I got my start to writing, by a trip to Israel back in 1983 on a tour with a group from the T V program One Hundred Huntley Street. We were in a southern suburb of Jerusalem to visit the Church of the Magnificat, the traditional site of the home of John the Baptist. You will remember that Mary of Nazareth visited her cousin, Elizabeth(John’s mother) when she first became pregnant with Jesus. The tour group roamed about the old church and the rose garden under the watchful eye of the curator priest from Quebec City. This man had the longest and dirtiest toenails I have ever seen on a human being which is why I remember it so vividly.
A month later, I sat in my favourite chair at home in Sparta, reflecting on the sights of the Holy Land while reading the gospels ,and remembered after seeing the Church of the Magnificent, the tour had continued on, within a quarter hour to the olive wood tourist traps in Bethlehem! I lay my head back and closed my eyes, thinking that if I were Mary, great with child, and had tramped over a hundred miles from Nazareth, up hill and down dale through the heat and dust and flies, and I had come this far on my way to Bethlehem, I would never pass my cousin’s open door without stopping in to say ‘hello’ and to see her new baby, born in my absence, and rest my weary feet. So…I thought, There’s a story here about the relationship of these two families and many of the other people mentioned in the New Testament. So… I said to myself (I thought) Someone should write a book about all these people. I can only say, I heard a voice, perhaps in my mind, say,”Then you do it!”
Before I started my first book, I distinctly remember rising from my chair and thinking I don’t know how to write a book. And the thought came to me that I would have to read a lot to learn what the life of a Jewish woman, was like during the first century two thousand years ago. I walked into the den to pick up the encyclopedia to read about Herod the Great. I closed the tome thinking, I had an awful lot to learn but where to start? The public library in St. Thomas and the church library seemed good places to begin. But I ended up spending long afternoons at the University of Western Ontario’s library. making copious notes .I read for two months, three or four hours each day. Then when the first week of September rolled around and my youngest child at home went to high school and the rest of the family went back to work or college. That’s when I began writing In Fullness of Time. It took me one week to write the first paragraph. After that, I began writing like a mad woman and couldn’t stop. The words were coming so quickly into my mind that my fingers on the pen could barely keep up to the ideas. I wrote steadily for two months, and one evening, decided to review what I had written up to the place where Mary leaves home with Joseph for Bethlehem because of the census. I found I couldn’t stop reading the manuscript either because I could barely wait to turn the pages to find what happened next. After that, I felt I had something there worth spending much more time on. (To be Continued)
