Propter nimiam charitatem!…

That day was God-ordained:
the Father, by decree,
Laid down that you began
my Mother here to be.
I hail that joyous day:
the Triune Loving — more,
‘Excess of Charity’!
I see it, and adore.

Such overflowing love! —
that’s what it is, I know,
When God, in prescient love,
arranged that this be so —
For He (that I should make
oblation here fore-known)
Had consecrated you
with unction of His own.

And, from the very start,
O Mother, God was pleased
To love as one in Him
His victim and His priest:
His gaze of love on us
from all eternity,
He’ll always look and see
not two, but unity.

So, if your little ‘host’
(O Pontiff, whom I love!)
Is very soon transferred
up to the Home Above,
She will be yours still more! —
I think it might be so —
Than when the night of faith
she lived in, here below.

Have you not seen a priest
who’s going through the town
Carrying God, the Host,
hidden beneath his gown? —
On your maternal heart
that way, will not it be
That Laudem Gloriae
spends her eternity?

Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity

P 122 [for 9 October 1906]

Note: St. Elizabeth wrote this poem for the fifth anniversary of the election of the prioress, Mother Germaine. Elizabeth refers to herself as a “victim” and “little ‘host'”; she refers to Mother Germaine as “priest” and “Pontiff”.

Mother Germaine (center) holds an early copy of Story of a Soul
The photo was taken on 5 August 1901 on the terrace leading to the infirmary. Kneeling from left to right: Elizabeth, Mother Germaine of Jesus, Sr. Geneviève of the Trinity
Image credit: Discalced Carmelites

Elizabeth of the Trinity, Marmion, C and Bancroft, A 2001, Barb of fire: twenty poems of Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity: with selected passages from Blessed Columba Marmion, OSB, Gracewing, Leominster.

Featured image: Image credit for St. Elizabeth of the Trinity: Discalced Carmelites. Collage created in Adobe Express.

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“As the thirsty doe longs for the springs of fresh water, so my soul longs for You, O God! My soul thirst for the living God! When will I appear before His face!…” (Ps 42:1–2).

And yet, as “the sparrow has found a home,” and “the turtle dove a nest in which she may lay her young” (Ps 84:3), so Laudem Gloriae has found while waiting to be brought to the holy Jerusalem, “beata pacis visio”—her retreat, her beatitude, her anticipated Heaven in which she begins her life of eternity. “In God my soul is silent; my deliverance comes from Him. Yes, He is the rock in which I find salvation, my stronghold, I shall not be disturbed!” (Ps 62:1–2).

This is the mystery my lyre sings of today! My Master has said to me as to Zacchaeus: “Hurry and come down, for I must stay in your house today…” (Lk 19:5). Hurry and come down, but where? Into the innermost depths of my being: after having forsaken self, withdrawn from self, been stripped of self—in a word, without self.

Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity

Last Retreat, sixteenth day
31 August 1906

Note: Beata pacis visio (Blessed vision of peace) is a phrase found in the first stanza, second line of the hymn Coelestis urbs Jerusalem, which is sung at Vespers for the Common of the Dedication of a Church. Note that having begun her Last Retreat on the sixteenth of August, the “sixteenth day” is 31 August, on which the Dedication of the Churches of Carmel was celebrated.

Elizabeth of the Trinity, S 2014, I Have Found God, The Complete Works of Elizabeth of the Trinity Volume 1: Major spiritual writings, translated from the French by Kane, A, ICS Publications, Washington DC.

Featured image: This detail from the last photo of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity was taken in mid-October, 1906, less than one month before her death on November 9 in the Carmel of Dijon, France. The statue of Our Lady of Lourdes on the small table next to Elizabeth is the one that she gave to her mother when entering the monastery. In her final illness, the statue returned to Carmel and Elizabeth called her, “Janua Coeli”, meaning “Gate of Heaven.” Image credit: Discalced Carmelites

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“Nescivi” (Cant 6:11, Vulgata). “I no longer knew anything.” This is what the “bride of the Canticles” sings after having been brought into the “inner cellar” (Spiritual Canticle, 26:14).

It seems to me that this must also be the refrain of a praise of glory on this first day of retreat in which the Master makes her penetrate the depths of the bottomless abyss so that He may teach her to fulfill the work which will be hers for eternity and which she must already perform in time, which is eternity begun and still in progress (cf. Heaven in Faith, 1).

“Nescivi”! I no longer know anything, I do not want to know anything except “to know Him, to share in His sufferings, to become like Him in His death” (Phil 3:10).

