The Introduction to Seven Years of Plenty:

I was sitting quietly in the sunroom of my home unloading my feelings of sadness and guilt on God. I felt unlovely and unlovable. I recognized that I had hurt many people throughout my life in a struggle to be affirmed and loved. I asked God to forgive me and show me how to love in an authentic way. As I prayed, I suddenly felt as if I was lifted out of my body by an invisible presence and held, like a child being cradled by a loving parent. I felt a gentle caress on the back of my head and heard an audible voice whispering the words “beloved child” again and again. In the deepest part of me I knew it was God’s voice I was hearing and God’s touch I was feeling. I couldn’t remember experiencing that kind of tenderness and compassion before. Time seemed to stand still. I felt completely safe, accepted, loved, and cherished. I realized that this was a love that I had been searching for all my life.

I was fifty-one years old and had recently come with my husband to live in a rural area of Wellington County, Ontario, close to the Grand River. We had moved from the city of Toronto in an effort to live a more peaceful, less busy life. In Toronto, I had three part-time jobs teaching and performing music. My time was taken up with lesson planning, rehearsals, performances, social activities, and family responsibilities. I was employed as soprano soloist and section lead in a United Church choir. It was at this church that I began to rediscover a hidden desire to know God in a more intimate way. With the encouragement of the church minister, I developed a daily practice of Bible reading and prayer, following the Anglican Church lectionary. It felt like coming home after years of wandering in a spiritual desert.

My early religious training as a child and young adult was in an evangelical Baptist Church. The home where I grew up was only a half block away from the church and my three sisters and I (all of us born within a five-year span) were taken to Sunday School when we were still preschoolers. Our mother also became a regular attendee of services and prayer meetings. Mom trained the four of us to sing in two-part harmony and we sang regularly in church services as well as on a Saturday morning radio program called The Gospel Ship. Bible memorization and study was an important element of the church’s teaching, along with intercessory prayer.

At the age of sixteen, I attended a week-long Youth for Christ retreat. During a service, as the speaker delivered an inspirational talk, I was aware of a stirring within me. I don’t remember what the speaker said, but I felt (rather than heard) an inner invitation to open my life to God. My spirit was warmed and drawn to this invitation. I wanted to walk that path but felt I didn’t have the strength to live a spiritual life on my own. An inner voice promised to help me. It was the first of many turning points in my life. My heart was softened toward God, and I wanted to learn more about Jesus’s teachings. Bible studies and prayer became important to me. I had a sense of belonging to something greater than myself, and that gave me peace.

Music had always played an important role in my life because I loved to sing. My decision to give my life to God opened up an opportunity for two of my sisters and I to sing as a trio at weekly Youth for Christ gatherings across southwestern Ontario. We were also active in the music ministry of our church. Singing gave me so much joy that I began to study voice with a private teacher, an Ursuline nun. Prior to that I’d had very little contact with Catholics, but I had often heard preachers at my church say that Catholics did not teach the truth and were therefore going to hell. My teacher was a lovely, kind, and competent woman who lived in the Ursuline convent and wore an old-style nun’s habit. This was in the early 1960s, before the changes brought about by Vatican II. At one lesson, we got into a discussion about faith. I did most of the talking, telling her what my church had taught me to say about faith—that it was only available to those who acknowledged Christ as their Saviour. After I had rambled on for quite some time, she said quietly and humbly, “Do you think I could live as I do if I didn’t have faith?” Her question penetrated my thoughts and heart and stayed with me. Here was a woman who loved God and had committed herself to serving others. Yet my church taught that Catholic teaching was wrong and unscriptural. It didn’t make sense to me.

My love for singing and my growing love for God led me to enroll, after high school, in a US Bible college to study music and Christian education. My goal was to do mission work through radio at a station in Quito, Ecuador. I envisioned a life of singing the gospel message of love over radio in South America. What I didn’t realize until years later was that I was looking more for validation as a human being, as a singer, and as a Christian than for a way to serve God and the poor of the world. Missionaries were honoured and respected and valued in the Baptist Church, and oh, how my insecure spirit needed that.

