When Spanish missionaries first pushed into the far country of west Texas, they were met by a crowd of Jumano people who left them astonished. These people had never laid eyes on a priest, yet they already knew of the Christian faith and asked to be baptized. When the friars asked how this could be, the Jumano described a beautiful young woman in a flowing blue cloak who had been coming to them, teaching them, and telling them the missionaries were on their way.
Word of the mysterious Lady in Blue eventually traveled all the way back across the ocean, to a convent in Spain, where a young nun named Maria de Jesus de Agreda wore a cloak of exactly that blue. For years, she said, she had fallen into deep trances in which she felt herself carried across the sea to a far and unknown land, where she taught the Gospel to a people who had never heard it.
She insisted she had never once left her convent in Spain. And yet she could describe that faraway land and its people in detail, and she ...