One on One - Karen Armstrong

hello and welcome as a nun she was immersed in the Roman Catholic religion but then decided to expand her horizons and study other faiths her best-selling books on comparative religion have now become essential reading in many theology courses this week on one on one Mead the writer and commentator on religion Karen Armstrong born into a family of Irish descent living in the English Midlands she had a fairly uneventful childhood although the young Karen Armstrong did witness a father going through some tough Financial Times that shaped her view on life later she found her early school years tough at quite a young age decided she wanted to escape the rat race joining a convent to become a nun with the strict Society of the Holy Child Jesus it was an experience that triggered much of Armstrong's rejection of institutionalized religion and the search for a deeper and broader faith she gave up an academic career to write about her findings and the many fans have heard best-selling books find her pragmatic perspective on religion something of a relief from the preaching of hardline conservatives in the religious world strong global support from her readers has prompted Armstrong to continue to push for greater understanding and tolerance between the world's various faiths such a delight some time with you thank you thank you I love this expression you have to describe yourself that you're a freelance monotheists explain what that is well that was a remark I made in a light-hearted way and it's sort of dogged me ever since rhymes of sometimes wish I hadn't said that what I meant was that I've studied the three monotheistic religions Judaism Christianity and Islam now for about 20 years and I draw nourishment from all of them and I cannot see any one of them really as superior to any of the others let me ask you one thing that with all that study you've done the writing you've done over the years and you have studied these very thoroughly what do you feel is the one lesson you have learned there are two I think if I may one that belief accepting certain doctrines is not very important that our word belief in English meant commitment originally it meant it was much more action-oriented and that many of these so-called doctrines that we have say in the Christian world like Trinity and incarnation began originally as a call to action rather than just the acceptance of a particular idea and the second thing is that all the world religions insist that there's something wrong with your spirituality if it doesn't lead you to practical compassion to a profound respect for the four other people seeing other people as a sacred inviolable and unique that leads me to ask you is it easy to discuss religion nowadays or has has extremism and some extreme views have extreme views taken over too much well no there's I still find that but there's a wherever I go in the world in whether it's in Pakistan or United States or or Europe people are hungry for a religious voice that they want to hear about religion and they're well aware that extremism is the position of an extreme view I think too in England it's not so easy because England is a very very secular country and among the chattering classes it's almost de rigueur not to talk about religion I mean people actually ask me not to mention my work when I go around for dinner so I think there that it's among the chattering classes here religion is seen as passe but that's not so in in either the United States or Canada or the Muslim world not at all a lot of people say that religion is the root of all conflict you know that it's it's if looking any conflict going back you can put you know put the cause down to religion is that the case from all the research you've done no it isn't I thought I used to start out with that attitude myself and I've lost count of the number of taxi drivers who when I jump into a London cab ask me what I do for a living and I and then they tell me quite categorically that religions being the cause of all the major world in history was in history well the major cause of war and conflict is greed fear cruelty envy hatred ambition and it's true however that religion and other ideologies secular ideologies to have often been used to sort of give these rather self-serving and very destructive emotions are sort of a sort of some kind of legitimacy and that's unfortunate but in fact no I mean I think largely the wars have been caused largely by state structures by economic disparity by greed for other people's riches and wealth and that's still the case today but religion especially where a conflict becomes drawn out such as has happened say in the arab-israeli conflict religion get sucked in in the air and it becomes a part of the problem well let's take you back to your families of Irish descent you were born in Widmore and was to share before they moved I think soon when you were still young to to Bromsgrove and then Birmingham well there's only childhood years like oh they were okay I mean I we I wasn't from a very religious family we were Catholics but we didn't take that very seriously yeah so my decision later to become a nun was appalling it was lovely growing up in the countryside and I to be taken out for walks in the afternoon with my sister in the pram and there'd be a sort of a being a fairy or someone in every tree or every Grove but it was my way of sort of sacra lysing and making myself at home in my own landscape I think then when we were about ten we moved into the city of Birmingham and but we had a lot of ground I mean we have our garden looked led directly into a park so there was plenty of space to run around and enjoy the natural world I was I found school of pooling it was a mixture for me of both boredom and terror we were constantly sort of frightened by our teachers into behaving well and I would look at the clock wondering how it could pass so slowly except in the last two years then suddenly I began to see the point of learning and reading because I was concentrating on the subjects I like the best now in terms of all your family your parents the kind of influence they had on you how do you think they shaped your character each of them my parents were a rather wonderful couple my father was 20 years older than my mother my mother was very young when she had me my father became a a Catholic rather to please my mother I think and for social reasons there were many sort of deep conviction they were very very sociable they loved having parties and they had very little money and what little they had they they actually lost my father went bankrupt when I was about 14 or 15 which in those days was a real real disgrace but my mother was kind of an inspiration really because she had to go to work to sort of eke out the family finance and she'd had no training no qualification at all but she was very clever and she got a job in Bermuda versity in one of the department's of the medical school and by the end of her time there when she left at 65 after 35 years there as she was running the department administratively and her research was in the byline of medical articles she and after that she lived she went and did a university degree at the doing her first examination