o enter the creative realm of Bridgette Mongeon’s art studio is to be transported to a sanctuary – a sacred chamber where the historical bond of love between the living and the no-longer living is almost palpable. Each commissioned likeness Mongeon skillfully and lovingly sculpts or paints is meant to help a family find healing and closure while celebrating the life of their deceased loved one. It is a unique ministry, one that has changed Mongeon in ways she could not have imagined.

As an artisan, she forms a bond of her own with each of the subjects she may not have known in life. Their bronze faces and forms or painted images taking shape in her hands, remind her that the same God who created their lives endowed her with the skill to craft their likenesses.

Far from the lonely, isolating endeavor one would imagine her work to be, Mongeon feels connected to others and to God in a powerful way as she works.

“There is a real, ethereal feeling when you are creating, where you get into what one psychologist calls ‘the flow.’ That’s the closest thing I can experience to being near to God,” she says.

A memorial sculpture created by Bridgette Mongeon.

As she works through her creative process, Mongeon’s clients work through their grieving process. “We talk on a daily basis. They are purging. When I complete a sculpture and they install it on the grave or memorial site, the letting-go happens. It gives them permission to have a continuing bond while letting go.” 

Laying it all on the altar

While she has always taken great delight in her work and has found meaning in sharing her clients’ emotions, Mongeon eventually came to believe God had additional work for her to do.

About 15 years ago, she told God she would give her artistic skills up to him, if that were what he required of her. “If I don’t ever create again, that will be OK with me,” she promised. “I wanted to serve God, and that’s how deep my service for him felt to me.”

Instead, God spoke to her heart, freeing her to honor him through her sculpting. That’s when the idea for God’s Word Collectibles (www.godsword.net) was born.

A God's Word Collectible sculpture created by Bridgette Mongeon.

In the years since that dream came to fruition, Mongeon created 16 God’s Word sculptures. Each approximately six to eight inches tall, they depict children in everyday life scenes, and are built around a Bible verse. Like her commissioned sculptures, these more affordable pieces also exist to bring encouragement and healing to the people who take possession of them.

“The God’s Word pieces each come with a card and a letter, and so much of a part of me is in that letter and in the Scripture,” Mongeon says. “Why is that Scripture important in my life? What did it do for me? I am hoping when someone gets it, they say, ‘Oh, yes! She’s right. This Scripture means something for me in this place in my life.’”

God’s Word Collectibles are one more answer Mongeon has found in the “constant search my entire life for how I can best serve the Lord through what I do. If you asked me what is it that makes me who I am, what is my place on this earth, it’s this: I need to help people, to give back,” she says. “It’s almost this desire that you can’t quench.”

A God's Word Collectible sculpture created by Bridgette Mongeon.

That giving back recently took Mongeon as far away as South Africa, where proceeds from one God’s Word sculpture go to help a ministry outreach.

Working through the “dark times”

“I need to help people, to give back. It’s almost this desire that you can’t quench.”

If Mongeon puts something of herself into every God’s Word piece or life-size commissioned work she sculpts, it is because she understands the struggles and passages of life in a deeply personal way. Growing up in Buffalo, N.Y., she endured the pain of watching both parents deal with depression and substance abuse. But her mother’s battle left the deepest impression on her.

“During the most traumatic times, through the alcoholism and drug addiction my mom had when I was a child, creativity – to be able to express myself in writing or drawing or art – gave me an outlet. I’ve been creative since I could pick up a crayon. I remember that pivotal moment, which was probably in the darkest time of my life, where I first realized I could capture the likeness of somebody else. I think I was 9.”

Thankfully, someone led Mongeon to Alateen, part of Al-Anon, where she says her desire to help others was born. She gave her testimony for the first time during an Alateen meeting at the age of 12 or 13.

“I got up and just told them about my life and how difficult it was, but that I’d found Alateen and was able to make it through and realize it wasn’t my fault – that I could help myself and not have to worry so much about helping Mom get though everything,” she recalls. “The great, big ‘pink elephant’ in my house wasn’t supposed to be there. It was OK to talk about it.”

A girl approached her after she spoke and said, “Because you made it through this, I know I can make it.” Mongeon knew then and there she wanted to help others.

Not only did she begin to find the healing she desperately needed through Alateen, but she also found the Lord through a friend’s invitation to a church youth overnight “lock-in.” Two weeks later, Mongeon led her mother, Barbara Ingersoll, to the altar in that same church where she made her own decision to accept Christ as her Savior.

Ingersoll eventually overcame her alcohol and drug addictions and found true healing. She has remained sober for 30 years. “It amazes me how God healed all of us,” Mongeon says.

Three generations. Left to right: Barbara Ingersoll, Bridgette Mongeon, Christina Diliberto.

That story of healing and redemption is poignantly told through a five-part generational testimony, aired over an online podcast program called “Generations” that Mongeon does with her mother and her own daughter, Christina Diliberto. In those programs, mother and daughter journeyed back to the “dark places” of their lives.

In those days, Ingersoll was desperately trying to escape the debilitating effects of childhood sexual abuse, even undergoing electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and enduring epileptic seizures, while trying to hide her gin bottles from her children. Young Bridgette was trying to understand “where my mother ended and I began,” so great was their emotional entanglement. Their testimony ends with both tearfully recounting their gratitude for God’s grace.

Ingersoll is somewhat of a celebrity to her podcast audience. “Mom has been counseling hurting women for years. She sits in an assisted living home and was feeling her ministry was over because she can’t walk. But she can sit in her fluffy chair and talk on the phone and minister to women all over the world.”

Those lively discussions cover a wide range of topics and recently featured author Gary Chapman as a guest during a series on “The Five Love Languages.”

Unraveling the mystery of God’s grace

Helping families deal with the loss of loved ones through her memorial sculptures impacts Mongeon in unexpected ways. Not surprisingly for someone with her past, she says, “I have a very strong sense of empathy. I struggled with that within the church for a really long time. I would sense the emotions of others and take them on as my own and not even know it. But I realize that’s part of my job. If I don’t do that, I won’t be able to make my sculptures into true likenesses.”

Bridgette Mongeon next to the "Newsboy" sculpture she created as a tribute to a 19th-century homeless boy hawking newspapers.

A pivotal posthumous sculpture Mongeon was commissioned to do was of a 20-year-old young woman who had committed suicide. “I suffered a bout of depression while doing it, and I thought that was the strangest thing,” she recalls.

Mongeon included work on that piece as part of a college thesis. Her professors encouraged her to look for the meaning behind her emotional reaction. That scholarly quest became both a psychological and a spiritual one and opened up a whole new area of interest for her while giving her a different perspective on her work.

Mongeon has come to respect the relationship between thoughts and feelings and the extent to which they can sweep us up into a “negative tornado.”

In a column she wrote for The Houston Tribune several years ago, she declared, “My cognitive training did not come from a book on psychology or a counselor; it came from Sunday School. When I felt I could not do something, my Sunday School training said, ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me’” (Philippians 4:13).