This week's QPB Reading Group Pick is The Tulip and the Pope by Deborah Larsen. Some of you may remember her novel The White, the tale of white girl captured by Native Americans in the 19th century, which QPB offered a few years back. Here Larsen has broken away from fiction and written a memoir of her own experience as a Catholic nun. It's a stunning, eye-opening look into a struggle between commitment and faith.
Take a look inside with this excerpt from the book:
I 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.
What 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.
So 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.
In the beginning God created heaven and earth.
And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters.
I 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.”
Since 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.
How 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.
You 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.
Why 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.
“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.”
I 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.
"A novel with a powerfully unsettling moral conundrum at its heart: is radical evil indelible, can anything undo it? But what philosophy cannot resolve, storytelling triumphantly can. Lavigne’s radiantly imagined portrait of human possibility never obscures the blackest abyss of real history, and his Heshel Rosenheim emerges with all the complexity of a modern Raskolnikov"—Cynthia Ozick, author of The Shawl 