ever at the age of 67 so it was rather a matriarchal family the women were often the strongest people there and my grandmother too was I'm very like my grandmother both I'm small in stature and the rest of my family are extremely tall all the cup hooks were far out of my reach when I was growing up as a child but my grandmother was very very funny very witty she had problems and I think a lot of that problem was due to boredom I think I've been so fortunate in being able to be educated and take have a career I think I don't know what what I would have been like without without that I wonder with the the difficulties you saw your family going through with your father's bankruptcy and and your mother having to work how it shaped you how it made how at least it influenced what you might do in the future what you were thinking your might do well in it influenced me to become a nun apart from anything else it was I lived in Birmingham which is a very materialistic city all the talk was about money and status it was quite noticeable when my father was in trouble we lost a lot of our friends overnight they were remarks made at school for example and the fact that my mother went out to work which is in the 1950s was pretty unheard of and I was other nuns actually took me on as on reduced fees and a Catholic charity paid for my education and I could see that this was not a value that III wanted anything to do with and so at the age of 16 I decided that I wanted a life that wasn't dedicated to materialism and money and all these false values and that I would enter a convent and I would become sort of Buddha like and serene and holy and inspiring and it didn't actually happen but that was that was that I think that that experience really pushed me towards that it was the Society of the Holy Child Jesus that you learned what was what was life like in that environment people sort of know the stereotype you know image of it but was it was it that kind of very isolated and closed off environment it was isolated we were deliberately while we were being trained I was kept away from any news or news papers they did tell us for example about the Cuba crisis the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 which happened just after I entered because the world seemed about to end they thought they'd better notify but then they forgot to tell us that the crisis was over and we weren't supposed ever to ask for news of the world so for three weeks we were left scanning the horizon for mushroom clouds until finally one of us snapped so it was that kind of isolation when I left the religious life in 1969 I'd never heard of the Beatles for example I'd never heard of Vietnam which my fellow students at Oxford were very exercised about I knew none of the names of politicians so it was isolated it was also tough people who read my book say it reminds them of boot camp and it and that's not as odd as you might think because it was a Jesuit Order we had the Jesuit rule and Sint Ignatius had been a soldier and his idea was to make Jesuits soldiers of Christ that would obey simply like that not asking why or wherefore and when you're being trained as a soldier you know you have to be toughened up and so there it it was and I think what ultimately made me decide to leave was that it was not a kind place and increasingly I began to feel that this had very little to do with Christianity or the Gospels and but I wouldn't have missed that time not for anything I wouldn't be here talking to you now if I hadn't done that it started me out on some kind of quest I read that you said it literally drove you to being suicidal at one point not that was after I left this what do we had in those days and it wouldn't happen now because I was trained before the reforms that the Second Vatican Council came into effect and that did drastically change the way young nuns were trained but I so I had the old system and it's very last gasp but it did needed need reform but it was a form of conditioning and once I left the convent I found it impossible to exist outside that environment I'd been conditioned for that and though I didn't want to die particularly I didn't know how to live and I entered a state I think of extreme depression a sort of grief like for about six years rather like you might have after a bereavement or a very painful divorce and I also had the problem that I was having all kinds of symptoms of terror I would suddenly be engulfed in terror or I'd go out somewhere and we suddenly end ups in a completely different place from where I'd intended to go fortunately I with ended up in a quite edifying place like the Tate Gallery or something but they this was later discovered to be a temporal lobe epilepsy as a birth injury on that temporal lobe which interferes with memory and emotion and fills people with this kind of in all-engulfing dread and fear so I thought I was losing my mind really and the diagnosis of that epilepsy was one of the happiest days of my life I must say he found a cause yeah well I had some medication and I knew what was causing it so there what those were really really difficult years and you'd gone from being a nun in this isolated environment to st. Anne's College in Oxford he was in a totally different environment of course you know at a time when things were very outgoing and liberal well it was 1968 the Summer of Love not that I was participating in that I was far too still it's still a nun in my in my head and in my mind and they were sedans was a very political College so there was a lot of demonstration about Vietnam and and endless war against the Oxford authorities and demands to change the syllabus so at that time you decided you know yeah while at Oxford that's it no no more being a nun was it a sense of giving up on religion as such no that didn't come for about six or seven years after us well I remember waking up I moved to London to take up a job at London University for a while and I remember on the first Sunday I woke up in my London flat and I thought I'm not going to church that's it I tried to get in touch with God for all those years I'd failed I was completely unable to pray the kind of prayers and was not my kind of prayer it didn't suit me and the heavens remained closed I think I had an inadequate idea of God and was expecting things that were impossible and and I just found prayer utterly boring and tedious so I just let it all go and I thought that was it I thought from now on that's the end of me and religion if I used to see somebody on the London Underground reading a book on religion I used to feel positively ill never dreaming for a moment that I would be writing these so these books at a later stage you wrote your experiences in in the convent in your book through the narrow gate which I gather actually made you quite a target for some sort of devout or even I guess you know hardline Catholics yes especially in this country it's not so in the United States where Catholicism is more relaxed but Catholics in England definitely feel rather ghetto like there's been centuries of persecution here and so and there's also men most of us are Irish and that means that Nevers never we never really feel quite English either because of the problems between