Hello and welcome to Psychic Teachers. I'm your host Samantha Feigh and I'm Deb Bowen and we're so happy to have you here this week. We're going to be discussing our book club selection, which is Sue Monk Kids book the book of Longings.

Before we dive into it, I thought we would just tell you guys a little bit about Sue Monk Kids in case you haven't heard of her.

You're probably familiar with her bestselling novel The Secret Life of Bees, which spent almost three years on the New York Times bestseller list.

She also wrote the Mermaid Chair and the Invention of Wings. Sue was also the author of several acclaimed nonfiction books, including The New York Times bestseller, traveling with pomegranates, which was co-written by her daughter, and Kid Taylor.

Who lives next door to her in Chapel Hill North Carolina, which I just think is so sweet.

The book of Longings is a story that is very, very, very dear to Deb's heart and she's going to talk about that in a minute.

It's a fictional account imagining what if Jesus had a wife.

And Sue writes that she got the idea for the book in 2014 when she read a National Geographic article about a piece of an ancient manuscript found which hinted at Jesus being married.

She told The New York Times it turned out to be a fraud, but my imagination was ignited.

I thought if Jesus's wife ever existed, she would be the most silenced woman in Western history.

And that was all it took. I got up every day for four and a half years and tried to give her a voice.

She also did a ton of research for this book. She read about Jesus, Palestine, and Jewish women philosophers in Alexandria.

The book itself focuses on Anna, who's almost 15 years old when we first meet her at the opening of the book.

She's smart, educated, and rebellious young woman, who's put the truth to a much older widow against her will.

She's raised in a wealthy family and gallantly during the time of Roman control of Israel.

After a chance meeting with an 18-year-old Jesus, she falls in love.

Now her father is the chief scribe and he kind of reluctantly teaches his daughter to read and write.

She learns Hebrew and Greek, but her deepest longing is to be a writer.

The prayer she longs to see fulfilled is,

bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it.

Bless my read pens and my inks. Bless the words I write.

When I am dust, sing these words over my bones. She was a voice.

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