| “I think that in Heaven my mission will be to draw souls by helping them go out of themselves, to cling to God by a wholly simple and loving movement, and to keep them in this great silence within, that will allow God to communicate Himself to them and transform them into Himself.” (L 335)
Once, while still a teenager, the future Elizabeth of the Trinity was asked by a family friend what she said to God during the long hours of prayer. “Oh, Madame,” she replied with disarming honesty, “we love each other.” For Elizabeth, prayer was not a question of reason or logic: it was an affair of the heart, time spent apart with a Friend.
Even as a teenager, Elizabeth was a contemplative in the world. She lived her Christian life in all its essentials without the support and structure of a religious community. She found her monastery in the cell of her heart, in that “little Bethany” (IN 5), where each heartbeat is an act of love.
She wrote to a friend: “even in the midst of the world, one can listen to Him in the silence of a heart that wants to belong only to Him!” (L 38).
Elizabeth can rightly be called a teacher of prayer, but not in the sense that she spells out for us a method or way of praying. Rather, she shares her own experience with us, and invites us to open ourselves to the gift of the Spirit present in our heart.
It would be wrong to think of Elizabeth as someone to be admired rather than imitated, a spiritual athlete rather than a fellow traveller. It is all too easy to visualise her as a gilded seraph, gliding through the corridors of prayer without a wayward thought or distraction.
In her diary she humbly confesses her own struggle: “how hard and difficult prayer ordinarily seems. You have to work hard to gather all your powers together — how much it costs and how difficult it seems!” (D 14).
Elizabeth was not above falling asleep in prayer, or letting her attention wander. She confessed to her prioress that sometimes she felt so dry and empty that she wanted to get up and run out of the chapel.
On another occasion, she admits, she became so involved with her work of sewing that “When I went to my prayer, try as I might, I could not rise above my ‘rags’.”
Perhaps the phrase “heart to heart” best sums up the dynamics of Elizabeth’s prayer: “I pour out my heart [to Him], I catch myself saying all sorts of foolish things . . . but He likes me to be uninhibited and to speak to Him heart to heart” (D 135).
“Heart”, in this sense, represents the deepest part of her being, the centre of all her affections and love: “If you got to know Him a little, prayer wouldn’t bore you any more,” she tells a young friend; “to me it seems to be rest, relaxation. We come quite simply to the One we love, stay close to Him like a little child in the arms of its mother, and we let our heart go.” (L 123)
Elizabeth did not see her Carmelite life as irrelevant to her family and friends outside the convent. During her life in Carmel she wrote numerous letters; the majority of them were to lay people, with whom she shared the fruit of her own struggles. She tried to encourage and support them in whatever way she could.
Her suggestions for rising above the “rags” of distraction are as practical as they are sensible. “When I say prayer, I don’t mean so much imposing on yourself a lot of vocal prayers to be recited every day as that elevation of the soul toward God through all things.” (L 252)
This is an edited extract from Let Yourself Be Loved: Elizabeth of the Trinity by Eugene McCaffrey (Teresian Press, £5). It is obtainable from www.carmelitebooks.com. |
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