– two important concepts in the prayer of Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity
Conrad De Meester, OCD
“My God, Trinity, whom I adore, help me to completely forget myself, so that I may dwell in you, immovable and at peace, as if my soul were already in eternity. May nothing disturb my peace or cause me to go out from you, O my Unchangeable, but let every minute draw me further into the depths of your Mystery. Calm my soul, make it your heaven, your beloved abode, and the place of your rest. May I never leave you alone there, but may I be there entirely, fully awake in my faith, wholly in worship, completely devoted to your creative action.
O my beloved Christ, crucified out of love, I wish to be the bride of your heart, I wish to envelop you in glory, I wish to love you… to death! However, I feel my helplessness, and (thus) I ask you to “clothe me in yourself,” to identify my soul with all the movements of your soul, to immerse, flood, and replace me with yourself, so that my life might only be the radiance of your Life. Come into me as the One who adores, as the Reconciler and as the Savior. O eternal Word, Word of my God, I want to spend my life listening to you, I want to become completely teachable so that I may learn everything from you. Then through all the nights, all the emptiness, all the helplessness, I want to be continually focused on you and dwell in your great light; O my beloved Star, enchant me so that I may never be able to go out from your radiance.
O consuming Fire, Spirit of love, “descend upon me,” so that, in my soul, the incarnation of the Word may take place: that I may be humanity besides, in which He will restore all His Mystery.
And you, O Father, bend down to your poor little creature, “cover it with your shadow,” see in it only “the Beloved, in whom you have placed all your delight.”
O my Three, my Everything, my Bliss, infinite Solitude, Infinity in which I lose myself, I surrender myself to you as prey. Hide within me, so that I may hide in you, in the hope that I will gaze into the abyss of your greatness in your light.”
On November 21, 2004, exactly one hundred years passed since the barefoot Carmelite Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity (Elisabeth Catéz, 1880–1906) composed this prayer. She was only twenty-four years old at the time... This text is today known worldwide and is very popular among people devoted to prayer.
Elizabeth's intimate conversation with God-Trinity, this petitionary prayer can be contemplated from many angles. Here, we will engage with it based on how it speaks of space and silence. This will help us learn better to live with God, who is Great and Present, and at the same time, Blessed Elizabeth will firmly lead us into the depths of Christian prayer.
God is an unfathomable mystery, a pure spirit. But in Jesus, our human brother, he became a man of “flesh and blood” like us. And Jesus teaches us to express God, who is Spirit (entirely) and Immaterial, using human terms and images connected with matter, which supports our spirit.
God as an abyss
Thus, Elizabeth speaks of the transcendent God in this human and Christian language of Jesus and mystics. At the beginning of her prayer, she gazes at God-Trinity in his mystery. A mystery that is abyssal, and therefore, Elizabeth prays that “every minute may draw her deeper” into the depths of this mystery. At the very conclusion of her prayer, she returns to this thought when she expresses to the Holy Trinity the goal of her prayer and her expectation: “that I will gaze into the abyss of your greatness in your light.”
This mystery of God has already been substantially revealed in the Incarnation of the Word. Since the event of the Incarnation, Christ is the visible “Star” of God, radiantly shining “light” and “life” (see the text of the prayer). In this radiance, Elizabeth wishes to dwell constantly. In it, she finds her place in life (her habitat), her natural living space: “I want to be continually focused on you and dwell in your great light; O my beloved Star, enchant me so that I may never be able to go out from your radiance.”
Elizabeth loved the intensity of light and the depth of reliefs. Often, as a young tourist, she admired during her endless wanderings through France the sunny, radiant landscapes of the French south; in the mountains, she was thrilled by the steep abysses, the vastness of wide valleys, the waterfalls and streams rushing down the gorges of emerging rivers; on the coast, she was in awe of the immeasurability of the boundless ocean. In all of this, she saw symbols of God.
In this way, the unfathomable, “abyssal” God offers himself to us. In Christ, He shares His inner life with us, becoming our God, “my Three,” as Elizabeth says. If God is giving and receiving, sharing and attentiveness, we are the invited, the expected. “To what abyss of glory are we called!… Will we ever understand how we are loved?” Elizabeth writes to a young friend. And at another time to her sister Gita: “Do you know your riches well? Have you ever penetrated the abyss of Love? I will reveal to you the immense tenderness that hovers over your soul day and night...”
