The Inner Life
Continual prayer — The retreat of 1904 — Prayer — Devotion to the Holy Trinity and the Blessed Virgin — November 21, 1904 — "The only thing I do is to enter into myself."
No one will ever know how deep was the spirituality of this angelic young nun, who uttered the most sublime speeches with the frankness of a child, as though they were the most natural remarks to make. Absorbed as she was in God, when the time came, she could climb her Calvary with the fortitude of a martyr ; her heroism then revealed to us how genuine had been her prayer, which no pain, however intense, could henceforth interrupt.
" I cannot reveal what He teaches me in the depth of my soul," she said. " He shows me all things and responds to all my needs."
At other times the Divine light was eclipsed, but Elizabeth, unshaken in faith and hope, remained perfectly collected, dwelling on the words of our holy Father, which delighted her : " Faith is presence in the darkness, possession in obscurity." "During the night that obscured her soul she clung to Him she loved and for Whom she suffered, following Him by the glimmering of the obscure light."1
no THE "PRAISE OF GLORY"
Those experienced in the states in which faith is purified and simplified will know that our little sister was heroic in keeping assiduously to prayer.
No one who saw her, calm and peaceful before the Eucharistic throne, would have supposed that sometimes on the Sundays and feast days she passed in the oratory, without sparing a moment from her worship of the Divine Master, she was being " tempted to get up and leave."
" I often spend all these hours in c the dark night/ " she said; " but at my prayer in the evening He compensates for it, and still more so next day. Then I receive the reward of my acts and silence of the day before, so that I would not miss my Communion on Monday on any account."
Her first retreat after her profession established her in this state of soul : the way of faith, obscure, yet luminous, because she clearly realized the love of God. He was her light, enlightening her in the ! darkness of her night, so that she blessed the Lord ; at all times. God appeared to wish to recompense i her generous fidelity during this retreat, for she was overwhelmed with graces too sublime and substantial to be described, so that when Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity gave an account of her dispositions, she raised her lustrous eyes to her Prioress, and could only say : " He imparts eternal life to me."
" The kingdom of God must needs bring eternal life with it," says the holy Abbot Moses, "and is entered by the practice of virtue, purity of heart, and spiritual and divine knowledge."*
After this retreat, her prayer seemed still more simple. "We must keep our eyes on Him," she * " Lives of the Fathers of the Desert."
THE INNER LIFE in said, speaking of the Divine Master ; " we must be silent ; it is so simple !" This was her one rule. If a novena was to be made, a feast to be prepared for, when she was asked what she was going to do, she always answered : " I am going to be silent, so that He may flow into me."
This invariable answer was generally expected by our young nuns, who used to say to her, rather mischievously : " You will be quiet, won't you ? Silence !" And she used to smile.
Sometimes, however, she felt very doubtful whether she ought to be constantly passive ; ought she not to act more during prayer ? Her peace, disturbed for the moment, was always restored to her by Him Who wished her to be thus recollected under His direct and continuous action. One day, during the I Forty Hours," Elizabeth, after listening to her companions urging one another to make reparation, felt rather sorry, as she began her prayer, at not being able to act in the same way ; but she had hardly prostrated herself to adore our Lord, when He enveloped her with a luminous and peace-giving radiance. It was suddenly revealed to her that the obstacle created by sin against God's diffusing Himself into the souls of men was one of the things which most deeply wounded the Divine Heart, and that to console Him and to make reparation for such an outrage, she must let herself be taken possession of by God, giving full liberty to His grace and love to act within her. Now that her form of prayer was divinely approved, it became more and more her habitual state of soul.
" Do you not delight in listening to Him ?" she wrote to a young seminarist. " Sometimes I feel so ii2 THE "PRAISE OF GLORY"
strongly impelled to be silent that I should like to do nothing but sit at the Saviour's feet with the Magdalen, eager to hear everything and to penetrate deeper and deeper still into the mystery of charity that He came to reveal. Have you not found that while we are active and appear to be rilling Martha's office the soul can remain buried in contemplation like Magdalen, or like a thirsty man at the fountain? That seems to me the mission of the Carmelite and the priest : both can show forth God and give Him to souls if they are always close to the Divine source. I think we should draw very near the Master, be in communion with His soul, identify ourselves with all His impulses, then go forth, like Him, according to the will of His Father.
