Sabra Engelbrecht is an author, mystic, and spiritual guide with a passion for returning the Sacred Feminine to Christian theology, language, and practice—because without Her our relationship with God is incomplete.
Her debut book, Gifts of the Mother, brings a Sacred Feminine voice to the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. Using centuries-old spiritual practices, the reader will come to know Mother Mary as an archetype of the Sacred Feminine. By exploring the Sacred Feminine generally, and as an agent in the mystery of incarnation more specifically, the reader will uncover new aspects of God while finding their own personal connection to the Christmas story.
“I truly believe that the woundedness of the world will be healed when we find our way back to the Mother.”
Traditional understandings of the Trinity frequently frame God in solely masculine terms. But Scripture tells us that God possesses both masculine and feminine attributes. Gifts of the Mother, a five-week devotional for the Advent season—or any season of transition—serves as a loving remedy to this limited understanding of God, inviting you into a transformative devotional journey of sacred imagination as you follow the liturgical themes of hope, peace, joy, love, and Christ in the world.
An Invitation to Wholeness…
About Sabra
For over a decade, Sabra has regularly returned to Saint Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises to guide her spiritual practice. She has completed the Exercises numerous times, participated in Ignatian leadership training, and led small groups in nine-month-long Ignatian retreats When aprofound experience during a pilgrimage to the south of France awakened Sabra to the Sacred Feminine, she found the patriarchal worldview of the Spiritual Exercises made them no longer accessible to her. Since then, she has dedicatedcountless hours researching, reading scripture and other sacred texts, and writing, in an effort to integrate the Sacred Feminine into her faith practice. Gifts of the Mother: An Advent Journey With the Sacred Feminine is her faithful attempt to honor the spirit of the Exercises while centering the Sacred Feminine, in hopes that readers will be nourished by characteristics of God they may have never experienced, or even considered.
With degrees in Psychology from the University of Kansas, and Law from Wake Forest University, she believes in the power of words to shape reality and improve our world for the better. She left the field of law to serve as the Executive Director of Ministries for The Gathering United Methodist Church, a large multi-site church in St. Louis, Missouri. During her tenure at The Gathering, she wrote devotional content, a personal blog, and a short essay entitled “Finding Truth,” that appeared in The Carver Connections, an annual publication of The Carver Project at Washington University in St. Louis.
Sabra lives in St. Louis, Missouri with her husband, Nick. Together they are navigating a new stage of life that seems to be marked by a shockingly clean empty mud-room and a nearly empty refrigerator while their two adult sons, Dawson and Leo, step out into the big exciting world. Sabra is currently working on her first novel.