The other day, in a little street library near me, I saw the book The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong, and knew it was waiting for me. Armstrong is also the author of A History of God, and by the time I got about five pages into this memoir, I recognized a kindred spirit. She entered a convent in her late teens full of spiritual zeal, but left it around seven years later, wanting nothing more to do with religion. Her story mostly recounts the time between leaving the convent and writing A History of God, and all the false starts and seeming failures that beset her on the path to finding her true calling.
On page 23, I found these words, which may have just changed my life: "Looking back, I can see that during those first few months [after leaving the convent], I was experiencing something akin to the culture shock of those who, for one reason or another, have been forced to leave homes in Pakistan, Palestine, or Zimbabwe and migrate to a Western country...Exile is, of course, not simply a change of address. It is also a spiritual dislocation. Anthropologists and psychologists tell us that displaced people feel lost in a universe that has suddenly become alien. Once the fixed point of home is gone, there is a fundamental lack of orientation that makes everything seem relative and aimless. Cut off from the roots of their culture and identity, migrants and refugees can feel that they are somehow withering away and becoming insubstantial. Their world--inextricably linked with their unique place in the cosmos--has literally come to an end." Armstrong goes on to analyze how, despite her desire to leave the religious life, she initially felt this sense of disorientation in the secular world as well.
These words describe to a tee how I have felt every time I have left England to return to the U.S. I am sure this sounds like hyperbole. After all, I am American. The phenomenon should work the other way around. But with me, it does not. My "home," however inexplicably, is in the choir stalls of an English cathedral, and in the orbit of these cathedrals and college chapels and that kind of musical and intellectual milieu. Yet I have spent about 59 of my 61 years outside that orbit, and this quote perfectly describes the ghostlike, surreal quality of trying year after year to function outside of my "unique place in the cosmos." Armstrong's words have validated something so enormous, so potentially tragic, that I have never quite wanted to fully articulate or face it. But the validation is also a relief. It's like having been sick for years and having a physician finally find the correct diagnosis.
A few years ago, a member of the clergy condescendingly told me that if God really wanted me to be in England at the heart of the world of this music I love, then I would already be there. At the time, I was outraged at his presumption. Yet now, four trips later and still finding the boomerang bringing me back to the States, even I have begun to wonder whether there may be some larger reason for my lifelong exile. I am dislocating yet again this week, to a space which will potentially allow me to make progress in discovering what that reason is. If nothing else, I will undoubtedly continue to explore in writing some of the issues faced when one is out of one's right place. This phenomenon is affecting growing numbers of people around the world; perhaps I am giving voice to something important. Indeed, social and technological change is happening so fast, even the most settled of us must be feeling pretty discombobulated. Where do we find our "fixed point," some small place within where we feel at home? It's hard to imagine a time when my writing will have moved beyond these topics.
I am grateful to Karen Armstrong for articulating my truth so well. I take heart from the fact that she eventually found her unique calling, which, of course, was simply a different iteration of her original passion. Hmm...
