aspects of the book commend it for its insights into religious life.
First, the inner religious motivation of the individual is acknowledged so that a transcendent reality is even indicated: "As I looked at the tabernacle, which contained the Real Presence of Christ, I felt a pull toward Him that was almost physical in its intensity" (p. 38).
Second, the strictures that paradoxically both sustain and undermine religious life are highlighted. For example, there is the obligation of unthinking obedience: "One of the things that had to die was my mind....But the mind dies hard. To think and judge is a reflex. How do you ever manage to embrace the absurd?" (p. 163). There is also the injunction against preferential human affection, "particular friendship," so that in some cases the natural emotional life is distorted: "What a fuss! They celebrate when one of the sisters dies, but look at the emotion produced when something happens to a cat! There was something wrong here" (p. 226). In grappling with the many apparent contradictions, the author accounts for the inner struggles that eventually lead her to decide in conscience to leave religious life, and in the process, without condemnation, she raises troubling questions that institutions of religious life would do well to ponder.
Finally, at the moment of truth, the author continues to affirm the validity of the total commitment of the religious to a transcendent reality: "I did want things other than God's love. I wanted human closeness, beauty, freedom of mind....God's love should have been enough" (p. 260).
The whole book, then, affirms the genuine inspiration of religious life, while at the same time upholding the painful decision of the author, who comes across as a person of integrity, to pursue the spiritual quest elsewhere.
The most poignant moment in the book for me is when the author is counseled with words of memorable kindness to separate from the community: "We'll miss you, dear. You yourself. But you must find your own peace. God bless you" (p. 258).
I would agree with Kirkus Reviews, "An emotive, spiritually intimate, and often quite moving memoir...written with affection, some humor, and a bittersweet regret."
Thank you, Karen, for leading us to this refreshing pool wherein we may all find our own reflection.
 |
Title: In the Beginning : A New Interpretation of Genesis by Karen Armstrong ISBN: 0345406044 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 07 October, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
Title: The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong ISBN: 0345391691 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 30 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
 |
Title: A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam by Karen Armstrong ISBN: 0345384563 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 09 August, 1994 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
 |
Title: The Spiral Staircase : My Climb out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong ISBN: 0375413189 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 02 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
 |
Title: Buddha by Karen Armstrong ISBN: 0670891932 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 15 February, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
