Amy Grant's Amazing Journey: The Broad Hand of God
by Natori Moore

A lot can change in 25 years.  Just ask Amy Grant, the popular singer-songwriter who began her musical career in 1977 on the Myrrh/Word Christian record label.  As an earnest young musician on her trek up the gospel music charts, Amy inspired many with hit songs such as “ My Father’s Eyes,” “Lead Me On,” and “El Shaddai.”  She earned numerous Grammy and Dove awards for her records, and in 1985, became the first gospel artist to achieve certified sales of more than one million copies of a single album, her platinum selling Age to Age. 

By the year 2000, Amy Grant’s life would look different indeed.  Not that her fundamental identity as a Nashville musician, wife and mother would change much.  But she would have a broadened, genre-crossing music career, a new husband in musician Vince Gill and an additional baby at age 40.  She probably never guessed that life could come to hold such richness and breadth, nor realized ahead of time the painful price she and others would have to pay along the way. 

JUPITER AND NEPTUNE

AMYS CHART.  Though we don’t have a timed birth chart for Amy, I have constructed a speculative rectification of her chart to 8:00 p.m. based on her life events.  Amy’s birth chart reflects the optimism and spirituality for which she is known.  Her Sun falls in the inspirational fire sign, Sagittarius, and her Moon in the idealistic water sign, Pisces.  Both signs share a common traditional ruler in the wise and generous planet Jupiter. 

Jupiter often stands out in charts of people with strong faith as well as high cultural standing or noted service positions in their communities.  Amy comes from a deeply religious and comfortably well-off Nashville family with a background in medicine (her father and grandfather have been doctors).  Her father and uncles were among those who gave her an original boost of good luck with financial backing to establish her music career.  She has had a more privileged upbringing than many gospel singers, and yet has been able to tap into a sincerity of expression and modern style that helps many gain encouragement and celebrate their faith. 

Another strong influence in Amy’s chart is the planet Neptune.  Neptune rules Amy’s Pisces moon, and conjoins the mental planet Mercury in her chart.  This is a wonderfully classic placement for a musician and songwriter, as it can give heightened intuition and an almost supernatural ability to tap into realms of beauty beyond the norm in expressing feelings and insights. 

NEPTUNE’S SWAMP

On the down side, a Pisces moon and a strong Neptune can contribute to Amy’s being deeply impressionable and even naive, at times following what others want simply because they are in her environment and encourage her to do so.  The on-again, off-again courtship of Amy and her first husband Gary Chapman in the early 1980s suggests that she may have let herself be persuaded to marry him more because of his enthusiasm for the idea rather than her own. 

Pisces/Neptune-influenced people may also not be fully aware of their own desires and goals, and therefore easily led by others.  Amy has said that even though she also loved and had written pop songs early in her career, she gravitated toward recording Christian music because someone said, “We want you to do a Christian album.  You have a knack for expressing this.” 

PLUTO CONTACTS THE SUN

In late 1996 and throughout 1997, Amy experienced the transit of the planet Pluto to her natal Sun in Sagittarius.   Pluto transits often expand our psychological boundaries and push us into broad scale changes we never imagined we would make.  Big changes in Amy’s identity and relationship with her husband were about to become likely, since the Sun in a woman’s chart can symbolize these important areas. 

During this time, Janis Gill divorced her husband Vince over his refusal to cut his ties of friendship to Amy Grant.  Vince and Amy had known each other as musical collaborators since 1993, and claim that they remained only friends.  Yet Amy and Gary were struggling in their marriage at this time, too.  Amy may unconsciously have hoped for Vince’s divorce, yet was likely unwilling to admit how much her presence in Vince’s life contributed to such an occurrence.  She was probably not sexually involved with Vince at this time due to the restraint of other chart factors, yet given her Pisces-Neptune temperament, she may have fallen into a back-door type of emotional dependency with him while they were both still married to others.

PLUTO CONTACTS THE MOON

It wasn’t until two years later, in December 1998 when Pluto reached the first probable contact of a square to her Pisces Moon (symbolizing her emotions and domestic life), that Amy’s emotional awareness was deepened to the point that she felt the planetary pressure to make a big change.  Amy and her husband Gary separated in January 1999, and her divorce was final on the second pass of Pluto’s square to her Moon in June 1999.

