{"product_id":"the-tulip-and-the-pope-isbn-9780375712906","title":"The Tulip and the Pope","description":"The story of novelist and poet Deborah Larsen's young womanhood, \u003ci\u003eThe Tulip and the Pope\u003c\/i\u003e is both an exquisitely crafted spiritual memoir and a beautifully nuanced view of life in the convent.In midsummer of 1960, nineteen-year-old Deborah shares a cab to a convent. She and the teenage girls with her, passionate to become nuns, heedless of all they are leaving behind, smoke their last cigarettes before entering their new lives. In the same artful prose that distinguished her novel \u003ci\u003eThe White\u003c\/i\u003e, Larsen's memoir lets us into the hushed life of the convent. She captures the exquisite peace she found there, as well as the extreme constriction of the rules and her gradual awareness of all that she is missing. Eventually the physical world—the lush tulip she remembers seeing as a girl, the snow she tunneled in, and even the mystery of sex—begins to seem to her an alternative theater for a deep understanding and love of God.\"[An] evocative and intelligent memoir. . . .Larsen summons up a lost world.\"—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[Larsen] recalls . . .an era when life in a nunnery, for many woman, was the only counterculture available.\"—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Movingly and honestly explores an innocent girl's faith and subsequent coming-of-age.\"—\u003ci\u003eBookpage\u003c\/i\u003eDeborah Larsen grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and currently lives in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. She teaches writing at Gettyburg College, where she holds the Merle S. Boyer Chair. She is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe White, \u003c\/i\u003ea novel based on the life of Mary Jemison, and a collection of poetry, \u003ci\u003eStitching Porcelain.\u003c\/i\u003e Her poems and short stories have appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe Nation, The Yale Review, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker, \u003c\/i\u003eamong other publications.Becoming a Postulant\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eTaxi\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBlue smoke curled out of the taxicab windows.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe driver, who had just parked outside what looked like a stone mansion, waited; he had most likely been through this before. Three of us, three young women, sat in his Yellow Cab and smoked our cigarettes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe mansion was the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And this day, July 31, 1960, was Entrance Day, the day we would give our lives to God by joining the convent. About two weeks earlier, on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, on July 14, I had celebrated my nineteenth birthday.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOther taxicabs were pulling into the motherhouse like limousines to the Oscar awards or like horses to the Bar X corral. One hundred and eighteen of us wanted to become nuns.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMany of us were edgy and sat smoking and speculating a little, like starlets or cowpunchers before it was time to crush out the cigarettes or flick them away and do the next things that needed to be done.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEdgy, yes, we were—but also blithe to become nuns, just as Thomas More had been blithe to bare his neck and have his head neatly sliced off by the likes of the black-hooded executioner in A Man for All Seasons. Thomas was so chipper because he knew he was headed for God, would see God face-to-face. Robert Bolt has Thomas say—or maybe Thomas said it himself—that God “will not refuse one who is so blithe to go to him.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn a way, we were going to Him now.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was going to Him now. When I died, why would He refuse me if I had been a good nun? It was quite a bit like being a princess; eventually I would come into my own and inherit the transfigured earth and the kingdom of heaven.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMaybe the Yellow Cab driver, unless he was Catholic, actually did think he was my executioner. I would give him a big  tip, all the money I had left, and I would give him the rest of my cigarettes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe motherhouse, the convent of wine-colored stone, looked huge as a Cotswold manor house or an estate in Croton-on- Hudson. But the river at the base of the bluffs on which this building stood was the Mississippi, as it flowed past the southern edge of the city of Dubuque, Iowa.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1960 most of us didn’t know much about the path of the Mississippi or the life on it or where the bluffs began or ended. Did the river mostly remind us of the flux of all things, or even of Jim and Huck? It did not. It might have been the Tiber or the Loire, the Tigris, the Ruhr, or the Yangtze. No matter. What we wanted that day was to become nuns.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe didn’t give a fig about our position in the landscape.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eSmoke\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy friends Teresa (Tessa) and Kathleen (Kathy) and I thought of ourselves as savvy. We knew what to do because another friend’s sister, who was already a nun in the order we were joining, had told us the tradition. On Entrance Day we were to give our last cigarettes to the cabdriver.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe three had come in the Yellow Cab across a bridge over the river, from the train station in East Dubuque, Illinois. We had gotten on that train at Union Station in Saint Paul, Minnesota—our hometown.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTwelve young women in all had come from Minnesota to be nuns, but I knew Tessa and Kathy the best. I had been friends with Tessa since we were both about five years old. She had lovely black hair and an interesting, angular face and white teeth; some of her relatives had been actors; she was talented in art and she spoke her mind in an honest way. Kathy came from a large family and had brown hair; her eyes and her mouth worked together when she smiled, and we always felt we could trust her and her kindness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA letter from what would be our new community had earlier asked that our parents please not drive us to Dubuque. The Sisters wanted to avoid what could always threaten to turn into weeping and the gnashing of teeth at their gates.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJust watch your daughter disappear through the doors of a convent. Try looking down at her feet in black flats walking away from you into the religious life. Better to put her on the train, the Burlington Northern, so that it felt like she was going off to  college.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI sat in that cab and smoked two cigarettes at a time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo be funny.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI thought I was being funny, trying to look frantic to smoke them all up, juggling the two lit cigarettes, Kents, in my ringless fingers. In the end, I would still have plenty of cigarettes left for my taxi driver, who undoubtedly watched us through his rearview mirror. I felt like a comedian.