I travelled to Chicago, Illinois, and began my studies at the Bible college with my dreams firmly in place. However, soon after I arrived, as I sat in the auditorium with the other first-year students listening to a group of seniors on the stage issuing words of welcome, my attention was drawn to one young man in particular. A voice within me said clearly, “That is the man you will marry.” I shushed the voice with my own disbelieving thoughts. After all, I wasn’t planning to marry but rather to go to Ecuador as a missionary. In coming to know the young man—Kem was his name—I discovered that we had similar spiritual goals. The one difference was that he did not feel a particular call to do mission work. But we fell in love and, after much soul searching, decided to marry. Kem was graduating and planned to continue his studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He asked me to go with him, and I agreed.

After our marriage, Kem and I spent a year in Ithaca then returned to Chicago where he began graduate studies in philosophy of religion, first at a seminary and then at the University of Chicago. We became involved in an inner-city church, LaSalle Street Church, which was located near the Cabrini-Green housing project. This was a progressive evangelical church that cared deeply for the poor who were living in slum conditions in the area nearby. The church was comprised of mostly young college students or graduates (many of them disgruntled evangelicals), young families, and some academics who drove in from the suburbs to help our struggling inner-city congregation. The pastor and music director were forward-thinking people who together constructed a liturgy each Sunday of Scripture readings, prayer, music, and sermon that had cohesiveness and meaning for me.

I worked as a volunteer in a club for young black girls from the housing project nearby. The group met weekly at the church. I also helped to prepare and serve meals monthly at the church to neighbourhood seniors, most of whom were lower-income black men and women. The children and elders I worked with were so genuine and totally unpretentious. They accepted me as I was with no expectations, and it was a joy to be with them week after week. Being married to a scholar—a graduate student—meant socializing with academics and I began to realize how insecure I was in that milieu. I felt I couldn’t measure up intellectually to Kem or his peers. The black children and elders, who were very poor, helped me to identify my own inner poverty.

The church had a wonderful choir, which I became part of. Not only did this satisfy my need to feel valued, but it also gave me deep joy to sing sacred choral and solo music by some of the world’s great composers.

As I look back, I see that the six years spent in Chicago were filled with grace. Two daughters were born to us, Jeni in 1970 and Erin in 1975, and they were truly precious gifts from God. I developed close friendships with several women from the church—women who had similar evangelical backgrounds to mine and who were asking the same spiritual questions. The church leadership did not make judgments about our questions but rather encouraged honest searching. Women were respected for themselves and the gifts they brought to the community. The church’s strong focus on social justice helped me to see that this was an essential component of Jesus’s message “to love God and love your neighbor as yourself.” LaSalle Street Church was a place of welcome for everyone—young, old, black, brown, East Asian, white, gay, lesbian, straight. I learned the meaning of true hospitality there.

In 1975, shortly after Erin was born, our little family left Chicago to join with some friends in forming an intentional community in New Glarus, Wisconsin. It was becoming expensive to live in Chicago and only one person in the community had a full-time job. Kem had finished his course work for a PhD at the University of Chicago and needed only to write his dissertation. We hoped to live off the land as much as possible in the rural area where we settled, renovating an old Amish farmhouse in exchange for rent. Kem planted several gardens, and we acquired hens to provide eggs, goats for milk, bees for honey, and rabbits, geese, and a pig to raise for meat. There were many hopeful things about this experience. We learned about living frugally and simply, about sharing food and material goods, about sharing tasks such as cooking, washing dishes, cleaning, and laundry, and about caring for the animals and doing renovations. We also discovered our personality quirks and the effort it took to get along together. We didn’t have many community meetings to discuss problems that arose, nor did we pray together. The lack of communal prayer meant that we had very little spiritual glue to bind us. At the same time, I had stopped setting aside a time each day to pray on my own—I was too busy caring for my young children and carrying my share of community tasks. The community folded after about six months. Kem and I and the girls moved to the closest city, Madison, Wisconsin. This was really, for me, the beginning of a long inner loneliness.

