Author's Note:

I grew up third in a chaotic Irish Catholic household including five brothers, two sisters, and parents whose thumbs were permanently stuck in a bursting dyke. The rigors of our religion counterbalanced the force of our insurrection, barely. Besides the plethora of rules and regulations, the threat of burning in hell for eternity was a nebulous, yet effective backdrop against more immediate punishments, such as standing in a corner for an hour, losing a month’s allowance, or, for me, the horror of housecleaning.

The clergy were a familiar presence in our home, both in the formal and informal sense. Dinner guests often included priests or nuns, either from the local parish or the extended community of family and friends. Unlike many Catholics I know, the clergy for me were more a factor of intellectual curiosity than intimidation. Like my mother, I enjoyed engaging them in debate, and felt free to express any passing idea, whether or not it complied with Vatican authority. Although I often enjoyed the company of priests and nuns, I never once entertained the idea of joining their ranks. After all, I thought, who in her right mind would want to become a nun and live without boys, not to mention the stifling outfits and orthopedic shoes? At that point in my life, the guarantee of eternal life was insufficient compensation for the fashion sacrifice alone.

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Of course the priesthood was a different matter altogether. Minus the celibacy, I was far better suited to that vocation in every way. Since the priesthood was not an option for my gender, I was free to roam the secular world without guilt. Even so, the more ethereal aspects of all religion and spiritual practice became a continuing avocation of mine. I was a born and educated metaphysical thinker, conversant in the theology and emotional embroidery of the mystical world. A world I had fallen in love with as a child through the stories of the saints.

From earliest memory, the lives of the saints were more compelling to me than Rumpelstiltskin or Cinderella. I collected holy cards: St. Lucy, Patron Saint of the Blind, whose plucked eyeballs were displayed prominently in a chalice; St. Therese of Lisieux standing euphorically amidst a shower of roses, promising miracles to the needy; St. Paul shielding his face from blinding light as he is struck from his high horse by a bolt of divine lightning. They were martyrs and virgins and prophets who spoke directly to God and got answers. For me, their lives suggested the prospect of miracles in my own. I have always believed in miracles, and over the years that belief has not diminished. In fact, at this point, I have grown to expect them.

I wrote The Sublime Transformation of Vera Wright because my own experience, faith (and antenna) tell me that there are saints and prophets among us now who, though seemingly integrated in the conventions of ordinary life, are exposed to powerful and confusing supernatural experiences that, if they share at all, they share only in closed circles. When conceiving this story, I asked myself: What if my next-door neighbor was a saint? Who would she be? What would her life be like? What radical divine Idea would she be asked to express to the contemporary world?

After a month of musing, I had some back story. First, the woman would be a simple saint. Overlooked. She would be quirky, loveable, and engaged in a humble profession. God favors the humble. Like many of the saints, she would not pursue sainthood, but back reluctantly into it. And finally, the awakening of her own spiritual psyche would engage her in the awakening of the larger spiritual psyche of her gender—a daunting task, and one that would challenge her, and at times overwhelm her. The task would be a timely one, a necessary one. One that I myself had been anticipating for a lifetime—one that the world had been anticipating for millennia—the Catholic Priestess. My heroine would be asked to champion the voice of women in a hopelessly patriarchal religion. A religion emanating from Christ, who above all, honored the disenfranchised. Christ—whose most faithful disciples were women. Whose female disciples stood fearlessly beneath the cross, and were the first to believe in his Resurrection.

My heroine's name would be Vera, derived from Truth, and she would be asked to start her own religious order of female priests…a church, if necessary—whatever it took to restore a powerful and fearless feminine voice to Catholicism in particular, and to Christianity in general. And her creation, the Society of Loaves of Fishes, would eventually become a church of possibilities—an open channel for the return of outright miracles.

I had the story. But who and what would Vera be? Where would she come from? Ultimately I decided that she would be a beautician, a profession concerned with the external and superficial aspects of women’s lives—their hair, nails, makeup, and of course, a good round or two of cheap gossip. An ordinary, chronic venial sinner, Vera would start out unaware of her constant judgment of others, also unaware of the deeper more dangerous pathology penetrating her own family. I would give her a troubled and narcissistic daughter, Mia, a Magdalene character whose dependency on drugs would supply Vera with the mandatory carnival ride through hell—the acid test of sainthood. Mia’s salvation through Vera’s unceasing effort and prayer would also create an heir apparent, a successor for the church’s continuing apostolic mission. (Sequels!) So now I had an every day saint who would suffer all the supernatural vagaries documented in Catholic history. I had a hairdresser, whose own internal transformation would ultimately transform the world. I provided her with a daughter, Mia, for conflict, a husband, Monk, for support, and a mighty band of female "disciples"; i.e., the housekeeping regulars at her parish church of St. Jude, the Patron Saint of the Impossible.

There were a few complications. I knew I could probably not write a story for an entire year without employing humor. But then when I thought about it—what was really funnier than superimposing the spiritual world upon the world of matter? The finger of God prodding the hapless and unsuspecting saint on her path to manifest destiny? An angel of God in the middle of a tattered living room? Astral travel? Automatic writing? Bilocation? Levitation? All the usual dilemmas of sainthood—at once deadly serious and wildly hilarious, depending on your outlook and personal history. Every day I wrote, I walked a fine line between comedy and tragedy. The result, I hope, is an inspiring, multi-dimensional, spiritually rich and theologically sound story told with a steady digestive of low-impact humor. A story about a real saint in a contemporary setting, who sets the world on its ear.

Why do I think the world is ready for this story? Because as consumers, we have already proven that our lust for the religious and the supernatural is unquenchable. We have driven in droves to The Passion of the Christ. We have read stories and memoirs by Kathleen Norris, Annie Lamott, Martha Beck, Sue Monk Kidd, Joan Chittister OSB, and many others. This body of feminine spiritual literature has shown us that, as women, we can either quietly struggle with convention waiting (centuries?) for our rightful place in the world of religion, or we can run like wolves through the mythical world of the Goddess. But is there no middle ground? No real option that would allow us to claim our rightful place within established religion—now?

Indeed there is—ask Vera. Vera, with the help of her disciples, the Martha’s, shows us how to find the collective feminine voice within conventional religion—in other words, seize it! Seize it with the courage and conviction of a saint under a mandate from God. As I wrote it, I saw women everywhere in my mind’s eye assembling as Vera has assembled her friends, around meals of loaves and fishes. I heard the mellifluous beauty of the feminine spiritual Voice finally emerging. I saw miracles traveling like lightning through simple acts of faith, miracles that could change the world. As Pascal wrote in Pensees, "The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it." In this book, my hope is that I have effectively braided reason, intellect and humor into a rope strong enough to swing from the mundane to the infinite.

Rea Nolan Martin