Meet Laura Ercolino: Fall in Love with the Bridegroom

Fall In Love with the Bridegroom!

by Genevieve Kineke

​

Laura Ercolino is an artist, writer, and Christian Expressive Arts Coach in Ohio. She is the mother of nine children and homeschooled them for many decades. After surviving domestic abuse, she divorced her husband and experienced a miraculous healing for depression, PTSD, and chronic pelvic floor pain.

Her experiences led to her founding Hope’s Garden, a healing ministry for women who have suffered trauma related to the family, especially marital betrayal or domestic violence. She also provides Christian expressive arts inner healing sessions and leads support groups in the Hope’s Garden Community. She has written several books. The two most recent, published by En Route Books and Media, are Consecration to Christ the Bridegroom and The Womb of My Heart Rosary Devotional.​

​

Genevieve: Can you tell me how you came up with the name of this ministry, Hope’s Garden?

Laura: There’s two parts to it. One, the garden part comes from my devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe and to the roses of Tepeyac, which were the roses she sent St. Juan Diego to collect and hold in his tilma and take to the bishop. And, through my days of darkness, my hope was in Christ, that Christ is our hope.

Genevieve: How did you imagine it?

Laura: I envisioned a small parish ministry. We went into quarantine due to COVID in 2020. My sister suggested we set up our meetings on Zoom. So we did that. And the first meeting we had, I opened the Zoom and women from all over the country came. We advertised as being a support group for women who were suffering from betrayal trauma from their husband’s pornography or sex addiction. And it became clear that there was a greater need for this than I had ever imagined.

Genevieve: So were you intimidated?

Laura: I had several moments of panic! Really my strength comes from Our Lady. You know, the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, she has her hands folded in prayer, her head tilted down in humility, just the handmaiden of the Lord. I try to always just return to that posture.

Genevieve: It must be hard for some women to hear, the message that they are a Rose in God’s garden.

Laura: It can be very hard at first. They are wounded Roses, the roses whose petals have been crushed and trampled on, but each one is still a Rose. That’s an image that gives them hope. One of our phrases is, “Let Jesus love you into full bloom.”

Genevieve: How did you come to focus on the Song of Songs?

Laura: I was on retreat and Mother Gabriela gave me a copy of the book, The Cantata of Love, a verse by verse reading of the Song of Songs [written by Fr. Blaise Arminjon, SJ]. And it changed my life from the very first moment. I could just hear the Lord singing to me through that book and through my reading of the Song of Songs.

And he healed those heart wounds, those spousal wounds that I had from the tragedy in my marriage and divorce.

When you fall in love with Christ the Bridegroom, you realize He is the one true eternal Spouse of your soul and the only one to fulfill those core desires of your heart.

Genevieve: The Song of Songs is the most commented-on book in the Bible. It’s so short and to us in the 21st century, it seems so obscure and irrelevant to our daily lives.

Laura: And yet that’s not how the Church has ever understood it. They understood it as pivotal, this nuptial relationship between God and creation. The modern age tells us it’s just erotic love poetry, but if we go back to the way that the ancient Jewish rabbis read it, the early Church fathers read it, and the saints read it, this is God’s love song to His people.

All of Scripture is a love letter to you personally. God wants to marry you. Yes, He wants to marry all of humanity, but He also wants to marry each one of us personally and intimately.

Genevieve: So I want to pivot now just a little bit to inquire how you are living this spousal union.

Laura: I began feeling in my heart that He was calling me to make a betrothal promise and to make that promise on the day that would have been my 30th wedding anniversary. And it was going to be the first anniversary as a divorced woman. I took it to my spiritual directors and said, “Do you think that’s really the Lord asking me to do this?” And they both agreed.

The very day that I had first given myself to a spouse who abused me, now the Lord was saying, “I want you to take Me as your spouse.” So I made that betrothal promise, and then, women were asking me about my story, and some of them also wanted to make betrothal promises.

So we came up with a ceremony, and we took it to the bishop and had it approved. Hope’s Garden now has 24 women who have made betrothal promises. Five women have made vows of spiritual marriage, four who are divorced and one who is a widow.

We come together as community every Friday morning for formation. And we’ve started coming together on Sunday afternoons just for a social hour just to hang out and talk and be with one another.

Genevieve: And your bishop, what did he say when you approached him?

Laura: He has responded positively and keeps encouraging us to keep growing and to see what the Lord does here. I don’t know yet if the Lord is going to lead us into becoming a canonically recognized institution within the Church, a lay movement. I don’t know yet.

We’re still discerning that. But we go to the bishop at least once a year to get approval for our events or ceremonies we have developed. These are just private vows that we’re making. But so far, the bishop has approved it all.

Genevieve: This is so very beautiful. How do you implement this ministry online?

Laura: Women come to us feeling the shame and guilt of domestic violence, or the husband’s pornography addiction, or the husband’s sex addiction. It’s really hard to walk into your parish and show up at a domestic violence support group, right? Who’s going to do that?

Genevieve: So, virtually is a much safer way to do support groups for these types of issues?

Laura: Yes. Some women will use a made-up name. We do enforce the rule that in the support groups, you must turn your camera on because we need to be able to see each other. We also offer prayer gatherings five times a day. And for those types of meetings, you do not need to turn your camera on. We also offer monthly workshops on a topic related to healing and trauma. And then we also offer live spiritual direction with Father Michael Stalla [ed. Spiritual Advisor for Hope’s Garden] with time for questions and answers once a month. And then we also offer Scripture studies and book studies.

Many of the women we reach have been so isolated or their husbands have left them. With a click of a button on your phone, you can jump on Zoom with other women who understand what you’re going through and care and will pray with you and for you.

I see it as an answer to my prayer during all those dark years in my life when I said, “Lord, I can’t be the only one, right?”

Genevieve: And sadly, you were not the only one.

Laura: Right. There are so many women experiencing this. I give a talk in one course on a verse in the Song of Songs about enslavement. Even when we’re ensnared or enslaved, God still says, “You are mine,” right? And then he frees us. He rescues us and takes the very things that were our chains and he turns them into jewels. He transforms our wounds into rubies.

​

​

Read more articles on our website!

​

Volume Three of My Secret is Mine newsletter includes essays and discussions on Mulieris Dignitatem, On the Dignity and Vocation of Women, an apostolic letter written by St. John Paul the Great in 1988.

Premium subscribers have full access to ALL the back issues of My Secret is Mine newsletter – and have the PDF emailed to them on the first of the month!

They also can choose to turn off weekly emails and receive only the PDF version! And links to our monthly online discussion groups! And first notification of all podcasts and videos!

Upgrade to a paid subscription today!

​

​