Oct 26, 2026 · 38 min · 10 segments
Former Bridges retreatant Sabra Engelbrecht in conversation with Executive Director Steve Givens about her new book, "Gifts of the Mother: An Advent Journey with the Sacred Feminine."
We'll work our way towards the topic of your book, but there's one more step along the way, which is during the course of your experience with the spiritual exercises, you know, maybe especially with your Protestant background, which isn't people, and I'm of Protestant background also, sometimes Protestants don't quite know how to deal with Mary, right, you know, and see her in a different way than many Catholics do.
During the exercises, we're often called upon to kind of talk to Mary and to make her a part of our our prayer.
Talk a little bit about what happened in the exercises when that happened and where that led.
I probably would have been pretty uncomfortable with any icons, you know, so I didn't have that imagery or that background at all.
And I think my memory is that when maybe in one of the first meetings with Father Mark, I actually said to him, please don't make me pray to Mary.
And for some reason, I thought that that was going to be something that he was going to make me do.
And I believe it was in the second year of of Father Mark being my prayer companion that I came to him really struggling with my relationship with my son, which has been difficult.
He has some pretty significant learning disabilities and he's had a really rough go and we have a challenging relationship at times.
And father Mark very gently said, have you thought about talking to Mary about that? So he did not use the word praying to Mary.
But he suggested that I do a colloquy with Mary and he's, he knew me well because I always came in there with my journal.
And, in my colloquy with Mary, I was talking to her about the challenges that I was having.
And what I very clearly heard Mary say to me was that she knew something about raising a difficult son.
And in that colloquy and that experience at prayer time, suddenly this figure or this character in a story became real to me.
That that was, I think up until that point, a little bit of a maybe not an abstract idea, but definitely like, I wish I could do that, but I don't really know what that means.
We'll work our way towards the topic of your book, but there's one more step along the way, which is during the course of your experience with the spiritual exercises, you know, maybe especially with your Protestant background, which isn't people, and I'm of Protestant background also, sometimes Protestants don't quite know how to deal with Mary, right, you know, and see her in a different way than many Catholics do.
During the exercises, we're often called upon to kind of talk to Mary and to make her a part of our our prayer.
Talk a little bit about what happened in the exercises when that happened and where that led.
I probably would have been pretty uncomfortable with any icons, you know, so I didn't have that imagery or that background at all.
And I think my memory is that when maybe in one of the first meetings with Father Mark, I actually said to him, please don't make me pray to Mary.
And for some reason, I thought that that was going to be something that he was going to make me do.
And I believe it was in the second year of of Father Mark being my prayer companion that I came to him really struggling with my relationship with my son, which has been difficult.
He has some pretty significant learning disabilities and he's had a really rough go and we have a challenging relationship at times.
And father Mark very gently said, have you thought about talking to Mary about that? So he did not use the word praying to Mary.
But he suggested that I do a colloquy with Mary and he's, he knew me well because I always came in there with my journal.
And, in my colloquy with Mary, I was talking to her about the challenges that I was having.
And what I very clearly heard Mary say to me was that she knew something about raising a difficult son.
And in that colloquy and that experience at prayer time, suddenly this figure or this character in a story became real to me.
That that was, I think up until that point, a little bit of a maybe not an abstract idea, but definitely like, I wish I could do that, but I don't really know what that means.
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