Introduction to Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity
Part II - Her Spirituality and Mission in the Church
This is the second of a two part series on the life and spirituality of Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity, who feast day is celebrated in Carmel each year on November 8. The first part focuses on the life and vocation of Saint Elizabeth, while Part II consists of an introduction to her spirituality and legacy in the Church.
Happy Feast of All Carmelite Saints!
Rooted In Scripture
The spiritual legacy left behind by Saint Elizabeth has its roots deeply planted in Sacred Scripture. As has previously been stated, the young Carmelite did more than just read the Word of God; she absorbed it, meditating on it was such frequency and such intensity that it became almost as much her own word as that of God. The conformity of her life to Christ and the degree to which she lived immersed in the Trinity shines forth from the pages of her writing, where one can plainly see that the petition in her magnificent Prayer To The Trinity, “Come upon me and create in my soul a kind of incarnation of the Word” was fully realized in how she thought and expressed herself with that same Word.
The loftiest and most personal of all her writings, the Last Retreat, is a veritable tapestry of Scriptural quotations and images, drawing in particular from St, Paul, but also weaving in generous contributions from the Gospels, the Epistles of St. John, the Book of Revelation, and (like any good Carmelite) the Song of Songs. From St. Paul she found the life-changing revelation that she had been “predestined” by God to be “the praise of His glory”, an insight that refined and came to define in a few simple yet profound words Elizabeth’s conception both of herself and of her eternal vocation in the heart of the Trinity.
From St. John in the Book of Revelation, she drew insights into what her soul must be like here and now in order that she might worthily fulfill her vocation as “praise of glory” and preserve her soul as a suitable dwelling place of the Trinity. Contemplating the descent of the New Jerusalem out of Heaven, she writes, “If I want my interior city to have some similarity and likeness to that ‘of the King of eternal ages’ and to receive this great illumination from God, I must extinguish every other light and, as in the holy city, the Lamb must be ‘its only light’. Here faith, the beautiful light of faith appears. It alone should light my way as I go to meet the Bridegroom.”
It was to the women of the Gospels, notably the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Mary Magdalene, that Elizabeth looked for practical models of how to live her own life in unity with God. To the latter, Elizabeth goes especially for an example of self-forgetfulness in the face of trials. Again in the Last Retreat she writes, “She could sing, ‘My soul is always in my hands,’ and also this little word: ‘Nescivi!’ Yes, she knew nothing but Him! There could be noise and excitement around her: ‘Nescivi!’ They could accuse her: ‘Nescivi!’ Neither empty self-esteem nor exterior things could draw her out of her ‘sacred silence’.”
Yet far above all other models in Saint Elizabeth’s calculation stands the Mother of God. She herself exclaims, “How all the saints remain in shadows when we look at the Blessed Virgin’s light!” (LR) This does not daunt Elizabeth; indeed, she always had great affection and trust in the “Janua caeli”, the “Gate of Heaven” who would be her portal into the eternal splendor of God. “The Mother of grace will form my soul so that her little child will be a living, ‘striking’ image of her first-born, the Son of the Eternal, He who was the perfect praise of His Father’s glory.” (LR)
Mary was for her the model par excellence of the contemplative life, a life which Elizabeth never viewed as being restricted to those who live within the cloister. Indeed, it is to her sister Guite that she addressed one of her major works, Heaven in Faith, and it is here that she says of Mary, “It seems to me that the attitude of the Virgin during the months that elapsed between the Annunciation and the Nativity is the model for interior souls, those whom God has chosen to live within, in the depths of the bottomless abyss. In what peace, in what recollection Mary lent herself to everything she did! How even the most trivial things were divinized by her! For through it all the Virgin remained the adorer of the gift of God! This did not prevent her from spending herself outwardly when it was a matter of charity; the Gospel tells us that Mary went in haste to the mountains of Judea to visit her cousin Elizabeth. Never did the ineffable vision that she contemplated within herself in any way diminish her outward charity.”
In her contemplation of Mary, we find encapsulated Elizabeth’s whole method of praying with the Scriptures: a penetrating encounter with the Word of God, a deep devotion to the real people whom she meets through the Scriptures, a vigorous application of the lessons and examples to be found therein to her own life, and an apostolic zeal to share those lessons with those around her, so as to draw them in turn into the mystery of the Word made Flesh. At an epoch in the Church when we are enjoying a newfound appreciation for serious study of the Bible and the ancient practice of lectio divina, Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity presents for us in her own person a striking, living example of what it means to be rooted and grounded in the Sacred Scriptures.
The Divine Indwelling
It was not only Sacred Scripture that Saint Elizabeth assimilated into her own thought and writing. She was a devoted daughter and pupil of St. John of the Cross, and quotations of The Spiritual Canticle and Living Flame of Love are nearly equally applied to expressing her deepest spiritual experiences and insights as are those of Scripture. In the final year of her life, she discovered the medieval mystics Bl. Jan van Ruysbroeck and St. Angela de Foligno.
For Elizabeth, the writings of these two saints was a watershed moment, especially the former, whom the dying Carmelite found to express perfectly her experience of the Trinity as God dwelling within. Elizabeth from early childhood had long been enamored with the idea that her soul was the “House of God”, and indeed it was this knowledge and focus on living with Jesus within the “interior cell” of her heart that had sustained her during the painful years of waiting to enter Carmel. Now, in Ruysbroeck she found this mystical reality, which at this time she was experiencing to a sublime degree, expressed in a way that exhilarated her.