The space of the human inner self
This mystery, the abyssal depth into which we dive, is also within us, “in the heaven of our soul,” as Elizabeth often used to say. Human and God dwell mutually one in the other. After all, Jesus announces: “Abide in me, and I will abide in you” (John 15:4). “Whoever loves me…, we will make our home in them” (John 14:23). It is wonderful to observe how Elizabeth emphasizes this mutual dwelling. The preposition “in” (in French en) appears ten times in her prayer (besides the meaning-similar dans etc.). Union with the Trinity is already given to us, albeit in a hidden way. In the expectation of blessed contemplation (in eternal life), we are invited: to enter our inner temple; sit at God’s table; enjoy the feast of His intimate closeness!
With absolute determination, Elizabeth offers her inner self to the Trinity as a dwelling: “Calm my soul, make it your heaven, your beloved abode, and the place of your rest.” Numerous hints in her writings reveal what kind of example of “the place of rest” is in her mind: the beloved house in Bethany, where Jesus rested while Martha prepared food, and Mary sat at his feet eagerly listening to his words (cf. Luke 10). Elizabeth also longs to receive Jesus like Mary did, completely and assures him of this: “I want to spend my life listening to you, I want to become completely teachable so that I may learn everything from you.” Her soul will become a space that “beloved Christ” will appropriate like a wild river that floods the land, soaking its waters: “I ask you to ‘clothe me in yourself,’ to identify my soul with all the movements of your soul, to immerse, flood, and replace me, so that my life is only a radiance of your Life.” Her soul expands into the dimensions of Christ, the divine Ocean.
And so, according to the verse of the psalm that Elizabeth loved so much: “In the roar of your waterfalls the deep calls out to the deep...”1 her soul was an abyssal depth calling for another “abyss,” the greatest one, the abyss of God. “Hide within me,” Elizabeth pleads with the Trinity, “so that I may hide in you.” It is certainly not about any kind of burying oneself,2 or anything morbid; on the contrary, Elizabeth desires to live more, fully, and sacredly. This young Carmelite urgently prays for the Pentecost of love, for the grace of complete “exchange” – of mutual dwelling without measure: “O consuming Fire, Spirit of love, ‘descend upon me’,3 so that in my soul the incarnation of the Word may take place: that I may be humanity in addition,4 in which He will renew all His Mystery.”
The need for silence
But we are inattentive, we are often “out of it”... Our minds dwell far from that space of the Trinity, which Elizabeth (elsewhere) calls “our second homeland.” But even this fervent contemplative person, such as Elizabeth, sees the barriers to her approach to the Word, acknowledges her “nights,” her “emptiness,” her “helplessness.” Captivated by the beauty of God, which God-Trinity radiates and which she perceives, Elizabeth longs for God with complete generosity, while acknowledging her certain lack of silence and attentiveness, a deficiency of sensitivity in the gaze of her ignited soul upon the Lord. There is still noise within her.
From the very first lines of her prayer, in order to remain in the “space” that is God, she feels compelled to pray: “Help me to completely forget myself, so that I may dwell in you.” Her explosive temperament is not yet entirely controlled, and Elizabeth asks three times right at the beginning of her prayer for inner peace: “May nothing disturb my peace,” “calm my soul,” so that she may remain before God's face “immovable and at peace.”
Behold, it is this kind of silence that Elizabeth strives for. She wants to be “immovable and at peace, as if my soul were already in eternity.” She no longer wants to be divided by all those earthly gusts of our inner self that we know so well and which drive away our inner peace; she does not want to be expelled from the abode of her inner self.
Elizabeth's deepest desire is to offer the Trinity, present in “the heaven of her soul,” a constant gaze full of love, a gaze that is entirely attentive, a gaze of acceptance and joyful surrender: “May I never leave you alone there,” never! Elizabeth wants to be always “there,” in the space of her inner self, in the deep human, spiritual, but also bodily “I” of her person; in that inner core, which we usually call “heart” or “soul.” With the presence of the Three, this depth becomes “heaven.” And with the surrender of Elizabeth's loving attention, this heaven becomes a “beloved abode and a place of their rest” for the Three.