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe had smoked since freshman year in our all-girls Catholic high school, which was called Our Lady of Peace. We certainly weren’t allowed to smoke at Our Lady of Peace. But after school some of the bolder of us—not I—would walk a couple of blocks down Victoria Street to, say, Grand Avenue and step into their boyfriends’ ’55 Oldsmobile 98s or ’56 Chevrolets (which action was also not allowed by our school), and within thirty seconds the smoking started. Off they went, Bernadette inhaling, Tom exhaling; Patricia blowing smoke through her nose, Mark grasping the knob on his steering wheel to make a dashing left turn, a louie.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe had been instructed to bring only enough money to get us to the convent, and I must have tried to calculate it before I left home, which was on Goodrich Avenue in Saint Paul: so much  for a ham sandwich and a Coke on the train, and maybe a  Nut Goodie or a Mounds bar; so much for cab fare and tip—that was it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd so we handed over that cab fare and that tip and the  rest of our cigarettes, and that part was over. The cabdriver thanked us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe thanked him. It was time, just the way it was “time” when the curtain went up in the high school plays in which we had acted. Mother Was a Freshman. The Song of Bernadette. The Little World of Don Camillo.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It’s time, girls.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe stopped laughing, got out of the cab, and walked up the sidewalk.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSeveral Sisters were at the door to welcome us. Even before I stepped over the threshold I felt relief from the heat. The motherhouse, I thought, was going to feel good compared to the muggy Iowa summer afternoon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI had seen the motherhouse before but I had never been inside.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBut Why\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI had seen the motherhouse, Mount Carmel, because I had lived in Dubuque while I attended Clarke College for a year before I entered the convent. Some of my friends and I had driven across town to look around the convent grounds.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What about waiting a year?” my parents had finally said when I told them I wanted to become a nun right after high school.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey had not stopped and stared; they had not winced; they had not blinked—although one time after I had sat holding one of my sister Judy’s newborns, my mother said, “I saw you looking at that baby.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey just said, “Fine. But what about waiting a year?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the end, I waited and went to college for the academic year 1959–1960.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo one asked me why I wanted to be a nun. No one needed to ask, except the young Protestant couple who lived next door. I hadn’t known many Protestants, but I loved this couple.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“But why do you want to be a nun?” they would ask. (They, like most of us, had never heard of the older distinction between a Sister and a nun; the latter belonged to what was called a contemplative order, and was cloistered.) From the screened porch where they sat drinking Old-Fashioneds before dinner, they had watched me go out on date after date.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI would sigh.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWould Protestants understand how much you loved God? Could you speak to them about such a thing without their getting embarrassed?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBashful\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI loved God. Maybe I could have spoken to my neighbors in the language of the parts of scripture I loved best. In this way, it wouldn’t have sounded just like me. For I was bashful. I didn’t want to sound like myself—who was I, anyway?—or like some sentimental dope.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat other language did I have, really, besides the one that had been handed to me by the Church and the scriptures? The only ideas I had about God—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost—would have come from tradition, from authority. It was important in those days that the words be sanctioned so I didn’t end up sounding bizarre or, worse, heretical, like the Arians, the Gnostics, or those southern French Albigensians who had been exterminated, according to the dictionary, during the Inquisition. The language of Holy Scripture, which I took to be the language of God and of the Roman Catholic Church—for the Church in a sense owned the whole Bible, I thought—was thrilling.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo if I had thought of it, I could have taken the Bible—for we had not memorized long passages in those days—and read from it to my neighbors. It would have been just like Readers’ Theatre, in which I had participated in high school.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the beginning God created heaven and earth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI would continue reading aloud about how God created a light, which He called Day, and a darkness, which He called Night; about how the firmament came from His Hands and the creeping creatures and the great whales. The winged fowls and seeds that grew into herbs and trees would come next. And then man and woman, and the river that divided into the four heads of Phison, Gehon, Tigris, and Euphrates. I would read the part about how God brought the beasts and the fowls to Adam “to see what he would name them.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSince God wanted “to see” what Adam would name them, I would eventually decide that God was quite a curious Person. Such curiosity on His part endeared Him to me, as did His allowing mere humans to name the things of this world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow could you not adore the Person who had done all  this? He made everything. He must have been something. Why does something exist and not nothing? Easy. Someone was  kind enough to create it. He dreamt things up: you would  never have thought of seeds, for instance. What you couldn’t do with seeds down through the ages! And herbs: he must have thought of something for healing and to flavor cooking. And Leviathan: all that baleen for straining plankton. What an imagination. Everything was absolutely original with Him, the  Absolute.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou shrugged off all the cranky things God did in the Hebrew Bible—which most of us called the Old Testament in 1960—and you absolutely loved this Person, the One Whom you could just imagine moving over the waters. You wanted to live as close as you could to Him, live in His Shadow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhy not dedicate yourself to Him as completely as you could? It was a cinch. Why didn’t millions of people do this every day, like the lemmings in the Arctic who sometimes grow so restless for something that they leave home and head downhill to wherever water is and think nothing of it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Because,” my mother would say. “Because if everyone entered religion”—in those days, in going into the convent or the monastery or the seminary, one “entered religion”—“eventually there would be no people.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI took that as a joke. Or I took it to mean that she thought that the world needed marriage in order to produce little babies who would grow up to be people.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305251983589,"sku":"NP9780375712906","price":14.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375712906.jpg?v=1767741933","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-tulip-and-the-pope-isbn-9780375712906","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}