After spending a few months in Madison, we prepared to move again. Kem was offered a teaching position at Eastern Mennonite College in Harrisonburg, Virginia. I had hopes of finding there another community like LaSalle Street Church. It wasn’t to be, but I did discover a group of people who knew how to sing beautifully in four-part harmony, who were family-oriented, and who cared about peace and justice—all qualities that appealed to my soul. I decided to enroll part time in the college as a music major. Jeni was in school full days and Kem and I were able to coordinate our classes so we could each take our turn being with Erin, who was a toddler.

Music courses, voice lessons, choir rehearsals, and performances were stimulating and soon became the focus of my life. Highlights were playing key roles in musical productions such as the medieval liturgical drama Visitatio Sepulchre, the St. Matthew Passion by Bach, and the oratorio Jephtha by Carissimi. All of the librettos were taken from the Bible and set to music, and they moved me. It was as if my soul was calling me to pay attention to what brought peace and joy to my inner self. But at the same time, my ego soaked up the adulation I received after each performance. All of the praise made me feel important and valued, yet also empty. I allowed music, which is such a beautiful gift, to pull me away from my family. There were evening rehearsals, workshops, performances, and extended choir tours. Kem was always so willing to be with the girls and I took full advantage of his generosity. But I think some of my happiest times during this period were our family trips to Nebraska to visit Kem’s parents. We were together then as a family, being present to one another, giving joy to the grandparents, and creating happy childhood memories for Jeni and Erin.

While I was grateful for the opportunity to develop my vocal talent and to learn about the history and theory of music, I grew weary of the critiquing and judgment that seemed to be a part of the academic scene. I often asked myself, “Why have I been given a voice to sing? Is it to impress others, to be the best I can be, to have my ego stroked?” I knew singing was much more than that to me. After graduation, I was invited back to LaSalle Street Church in Chicago to join the choir in an evening of musical celebration. Before the concert began, the director, a wise man named Omer Reese, told us that we had been given the gift of song, of being able to share with others the beauty in our soul. The audience, he said, had been given the ability to listen and appreciate and absorb our song so that it would join with the song in their own hearts. Both gifts were equally important. They served and needed each other. This little speech really resonated with me. It reminded me that music and the voice I had been given were gifts from God through which I could share my deepest joy and longing.

After five years in Virginia, Kem and I began to sense the importance of having our children spend more time with my extended family in Canada. Two of my three sisters and their families lived in Ontario, as did my mother. My beloved dad had died seventeen years earlier, so Mom had been alone for a long time, and I was hoping to spend more time with her. Kem was able to find a job teaching computer science at a community college in Toronto and we moved there in 1981. In my heart, I longed to return to the simple faith that I had in my late teens and early twenties. Somehow, I connected a move to Ontario with my earlier conversion experience. I prayed for help, but I had drifted far and wasn’t sure how to find my way back to God. The inner joy I once had was no longer there. How I missed it.

I learned of a choir at Knox College (part of the University of Toronto) that needed sopranos. The choir was made up of Knox students and Knox dorm residents and sometimes certain voice parts were not well represented. The director, John Derksen, welcomed me into the choir. This was a gift from God because the repertoire John chose was sacred choral music, some of it using psalm texts that spoke deeply to me.

Another source of joy while living in Toronto was sharing our home with others. We bought a house with friends Dannie and Barb and renovated it to accommodate the two families. Later, in 1985, when my sister Fran, her husband, and their three children needed a place to stay for about nine months, we renovated a space in the basement for them. After they moved to Manitoba, my sister Lynda, whose husband had died, came to live in our home. Living in community for a second time helped to reinforce for us the value of sharing life with others.