And then follows her urgent plea – and simultaneously passionate decision: “May I be there entirely, fully awake in my faith, wholly in worship, completely devoted to your creative action.” The wish “to be there” means to be fully present to God in the abode of her inner self. “Fully awake in faith” means: full of that attentiveness which is the privilege of a loving heart, enchanted by the Beloved. Even when He – “the beloved Star” – is covered by some cloud, it does not matter; He remains “there” in her inner self always, and then Elizabeth's awakened faith becomes love, genuinely selflessly shown. Elizabeth wants to be “whole in worship,” in that worship which she elsewhere names “the ecstasy of love.” The words “completely devoted to your creative action” mean: unreservedly open to God's intention and work, which is our likeness to Christ.
Four times, the adverb tout – “entirely, fully” precedes the adjective. Completeness, great intensity, and constancy of Elizabeth's self-giving are the firm pillars of her spiritual quest. If she wishes to “completely forget about herself,” in perfect fidelity, then it is so that she “may be entirely completely” in God. She expresses to the Lord: only you will be my abode, from which I emerge, without ever “going out” and without ever “leaving you alone,” and where I enter again, without ever being absent. For I carry within me “the heaven of my soul,” and through this heaven I speak and act and share with others what I receive from You.
“That beautiful silence”
Why must “that beautiful silence” arise, as Elizabeth calls it in her Last Retreat? So that her desire for perfect holiness and constant adoration may be fulfilled. In the Last Retreat, she further develops her thought: “As soon as the Creator sees that a person is completely silent, as soon as He notices that they are fully absorbed in inner solitude, he is captivated by their beauty and takes them into that immense solitude, the “free space” celebrated by the psalmist (Ps 18:20),5 which is He Himself. The Lord said: ‘I will lead her into the wilderness and speak to her heart’ (Hosea 2:16).”
Without – at least a little – inner silence, that space within cannot reveal itself, cannot be inhabited. The union with God that Elizabeth wants to experience actively and continually does not become actualized. In her spiritual will (letter 335), she rightly explains: “This great silence from within allows God to imprint himself upon souls, to transform them into Himself.” And what she writes to her married sister Gita applies to anyone who seeks God in the purity of attentive love: “The Holy Spirit will transform you into a mysterious lyre, which in silence under the divine touch will play a beautiful hymn to Love.”
Let us conclude with what represents the original intention of all of Elizabeth's prayer. In order for her transformative union in God to take place, Elizabeth completely gives herself, fully surrenders. In echo of the nineteenth psalm (Ps 19:6: “… goes forth like a groom from his wedding chamber…”) Elizabeth writes in her Last Retreat: if the Word “finds my soul empty of everything that cannot be included under these two words: His love and His glory, He will choose her to make her his wedding chamber.”
Thus the generous Elizabeth thinks in her prayer equally about the complete giving of herself to God as about the unconditional acceptance of the Gift of God. She assures her Christ, “crucified out of love,” that she wants to “love Him unto death”! And she formulates her firm decision: “O my Three,… I surrender myself to you as prey.”
Not as prey of one who tears and destroys, but of one who makes better and conforms to himself. The prey of Christ, “the beloved Star.” The prey of “the Spirit of love,” whose “consuming Fire” ignites the soul, purifies it, divinizes it, transforms it into Fire and Light. And when then Elizabeth dies of love, all limitations imposed by corporeality collapse, she enters into eternal life and praises the beauty and love of the Trinity in bright light.
Does this seem too lofty for us? Yet this is our destiny. Such is the folly of God, who made us “in His image and likeness.” This transformation can be lived in the simplicity of faith and everyday life, provided we are fundamentally sincere in love for God and for our neighbor.
And that we be “vigilant” to occasionally, and preferably as often as possible, enter like Elizabeth into “the heaven of our soul.”
Translated from French by VoH, edited by P. Gorazd, O.Carm.