Heaven in Faith was written to her sister Guite, not only as an abiding testament for Mme. Chevignard from her dying sister, but as a largely spontaneous reaction to what she had discovered in Ruysbroeck and which she was now eagerly impatient to share with her younger sister. “We must descend daily this pathway of the Abyss which is God;” Elizabeth writes to Guite in the opening pages, “let us slide down this slope in wholly loving confidence. ‘Abyss calls to abyss.’ It is there in the very depths that the divine impact takes place, where the abyss of our nothingness encounters the Abyss of mercy, the immensity of the all of God. There we find the strength to die to ourselves and, losing all vestige of self, we will be changed into love…‘Blessed are those who die in the Lord!’” Here we discover the heart of Saint Elizabeth’s spiritual itinerary: a continuous turning inward and pursuit of recollection in the depths of her soul, where she knew in faith that the encounter between God and man takes place and the soul is transformed into the divine image.
“Sabeth” and Guite as children
What makes this all the more extraordinary, and relevant to our own times, is the sheer generosity with which Saint Elizabeth viewed and shared this path. We find in her no spiritual elitism. Quite the contrary: this Carmelite was a veritable apostle of contemplation as a mode of prayer and a way of life open to the entire people of God. As already noted, Heaven in Faith was written, not for another nun or even a diocesan priest, but for her sister, a married mother of two young girls who would go on to have seven other children after her sister’s death. It was a tutelage that was to bear rich fruit. By all accounts, Marguerite Chevignard was a woman of deep prayer and nearly-continuous recollection. Four of her five daughters went on to become nuns, and at the convent of one of them, the novice mistress would draw the attention of the young sisters to her example. “When Madame Chevignard is in the chapel, you can watch her, you will see someone who is truly praying, someone who is totally absorbed by the Lord.”
Elizabeth’s apostolic activity went beyond just her sister. Everyone with whom she came into contact came away instructed in prayer, and in a way delicately personal and tailored to their specific needs and place in the spiritual journey. To her mother, Elizabeth directed these beautiful words on the essence of prayer, “Think that you are with Him, and act as you would with someone you love. It’s so simple; there is no need for beautiful thoughts, only an outpouring of the heart.” To her young friend Francoise de Sourdon, she addressed The Greatness of Our Vocation, a longer work in the form of a letter containing instruction more suited to a beginner, but one in whom Elizabeth saw great potential.
To Andre Chevignard, her priest brother-in-law, she wrote toward the end of 1905, “I love this thought, that the life of the priest (and of the Carmelite) is an Advent that prepares for the Incarnation in souls.” To Madame Angles, a family friend of the age of forty who was suffering from loneliness and mental trauma, Elizabeth addressed these words in 1902, “You would like to be wholly His, although in the world, and that is so simple: He is always with you, be always with Him, through all your actions, in your sufferings, when your body is exhausted, remain in His sight, see Him present, living in your soul.”
These are simply a few example of the informal teaching ministry that Elizabeth carried on from within the Dijon cloister. Anticipating the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on the “universal call to holiness” by more than a half century, the French Carmelite sought to draw everyone around her into the depths of divine intimacy with the tenderness of a mother and the zeal of a lover
The Praise of Glory
Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity saw one path to entering fully into this mystery of the life of the Trinity within her soul, and that path was perfect conformity to Christ, the One Who came to do His Father’s will. In describing this conformity, she borrowed from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians and declared that her eternal vocation, which was to begin already in this life, was to be a “praise of glory”. Just as Jesus is the revelation of the Father’s glory, so Elizabeth rejoiced in the knowledge that every aspect of her life, if brought into conformity with the will of the Father, could unite her to Jesus and magnify the glory of the Trinity. For this to take place, the soul must continually strive to fulfill within itself the words of Colossians 3:3, “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”
Elizabeth took this to mean that her soul must resemble, while still on earth, the souls of the blessed in Heaven, that is, simple beings, who seek and love God alone and whose “final rest is spent on the heights in simplicity also”. (HF) This demands a radical inner unity, generosity to the point of self-immolation, and an absolute singular focus on God. Here, Elizabeth’s poetic language and musical imagery reaches its pinnacle. “A praise of glory is a soul that gazes on God in faith and simplicity; it is a reflector of all that He is; it is like a bottomless abyss into which He can flow and expand; it is also like a crystal through which He can radiate and contemplate all His perfections and splendor. A soul which thus permits the divine Being to satisfy in itself His need to communicate ‘all that He is and all that He has,’ is in reality the praise of glory of all His gifts.” (HF)
All this is a profoundly Christocentric vision, rooted in the sufferings of the Passion. Jesus Christ is the lodestone of her spiritual life, the sole object of her desire, and her constant companion through everything. “’The queen stood at your right hand’: such is the attitude of this soul; she walks the way of Calvary at the right of her crucified, annihilated, humiliated King…she does not look at the paths on which she is walking; she simply gazes at the Shepherd who is leading her.” (LR) It is by this constant reference to the suffering Humanity of Christ that Saint Elizabeth was able to turn her fiercest trials and darkest hours into a hymn of praise to the Most Holy Trinity and a canticle of love to her divine Spouse. “A praise of glory is a soul of silence that remains like a lyre under the mysterious touch of the Holy Spirit so that He may draw from it divine harmonies; it know that suffering is a string that produces still more beautiful sounds; so it loves to see this string on its instrument that it may more delightfully move the heart of its God.” (HF)
Towards the end of the Last Retreat, Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity let her pen sing one final time the praises of the Blessed Mother. This time, we find Mary at the foot of the Cross, and it is there that the dying nun looks to her for strength and inspiration. “Now that He had returned to His Father and has substituted me for Himself on the Cross…the Blessed Virgin is again there to teach me to suffer as He did, to tell me, to make me hear those last songs of His soul which no one else but she, His Mother, could overhear.” For ourselves, we might now say something quite similar about Elizabeth herself. Let us draw close to this ardent apostle of the interior life and allow ourselves to be instructed by her so that our souls too might be eternally transformed into a melodious hymn of the praise of God’s glory.