Karen Armstrong: I Was a Nun Who Couldn't Pray | SuperSoul Sunday | Oprah Winfrey Network

let's start at the beginning because uh this is one of the most fascinating memoirs I've ever encountered actually at 17 years old you were in search of God lots of people are in search of God they go to church they have their you know services they sing in the choir they commit themselves but you at 17 years old decided that you wanted to be a Catholic nun that you wanted to go into the convent yes your parents didn't weren't encouraging it they were pulled they were appalled by it yes what was that oh it's you know our motivations are always so complicated but once but you know how adolescence is a time of such confusion yes and I thought I would become sort of wise and serene and Buddha like almost immediately and then were you raised in a religious family not particularly religious we were Catholic yes but we didn't take it that seriously I mean we used to go to church get it out of the way on Sunday mornings so we could but you do every Sunday we did Mass every Sunday yes but that was that was about the size of it we weren't a really devout family at all you said in the very beginning that God would agree one of the reasons why you wanted to go in the convent is so that God would no longer be a remote shadowy reality but a vibrant presence in my life I would see him wherever I looked and I myself would be transfigured because as Saint Paul had said my puny little ego would disappear and Christ the word of God would live in me I would be serene joyful inspired inspiring perhaps even a saint these were your visions of what would happen in the convent and it was quite the contrary it didn't happen it didn't happen at all for one thing I was completely unable to pray which is a bit of a drawback for a nun I you know I I can concentrate for hours and hours at a time at my work I don't even notice the minutes passing but when I used to go in to make my meditation every morning off my mind went down every skittering kind of alley and by way and this was a source of terrible shame and I remember saying to my Sapir I just can't do this I can't do this meditation and she said no sister you're always so dramatic mhm everybody has an off day can you give us a bit of insight would you do so beautifully in the spiral staircase a bit of insight into what the daily routine was like I mean I felt like whoa well we'd get up at half past five in the morning half past five don't you know how that hard that is for an adolescence yes you have that need for sleep yeah I mean it's all deep hunger for sleep so you immediately you nun would come to the bottom of your bed and crash bang on the bottom and say blessed be the Holy Child Jesus and we had to leap out of bed and say now and forevermore amen and then we would wash in cold water by the side of the put on our habits huh and utter silence no talking at all from nine o'clock the previous evening until after mass nine o'clock the previous evening yes until after that's called the great silence and then you'd go down to make your meditation and or rather fail to make your meditation so a nun who couldn't pray yes and that because a nun is nothing except the quality of her prayer and my prayer was so bad it was off the charts so I there was a sense of great shame and sort of sorrow so what did prayer mean to you at the time versus what it now means well now um if you ask me to meditate I still get jitters mm-hmm that's because of that although close because of that yes but what for me no it's but it's my study and that's a source of great surprise it comes back to that silence that we were doing when I'm immersed in my texts I get many seconds of wonder at oh ah you're in contact with all these beautiful things people have been writing through the ages and suddenly things fall into place and now by Jewish friends tell me I should have been a rabbi because that's what Jews do when they study Torah and helmet they don't talk to God as Christians do but they just study and then they will get many seconds of enlightenment and Benedictine monks used to do the same practice you get little seconds of what if they called or Axio or prayer while you were study but when you were a nun and you would have to do this every morning go through the meditation prayer it was uh it was a ritual and it was was it because it was to organize - I think it must have been that I just could not do it God it seemed to sort of not that you

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Keywords: own, oprah winfrey network, own network, oprah, oprah winfrey, Super Soul Sunday, Karen Armstrong, nuns, convent, catholicism, finding god, spiritual, daytime, self-help, realization, happiness, fulfillment, spirituality, conscious living, I Was a Nun Who Couldn't Pra, nun, #supersoulsunday, SuperSoul Sessions, SuperSoul Sunday, super soul sundays, oprah super soul sunday, brene brown, Religion, God, Faith, Have and Have Nots, Iyanla Vanzant, Livin Lozada, Lindsay Lohan, how-to, season, episode

Id: 6A8M6x6a9PA

Length: 5min 15sec (315 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 09 2013