I attended the University of Toronto teachers’ college and in addition took specialized music courses that would enable me to teach Carl Orff’s Music for Children and early childhood music and movement classes. There weren’t many public-school teaching positions available at that time, so I was relieved to find part-time work teaching music to young children. It gave me great joy to be with children who entered into singing and music activities with enthusiasm. I was studying voice with a private teacher and through her learned of the church music job at the United Church that I mentioned earlier. The choir director and choir members were warm and welcoming and very encouraging. The music inspired me, and people seemed to appreciate my solo work. I began to depend on their praise to feed my deep need for love and a sense of worth.

I sometimes asked the question, “Who am I and who is God?” I was reading books by Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, and other Catholic authors who wrote about finding intimacy with God. That spoke to the longing within me. I desired a deeper relationship with God. I believed in God’s love and mercy. But God seemed far away in a distant place—more like a righteous judge than a loving intimate. I thought the purpose of prayer was to be thankful, to confess my sins, and then ask for favours. When I prayed, I did all the talking, and God did all the listening.

Not long before moving from Toronto to Wellington County, I was diagnosed with a condition that required surgery. My father had died on an operating table, and I worried that I would too. The thought was frightening and also heart-breaking. I realized that, although I deeply loved Kem and our daughters, we didn’t speak openly about intimate things like our love for one another. I also knew that I was carrying secrets, and the lack of openness in my marriage troubled me. I asked God for help and healing. When I came through the surgery with a positive prognosis—no cancer was found—I was elated. I felt as if I had been given a second chance at life. Moving to a rural home close to the Grand River was exactly what my soul needed. Everywhere I looked I saw signs of God’s beauty in creation. My Bible reading and prayer took on deeper meaning, and I became more consistent in my journalling about what I was learning of myself and God.

As I will relate in my journal entries, I encountered God in Elora. The day of that encounter created a desire in me, as I prayed in the sunroom of our new home, to know in an ever-deepening way the one who had called me “beloved child.” It showed me that God was as close as my breath and loved me deeply and personally. I began asking God to guide me into truth about who God is. Often after that, as I waited in the silence of prayer, I felt held in love and was assured of my own value in God’s eyes. When I worried about the words I was hearing and the images I was seeing being just in my imagination, I was reminded that it was God who created me, and that it was God who gave me imagination. God said to me, “I knew you before you were born. I gave you your personality, your imagination, your talents, and your desires. You’ve tried so hard to prove your worth to other people and to yourself. But it was I who formed you in a unique way. That’s what gives you worth. I created you out of love and for love. It’s love I want to share with you, and it’s love I want you to share with others.”

For about seven years after my mystical encounter with God in 1995, I continued to hear an inner voice of love assuring me of my belovedness and guiding me along a healing path. It was a blessed gift, and it helped me to face some of the unexpected challenges that sometimes threatened to block my view of God. It is these seven years of journalling that I’ve reproduced here. I’ve titled the book Seven Years of Plenty because of the rich graces I received during this period. They reminded me of the story of Joseph in Genesis 41.

Joseph was the favoured son of Jacob because he was the first born from a tender love relationship between Jacob and his wife Rachael. His ten half brothers were jealous of Joseph and wanted to be rid of him. Away from the watchful eye of Jacob, they sold Joseph into slavery. He became the servant of the Egyptian pharaoh. Although Joseph was a slave, he endeared himself to the pharaoh because of his God-given gifts of intelligence and insight into dreams. He interpreted the pharaoh’s dream of seven fat and healthy cows being swallowed up by seven poor, thin cows, and seven full and good ears of grain being swallowed up by seven thin ears that came after them. In his interpretation, the seven fat cows and good ears represented seven years of plenty that would be seen throughout all the land of Egypt. The seven lean cows and thin ears of grain represented seven years of famine that would consume the land following the years of plenty. Joseph presented a plan to Pharaoh for setting aside and preserving some of the food from the plenteous years in order to nourish the people during the famine years. It proved to be a successful plan and later led to forgiveness and healing within Joseph’s own family.

I have gone through periods of dryness in my prayer over the years and have been nurtured and sustained by how God fed me during those seven years of plenty. It feels like renewed nourishment for my soul each time a memory surfaces of God’s tenderness and grace and inclusiveness in those years.