" I like the thought, ' the life of the priest (and of the Carmelite) is an advent that prepares souls for the Incarnation/ David says in one of the Psalms: A fire shall go before Him/ Is not love that fire? And is it not also our mission to prepare the way of the Saviour by our union with Him Whom the Apostle calls a consuming fire ? By contact with Him, our soul will become a flame of love, spreading throughout all the members of the Body of Christ, which is the Church. Then we shall console our Master's Heart, and He will be able to show us to His Father, saying : ' I am already glorified in them/ "
Sister Elizabeth interpreted the apostolate of Carmel like a genuine daughter of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross. As our holy Father says in his " Spiritual Canticle " :
"The soul that enjoys solitary love seems idle, * Ps, xcvi. 3.
but ... an instant of pure love is more precious in the eyes of God and the soul, and more profitable to the Church, than all other good works together, though it may seem as if nothing were done. Thus, Mary Magdalen, though her preaching was most edifying, and might have been still more so afterwards, out of the great desire she had to please God and edify the Church, hid herself, nevertheless, in the desert thirty years, that she might surrender herself entirely to love ; for she considered that she would gain more in that way, because an instant of pure love is so much more profitable and important to the Church. ... In a word, it is for this love that we were all created."2
The following lines show more clearly that Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity fully grasped the truth of this great doctrine :
"Since our Lord dwells in our soul, His prayer is ours, and I desire to partake of it unceasingly, keeping like a little pitcher beside the fountain, so that I may be able to give life to others by letting His inexhaustible streams of charity overflow on them.
" ' For them do I sanctify Myself, that they also may be sanctified in the truth.' t Let us make these words of our adorable Master our own. Yes ! let us sanctify ourselves for the souls of others, for as we are all members of the same body we can cause the Divine life to circulate throughout the great body i of the Church in proportion to the share we possess of that life ourselves.
"All sanctity and apostleship seem to me con- ii4 THE "PRAISE OF GLORY"
tained in two words : c union, love.' Pray that I may live beneath their sway by abiding within the Blessed Trinity."
" When I think of my name," she wrote to the same seminarist, with whom the bonds of grace connected her more closely than can any ties of relationship, " my soul is conducted by the great vision of the mystery of mysteries into that Trinity Which even in this world is our cloister, our dwellingplace, the infinite Being enclosed in which we can traverse all things. I am just reading the beautiful teaching of our Father St. John of the Cross about the transformation of the soul into the Three Divine Persons. To what sublime glory we are called ! I can understand the silence and recollection of the saints who could not withdraw from their contem plation, so that God could lead them to the divin mount where union is made perfect between Hr and the soul, which is His mystic bride.
"What an adorable mystery of charity that Go should call us by our vocation to live in such knowledge ! . . . I should like to respond to it by passing through this world like our Lady, < keeping all these things in my heart,' retired, as it were, into the depth of my soul, so as to lose myself, to be transmerged into the Blessed Trinity Who dwells there ; then my device, £ my radiant ideal,' as you call it, would be realized, and I should really be * Elizabeth of the Trinity.' "
Her special devotion for this august Mystery led her to make every Sunday a feast of the Blessed Trinity. When we recited the Athanasian Creed in the Office of the day she used "to feel as if she were in heaven " as she sang it.
She never missed reminding her relations when Trinity Sunday came round, and kept it herself with even deeper recollection than usual. It was in the centre of her being that she sought it, and there adored the Mystery.
" This is my own feast," she wrote to her sister : " there is no other like it for me. It is celebrated in silence and adoration in Carmel. I never before realized the sense of my vocation hidden in my name. Let this great Mystery be our meeting- place, our centre, and our abode/' Sister Elizabeth's dedication to the Three Divine Persons increased her devotion for our Lady, and formed a closer bond of grace with her whom she termed the great f raise of glory of the Blessed Trinity, " The movements of Mary's soul are so deep," Sister Elizabeth often said, "that we cannot fathom them ; she seems to reproduce on earth the Divine, the simple Being. She is so transparent that we might mistake her for the Light itself, yet she is only the c Mirror of the Sun of Justice/ It seems to me that she is more easy to imitate than any other saint ; it brings me peace whenever I look at her."
Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity loved to think of the hour when the Holy Spirit came upon Mary, the power of the Most High overshadowed her, and the Word became incarnate in her. One day, moved by contemplating this mystery, her heart overflowed in a prayer in which she besought some of its ineffable graces.* It was written on November 21, 1904, on the Feast of the Presentation of our Lady, dear to her on account of the mysterious bond entered into between the child Virgin and the Three * See Appendix.
n6 THE "PRAISE OF GLORY "
Persons of the Blessed Trinity. Our little sister used to delight in placing herself, in imagination, on the threshold of the Temple, where she adored and renewed her vows in the same spirit of oblation.
She was also particularly attracted by the season of Advent. " I need no effort," she said, u to enter into the Mystery of God dwelling within the Blessed Virgin ; it seems to resemble my usual attitude of soul, and like her, I adore the hidden God within me. When I read in the Gospel that Mary went in haste to the mountains of Judea on her charitable mission to her cousin Elizabeth, I can see her as she passes, calm, majestic, recollected, holding commune within herself with the Word of God. Her prayer was always the same as His : ' Ecce, here am I.' Who ? c The handmaid of the Lord,' she, His Mother, the lowliest of all His creatures.
" Her humility was sincere because she was always forgetful of self, unconscious of, freed from self, so that she could sing : i From henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. Because He that is mighty hath done great things to me.' "*
These words of Sister Elizabeth's recall a remark made about her by a religious : " She possesses a soul of an exceptional simplicity which has set her at perfect liberty." She had said to him during a retreat : " It is very dark and painful, yet I think it L is as simple to suffer as to enjoy." Her character is in this sentence. In fact, she went straight to God, without devoting herself to the practice of any special virtue. Her Carmelite life, contained in the words of the Divine Master : " I do always the things that please my Father,"t implicitly includes all the virtues * St. Luke 1. 48, 49. f St. John viii. 29.
without further thought of them. " Love dwells / within us," she used to say, " so all I do is to enter i into myself and lose myself in Those within me."
" I am Elizabeth of the Trinity, that is to say, Elizabeth disappearing, submerged in the c Three.' Let us give ourselves up to Them, sacrificing ourselves every moment without seeking for anything extraordinary. Let us make ourselves small, allowing Him Who is our all to carry us in His arms as a mother does her child.
" Yes, we are weak — indeed, I may say we are nothing but misery ; but He well knows that. He delights in forgiving and raising us up, in bearing us in Himself, in His purity and infinite sanctity. In this way He purifies us by continual contact with Him. He wishes us to be stainless, and He Himself will be our purity ! We must allow ourselves to be transformed into His image, which will be accomplished simply by loving Him ceaselessly with such a love as causes unity between those who love. I wish to be a saint that I may glorify my Divine Master ; ask Him to make me live for love alone, which is my vocation. Let us unite ourselves to Him, so that our days may be in continual communion with Him ; let us awake in love, deliver ourselves to love all day by doing the will of the good God, in His sight, with Him, in Him, for Him alone ; let us give ourselves incessantly in the way in which He wishes ; then, when night comes, after a colloquy of love in our heart throughout the time, let us sleep again in love. Perhaps we may know of faults and infidelities on our part ; let us abandon them to love which is a consuming fire, and thus we shall have our purgatory."
n8 THE "PRAISE OF GLORY"
Again she writes: cc Since we aspire to become (C victims of charity," like our holy Mother St. Teresa, we must allow ourselves to become rooted in the charity of Christ, as St. Paul says in the beautiful epistle of to-day. How is that to be done ? In living — raised above all that is around us — with Him Who dwells within us, and Who is charity. He thirsts to give us all He is, to transform us into Himself. Let us rouse our faith and remember that He is within us, and wishes us to be true to Him. How many acts of self-denial we can offer unknown to all but Him ! Let us lose none of them. It seems to me that the saints are souls completely oblivious of self, lost in Him Whom they love, with never a thought of self or of creatures, so that they are able to say with St. Paul : c I live, yet not I, but Jesus Christ liveth in me/ No doubt we must immolate ourselves in order to be so transformed, but we love sacrifice because we love the crucified God. Oh, let us be in earnest about it ! Let us give our soul to Him, telling Him that we long to love but Him alone ; let Him do all, for we are feeble and childish, and it is such joy to be the little babe of the good God !"
Footnotes
Chapter 10 of 19