“Those whom God has foreknown He has also predestined to become confirmed to the image of His divine Son”(Rom 8:29) the One crucified by love. When I am wholly identified with this divine Exemplar (cf. Ruysbroeck), when I have wholly passed into Him and He into me, then I will fulfill my eternal vocation: the one for which God has “chosen me in Him”, “in principio” (Eph 1:4), the one I will continue “in aeternum” when, immersed in the bosom of my Trinity, I will be the unceasing praise of His glory, Laudem gloriae ejus (Eph 1:12).

Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity

Last Retreat, First Day, no. 1
16 August 1906

Note: Saint John of the Cross’ commentary on the Spiritual Canticle (stanza 26, no. 14) is as follows:

On the other hand, the elevation and immersion of the mind in God in which the soul is as though carried away and absorbed in love, entirely transformed in God, does not allow attention to any worldly thing. The soul is not only annihilated with respect to all things and estranged from them, but undergoes the same even with respect to herself, as if she had vanished and been dissolved in love; all of which consists in passing out of self to the Beloved. Thus the bride, in the Song of Songs, after having treated of the transformation of her love in the Beloved, refers to this unknowing, in which she was left, by the word, nescivi (I did not know) [Cant 6:11, Vulgata].

In a way, the soul in this state resembles Adam in the state of innocence, who did not know evil. For she is so innocent that she does not understand evil, nor does she judge anything in a bad light. And she will hear very evil things and see them with her own eyes and be unable to understand that they are so, since she does not have within herself the habit of evil by which to judge them; for God, by means of the perfect habit of true wisdom, has destroyed her habitual imperfections and ignorances that include the evil of sin.

Elizabeth of the Trinity, S 2014, I Have Found God, The Complete Works of Elizabeth of the Trinity Volume 1: Major spiritual writings, translated from the French by Kane, A, ICS Publications, Washington DC.

John of the Cross, St. 1991, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, Revised Edition, translated from the Spanish by Kavanaugh, K and Rodriguez, O with revisions and introductions by Kavanaugh, K, ICS Publications, Washington DC.

Featured image: Adobe Stock (stock photo, also available on Freepik)

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My soul loves to unite with yours in one single prayer for the Church, for the diocese. Since Our Lord dwells in our souls, His prayer belongs to us, and I wish to live in communion with it unceasingly, keeping myself like a little vase at the Source, at the Fountain of life [Rev 7:17; 21:6], so that later I can communicate it to souls by letting its floods of infinite charity overflow [cf. St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Prayer 6].

“I sanctify myself for them that they also may be sanctified in the truth” [Jn 17:19].

Let us make these words of our adored Master all our own, yes, let us sanctify ourselves for souls, and since we are all members of one body [Cf. Eph 4:25 and 5:30; Rom 12:4–5 and especially 1 Cor 12], inasmuch as we have an abundance of divine life, we can communicate it in the great body of the Church.

There are two words that sum up for me all holiness, all apostolate: “Union and Love.” Ask that I may live that fully, and, for that purpose, dwell completely hidden away in the Holy Trinity; you could not wish anything more beautiful for me! [as a gift for the New Year and the first anniversary of Elizabeth’s profession].

A Dieu, Monsieur l’Abbé, I am praying very much for you so that, on the day of your subdiaconate [6 January 1905], God will find your soul just as He wishes it to be.

Let us unite to make Him forget everything by the strength of our love, and let us be, as Saint Paul says, “the praise of His glory.”

Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity

Letter 191 to Abbé André Chevignard (excerpt)
25 January 1904

Note: Elizabeth refers to prayers for the diocese. Biographer and editor Conrad de Meester, O.C.D. indicates that the Dijon diocese was “torn by the personality of its bishop,” Albert-Léon-Marie Le Nordez, who was “suspected of being a member of the Freemasons. The seminary was not very much in favor of him, which led several weeks later to the ‘seminarian’ strike,’ among whom was André Chevignard. Father de Meester also notes that Elizabeth closes this letter with a reference to Eph 1:12, “the praise of his glory.” He indicates that this is “the first appearance of this Pauline phrase in Elizabeth’s writings” and that “very probably Elizabeth had read the expression on a holy card that she had kept since 1901.” As for Bishop Le Nordez, he resigned several months after Elizabeth wrote this letter, on 4 September 1904 at the age of sixty.

Elizabeth of the Trinity, S 2003, The Complete Works of Elizabeth of the Trinity volume 2: Letters from Carmel, translated from the French by Nash, A, ICS Publications, Washington DC.

Featured image: Detail from the banner commissioned for the beatification of Elizabeth of the Trinity, 25 November 1984. Image credit: Discalced Carmelites

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#communion #holiness #LaudemGloriae #love #praiseOfGlory #Sabeth #seminarian #StElizabethOfTheTrinity #union #vocation