Gifts of the Mother: An Advent Journey with the Sacred Feminine (Sabra Engelbrecht) - Review
The three Abrahamic religions—Christianity,
Judaism, and Islam—are not only monotheistic but tend to speak of God in
masculine terms. This is especially true of Christianity with its trinitarian understanding
of God. As the Creeds declare, God is one God existing as three persons: Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit. So, Christians tend to use masculine pronouns when speaking
of God. Therefore, it has been difficult for most Christians to speak of God in
feminine terms despite there being multiple places in Scripture—both Old Testament
and New Testament—where God is described using feminine terms and images. Could
it be that God is, in truth, non-binary? The use of masculine language and
imagery to speak of God is problematic for many, especially women who struggle
to find themselves reflected in God's person. With this being the case, it is
always helpful when resources emerge that invite us to reimagine God’s person
and to speak of God in feminine terms. The challenge for us, especially when
speaking of God as mother, is to speak in a way that doesn't add another person
to the Godhead.
This lengthy introductory paragraph
leads me to Sabra Engelbrecht’s book Gifts of the Mother: An Advent Journey
with the Sacred Feminine. As the
subtitle notes, Gifts of the Mother is an Advent devotional that invites
readers to discover the Sacred Feminine. Engelbrecht is an author, spiritual
leader, and mystic who formerly served as the director of ministries for The
Gathering United Methodist Church in St. Louis. Engelbrecht's discovery of the
Sacred Feminine came as she attempted to come to grips with her own spiritual
identity. She made this discovery when her traditional approaches to God no
longer worked for her. While she remained committed to prayer, God seemed
increasingly distant. It was in reading Sue Monk Kidd's Dance of the Dissident Daughter that she gained clarity in her search for God. By the
Sacred Feminine, Engelbrecht, following Kidd, was not an attempt to recast God
in female form but to name and image God's feminine nature. Having made this
discovery, Engelbrecht offers Gifts of the Mother as an invitation to
readers to engage with the feminine nature of God using tools that she found
helpful in her own journey. These tools include Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual
Exercises and the process of reading the Bible through lectio divina.
When it comes to naming God, she notes that she has “purposely declined to
refer to the Divine exclusively as ‘God.’ With few exceptions, the daily prayer
will be presented using names, pronouns, and imagery that present God as female”
(p. 11). This may be jarring for some, but it is true to Scripture and themes
present in Christian tradition, especially among the mystics.
In Gifts of the Mother, Engelbrecht
takes the reader on a journey through the season of Advent, a season, like
Lent, that many find to be a useful time for contemplation and spiritual
renewal. Advent is a season of waiting and preparation that features among its stories
from the New Testament, the annunciation to Mary and the Magnificat, and so it
is a fitting time to explore the Divine Feminine. She writes that
"Throughout Advent, we anticipated a cosmic and mystical birth that is an
echo of the creation story found in Genesis. We sing songs about our Creator
God coming down to earth in the form of a baby." She notes that "the
way Jesus moved through the world and interacted with its inhabitants clearly
reflected a divinity marked by both traditionally masculine characteristics
(independent, protective, and action-oriented, for example) and traditionally
feminine characteristics (like intuitive, relational, compassionate, healer).
Yet we rarely speak of God in feminine terms" (p. xxvi). As I noted, for
Engelbrecht, the Ignatian Exercises provide the foundation for her exploration
of the Sacred Feminine. She hopes that the reader will use this as a daily
guide to prayer and reflection, creating a rhythm that includes prayer,
scripture reading (or another reading for inspiration), a time of reflection,
and recalling of the insights or themes of the day. She encourages the readers
to write this down in a journal.
The devotional is laid out over six
weeks. Advent itself is usually four weeks in duration, so she extends it a
bit. She invites the readers/users to incorporate a Preparation Week; Step 1
involves: "Prepare a Time." On this first day of the journey, she
invites the reader to spend time Centering,
followed by a word of Grace, a word of Inspiration, followed by a time of Preparation.
The goal for this first day is to set a regular time for the devotional. Step 2
is the "Prepare to God Deeper." Here, the reader is invited to plan
for the weekly activities that go with the journey. Step 3 involves
"Prepare a Place." She suggests that users dedicate a particular
place/space for the daily practice. Step 4 involves Prepare to Journal. On this
fourth day, the reader is invited to choose a journal, whether it is specially
designed for this purpose or simply a spiral notebook. Step/Day 5 is "Prepare
an Altar," a visual marker of the space used in the journey. Step 6,
"Prepare Your Heart," invites the reader to begin journaling. Step 7:
"Prepare to Begin". This is the final day of preparation. Now it's
time to dive in.
The four weeks of Advent focus on
four images: Hope (Week 1), Peace (Week 2), Joy (Week 3), Love (Week 4). Along
the way, Engelbrecht engages with the Advent/Christmas story, with a special
emphasis on Mary, the mother of Jesus. As she focuses attention on Mary, she
also engages with Mary’s interactions with Elizabeth. The sixth week in this
journey focuses on Christ. That is, on the birth of Jesus (incarnation). The
journey is designed to conclude on Epiphany. In all, the five weeks of the
journey through Advent and Christmas are pretty traditional. The difference is
that in this devotional the prompts are designed to focus our attention on the
feminine nature of God by addressing God as Mother or using other forms of feminine
imagery to speak of God. By doing this, she focuses our attention on ways we
can speak of and image God, so that we might dive deeper in our understanding
of God. Englebrecht is aware that this will be challenging to many who are
simply not used to addressing God in feminine terms. However, she believes that
at least for some this will be spiritually enlivening.
While Sabra Engelbrecht's Gifts of the Mother is
organized as an Advent devotional, it can be used at any time of the year
because the focus is on the way we imagine and speak of God. I am often
reminded of Mary Daly’s famous dictum: “If God is male, then male is God.” By
contemplating the Sacred Feminine, we can gain a fuller understanding of the
nature of God, while letting go of the vestiges of patriarchalism that too often
affect the way we engage with one another as male and female. So, whether used during Advent or some other
part of the year, Gifts of the Mother is an insightful invitation to a
reimagined understanding of the God we encounter in Scripture.
Copies of Gifts of the Mother may be purchased at your favorite retailer, including my Amazon affiliate bookstore and my Bookshop.Org affiliate.
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