At times this process of separation from her husband, children and the life she had known must have been exceptionally painful.  In addition to being a popular musician, Amy had become something of a standard bearer among her fans for the Christian ideal of lifelong fidelity in marriage.  Her divorce created a crack in this public perception, surprised many, and even caused some Christian radio stations to refuse to play her songs.  Yet Amy seems ultimately to have taken the strongly Piscean-Neptunian attitude that the river of life can take one places one doesn’t expect.  “Sometimes it’s an innocent third party, “ Amy said, “that makes you realize relationships can be easier.”  

The transit of Pluto to Amy’s Sun and Moon also forced her to look at the underbelly of her Jupiter-based idealism.  What was a good Christian woman to make of the emerging idea that her marriage could end?  How had her Pisces-Neptune tendencies to let others dictate her life direction contributed to her unhappiness in her situation?  She may have asked herself many times the common question for spiritual people in times of crisis, “Am I being selfish (to leave this marriage) – or is this the move God wants me to make?”  Amy might have felt that she would hurt someone – herself, her husband, her children, Vince’s wife or child -- no matter what she did.  Pluto transits can present us with these types of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” choices. 

WALKING AMID DESTRUCTION

In the aftermath of her divorce, Amy gradually worked toward building a new life to carry her forward.  Yet Pluto’s transformative transit to her Sun and Moon left a lasting impact.  Pluto pressed her to understand that her seemingly socially acceptable life needed to end in its current form in order to reach a greater and more fitting environment for all involved.  Pluto lies beyond Saturn in the solar system, suggesting that Pluto’s lessons are beyond those that our social structure (Saturn) considers safe or appropriate.  Some of the extreme events that can arise during Pluto transits include divorce, abduction, sexual difficulties, financial upheaval, destruction of property, death of loved ones, psychological obsession or possession, and other areas into which we’d rather not tread. 

Yet when Persephone, the maiden abducted by Pluto in the Greek legend, reemerges from her contact with Pluto’s dark forces, she becomes Queen of her destiny, able to both direct her life from a stronger emotional position and surrender to a balanced rather than idealized image of other people and of God.   Pluto is paradoxically not only the god of destruction, but also the god of spiritual and material wealth.  Ask any lottery winner, stockbroker, farmer at harvest time, spiritual aspirant in touch with the divine, sexually fulfilled person or pirate gleaming with booty -- Pluto is always present when the big gains arrive.   Yet it takes fertilizer to make those beautiful roses.  And it’s always darkest just before the dawn.

NEW LIFE

With luck, Amy Grant’s second marriage to Vince Gill will be as creatively fruitful and spiritually nourishing as her first marriage to Gary Chapman was in its prime.  Already Amy and Vince have embarked on plans to perform together on a 2001 holiday music tour.  There is news that Gary Chapman and Janis Gill have each formed new attachments as well.  Though there are astrological indications that Amy and Vince’s new baby daughter, Corrina, may not enjoy the naturally humble temperament and easy faith for which Amy and Vince are known, perhaps the challenge of raising her as well as their children from previous marriages will bring Amy and Vince closer together. 

In light of her strong Christian background, my brother jokingly says of Amy’s marriage to Vince, “This one better work out…or she’s going to hell for sure.”  Yet chances are good that since Amy has managed the difficult transits of Pluto to her Sun and Moon with skill and awareness, she’s going somewhere much brighter.  Amy has married a man and created an extended family with whom she can express love and service at the level her soul has grown to require.  Ideally, that can give others the courage to step into more of what they need to flourish as well. 

CHART INFO
Amy Grant
11-25-1960
Augusta, GA
time unknown
Source:  imdb.com, Jim Maynard’s Pocket Astrologer

Additional reference source:
Millard, Bob.  Amy Grant:  A Biography.  Dolphin/Doubleday, New York, 1986.
 
 

© 2001 by Natori Moore
All rights reserved