Ireland and Britain so when one of somebody breaks ranks and as it were wash his dirty linen in public that I've never been quite forgiven by that though I have been very much embraced by my old religious order which is in recent years which has been very wonderful a nice reconciliation then he did before the writing you did think about a career in academia and and he had that kind of a bit of a you know it would london university a bit of fuss over the PhD not a fuss it was Oxford University and I failed it and they failed it in a rather odd way the university too said decided the it hadn't been properly examined but they decided that the sanctity of the Oxford doctorate meant that it couldn't be re-examined I said that was the end of my academic career and that was awful because I was just beginning to recover from the convent I thought that this was something that I could do and then to have that sort of very notorious and public failure the Rauh about this went on for five months while they decided what to do with me so that was another awful thing but in fact I'm very glad now in retrospect because my aim had been to teach English literature and I'd now be teaching English literature in somewhere like reading or Aberystwyth or but in fact I've had a much more interesting life but and I think a will useful one and and and and I don't think the academic world would have suited me it's a bit narrow this the kind of writing that I do is not in fashion with academia I take these big subjects and in academia you polish a little tiny area so I think actually that was that bad failure with nudged me into a different direction a better direction for me what was it that triggered the writing if you what was it made that made you want to write about religion oh well I wrote my first book simply because people said you really ought to write about this and then I lost my teaching job my my life for until for the first 50 years of my life consisted of one disaster after another I'd be going along say in the convent then in academia and that the whole thing would collapse after about six years or so and I was a school teacher and then because of my epilepsy I was asked to leave and then I wondered what on earth I was going to do having been invalided out of teaching and then I got a telephone call from channel 4 television which had just opened up they'd never do this now but they asked me if I'd like to write and present a six-part documentary on some pool working with an Israeli film company in Jerusalem well of course I said yes and here I was unemployed I knew a little bit about sand Paul but not much but I thought I could learn on the job and indeed I did I had a but the big thing was I went to Jerusalem and he was that trip to the Holy Land that really changed a lot of it completely changed things first of all I knew when I arrived I knew nothing at all about the arab-israeli conflict but immediately you're thrown into it but also I start I when you're in Jerusalem you're rubbing up against both Judaism and Islam religions that I knew absolutely nothing about my Catholicism had been very parochial we didn't even think Protestants were really on the map as Catholics but when you're in Jerusalem I see I had to do and you see these faith you've realized their profound interconnection with each other at the same time as you realize their profound differences and I start and started learning about them all three and developing something that I called triple vision to try to see them all three at a tangent because some of the worst atrocities have happened when one religion gangs up on the other or when two faith traditions gang up on a third and so I I started writing about that I my relationship with the whole whole meaning of religion I think started to change now begs the question what difference do you think the work has made through the books you have done oh I don't know I don't know people tell me you've changed my life and you know I did you know in Muslim audiences that you know people are so enthusiastic that some of them not all about my work and it's something that I you don't when you're writing you don't really think of what effects you have the just the the struggle that you had if you like of writing a book is itself so all absorbing all consuming when you won the prestigious TED Prize in 2008 used you soon after setup the Charter for compassion explain that who supports it and what it's supposed to achieve well um Ted they give you some when you TED conferences when they when you win their one of their prizes they give you some money but more importantly they give you a wish for a better world which they will help you to come about to bring truth and I knew almost immediately what I wanted because as a religious historian it's long been a frustration to me that the religions all preach the ethic of compassion that doesn't mean feeling sorry for people or gusts of sentimental emotion it means treating others as you would wish to be treated yourself and so the religion should be making a major contribution to the chief tasks of our time which is to build a global community where people can live together in harmony and respect and it seems to me that unless now we learn to implement that golden rule globally so that we always treat all peoples even our so-called enemies as we would wish to be treated ourselves we're not going to have a viable world so I asked Ted to help me to create this charter it was contributed to by hundreds of thousands of people online on a multilingual website it was actually written and composed by leading activists in six of the major world religions Muslims Christians Jews Hindus and Buddhists and a Confucian and it's it's to its aim was to restore compassion to the heart of religion and moral life I'd like it to be cool to be compassionate for it to be one of those buzz words but also the charge was primarily a call to action and I'm happy to say in a way that Ted had never expected it's taken off in ways that we wouldn't have dreamed and we're starting now a campaign to create an international network of compassionate cities we've already got on board Seattle which declared the Charter last year Louisville in Kentucky is following but there are about 50 people going 50 cities worldwide going through the process now and one of the things that I'm insist on is that a compassionate City must have a global outreach must be doing something to create global understanding and awareness I'm thinking for example of twinning cities so that Lahore could twin with Chicago for example and so that so that this I couldn't start to break down some of these barriers of ignorance and distance and Prejudice that are often I'm afraid to say found by the media which often presents the most negative things about MIT about ourselves let me ask you how you'd like to be remembered what you'd like your legacy to be a peacekeeper I think someone who's helped people to try to understand one another's a difficult point in history journals from there thank you very much for your time thank you thank you very much you

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Length: 25min 7sec (1507 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 06 2011