Faith & Spirit Quote by Karen Armstrong

Armstrong’s line lands with the bluntness of a hangover confession: not doubt, not intellectual disagreement, but disgust. The force is in the physical language - “worn out,” “nothing whatever,” “how awful” - which turns religion from an idea into a substance that can exhaust you, even sicken you. She’s describing burnout before the term became popular: a system that asked for total psychic buy-in and left her depleted enough that even seeing someone else “reading a religious book” triggers recoil. That small train detail matters. It’s public, ordinary life; the private institution follows her out into the world like a smell on clothes.

The intent isn’t to score points against faith so much as to testify about what happens when spirituality is mediated through pressure, discipline, and institutional control. “After I left the convent” is doing heavy contextual work: mid-century Catholic convent life, especially for a young woman, often meant obedience, regimented time, and intense moral scrutiny. The subtext is that the problem wasn’t only doctrine; it was proximity to an enclosed environment where religion could become totalizing, a closed loop with no room for messiness or selfhood.

There’s also a quiet reversal of the pious gaze. The religious reader on the train becomes the object of her judgment, mirroring the moral surveillance she likely experienced. It’s a sharp portrait of how institutions can turn the sacred into something that feels coercive - and how long it takes to recover a language for meaning after that coercion has done its work.