The dead can be our friends and mentors, perhaps even more fundamentally and intimately than those we live and work with every day. We have many invisible brothers and sisters who watch us serenely and compassionately, household gods of the spirit. Such is the glory of the communion of saints. Life and words do not perish in the moment they are done but resound from immense to immense. The holiness of those who have already gone behind the veil is not of a merely ghostly memory that haunts the present like a guilty conscience. Rather, it is a light of companionship which both warms and cools the heart, preparing it for war with the powers, readying it for love in the interior palace of the mind that all legends and fairy tales gesture towards.
St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, a lioness God, like Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, and Edith Stein, is such a person. Her time was short, cut off in her youth like Therese of Lisieux, but it bore much fruit. Separated from the world by her vows to the Discalced Carmelite Order, her distance made her more aware of the essential foundations, choices, possibilities of life. Having become nothing to herself, she could do everything in Christ for those who struggle along the way in all walks of life. The daughter of a soldier, like the centurion who encountered Jesus in the Gospels, she knew the finality and weight of commands, and knew how to answer each silent order with joy and greatness of spirit. Elizabeth of the Trinity, again like Therese of Lisieux, remained a child of God despite knowing how dark the night of the soul could be. But she did so in a manner that provided a voice that was noble as well as trusting. She found the “heaven of our soul” where God delights to dwell, and in self-knowledge she could bear any suffering and believe all things.
I discovered her 6 years ago just before Christmas while visiting the Carmelite monastery of Holy Hill in Wisconsin as part of the process of discernment. I already had spent several years examining various orders and dioceses, looking for a home and a calling, often feeling much disappointment, but persistently rising to try again. Drawn by the delight in the writings of the contemplatives of the Carmelite order, I turned in that direction with a new sense of expectancy. In my heart of hearts, I was too bruised by prior rejection to be overly enthusiastic, but I remained hopeful. And something in the air and in my soul at that time seemed to promise an unlooked for boon. The words of St. Paul in Romans, then and now, often came to mind: “We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”
And perhaps I was just beginning to understand what that verse meant truly for the first time. The communal peace of the brothers, the beauty of the surrounding midwestern landscapes, and the order of regular prayer in the upper chapel where the faded but unconquered sun peeked through the glass at noon during the short winter days put me in a mood of receptivity. There was holiday preparations happening throughout the monastery and surrounding grounds, imparting a new ease and cheerfulness to all routines. It was one of those moments in which the world seemed to cohere in a blessed unity of thought and action, personal time and collective time, full of promise and hope. The silence facilitated the ritual acts, and the ceremonies in turn summoned me into the presence of a God I had too often forgotten, and still forget again and again. Above each visitor’s door the friars had put a seasonal quote. Mine was one from St. John of the Cross; “The Virgin, weighed with the Word of God, comes down the road: if only you’ll shelter her.”
I intuited the meaning of this mysterious phrase with giddy excitement, buoyed up by my routine devotion to Mary, in whose person I had so often seen the high calling of all of humanity according to the new dispensation. Mary was not just the Mother of God in history, but the ever present, ever fruitful openness of all our race to the divine rain that has been so long in both arrival and departure. God the Eternal could manifest now, without delay, if only I could greet Him with my own Ave and Fiat.
It was in this mood that I discovered Elizabeth of the Trinity, still three month away from her canonization. Her collected writings were a part of the Carmelite library in all the rooms for guests. Among the familiar writings of the Little Flower, John of the Cross, and Teresa of Avila, I noticed her unknown but evocative name. It was like discovering by chance a treasure of great price in a field. But also as if it had always been meant for me, and me alone, with all my humanity, hopes, and fears. I had already fallen for St. Therese of the Little Flower; with Elizabeth I found a similar spiritual beauty, the same mark of the Carmelites. But she brought out news depths of the nature of God, with a military sense of la gloriae, stripped of the personal details of her more famous contemporary. She had truly left the domestic scene of father, mother, and siblings behind and had wandered deep into the woods of contemplation. And chief among the things revealed to her was the living, present reality of the Triune life of God.
The Trinity is a doctrine which seems often to only be a negative framework in which we mainly learn the ways in which to not talk about God. But with Elizabeth the dogmas became a part of a positive, ecstatic discourse of worship of the threefold divine life that with Christ Himself had come down from Heaven to give joy to our earthly condition. Elizabeth wished her title in Heaven to be laudem gloriae (praise of glory); she spoke with such eloquence about the depths of she makes the reader herself want to join in the festival of charity. And thus Elizabeth revealed herself to me in those quiet December hours in between prayers with the brothers, Mass, and interviews with the vocations director. The dramatic poetry of Claudel, the philosophy of Edward Feser, and the last words of St. Therese mixed in and further deepened this new found friendship with the dearly departed.
I read her words greedily and with excitement. But what struck me most was the a passage from The Last Retreat, her final work before her death :
“‘Nescivi.’ ‘I no longer know anything. This is what ‘the bride of the Canticles’ sings after having been brought into’ the little cellar.’ It seems to me this must also be the refrain of a praise of glory on the first day of a 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.”
In particular the passing phrase “time…is eternity begun and still in progress” resonated in my ear like a melody I had always known but had forgotten. The latent monologue that I had carried on with myself, spun from years of accumulated joy and pain, was given words. I was suddenly permitted by the words of a saint to take seriously what in myself I had considered a dubious sentiment at best. This statement sounds, on the surface, more like a gnomic formula from a German Idealist philosophical treatise than something a cloistered nun would write. But in reality, Schiller or Hegel could not have written such a line, or if they did, they would have meant in the opposite sense. They would, despairingly, want eternity merely to become immanent in becoming as its Golgotha, its death, instead of remaining faithful to the hope that the temporal itself is being raised up into the glory of the incorruptible. Instead of the levelling equality of the atheistic theologians of Germany, Elizabeth intended an equality that elevates.
Instead of an auto divinization (and thus, in effect, secularization) of worldly human reality as the “real” sacred, what is celebrated by Elizabeth of Trinity is a marriage in which the two parties of Godhead and humanity marry, becoming one without ceasing to be two. And this spousal union of a pair is itself sustained by the higher economy of three in one found in the Trinity. Understanding each person of God relates itself in time, guided by the spirit of Elizabeth, helps us to understand better how the eternal can coexist with the finite without one swallowing up the other.
The life of the Trinity reveals the manner in which time is eternity begun. The Spirit assembles the Church into a living witness to the infinity of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, set to gather the lost sheep with the blood of the lamb. The Son ties together mankind and the Creator by taking on our flesh. Finally, the Father’s generosity is reflected back by the world and humanity alike as in a mirror where a face can be seen, however darkly. The temporal is sacralized without the destruction of the consecrating power. The Pope blesses the Emperor, without either bending the knee to him, or annexing the latter to himself.
As with many of the sayings of the mystics, we find much confirmation of Elizabeth’s words by just taking seriously the ordinary content of orthodoxy and orthopraxy. The clearest case for how the eternal is made in the case of the Holy Spirit as presented by the testament of Scripture and Tradition. From the fire that has been poured out into the Church on Pentecost to the flames, however small, that are kept alive around the world by the faithful, the kingdom is made manifest on earth. The brotherhood of believers makes the Lord present and visible, despite the distance of the Father and the pre-apocalyptic occlusion of the Son.
Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. (1 John 4:11-12)
The ethical life of neighborly care and mutual aid is not a mere afterthought in the economy of salvation. It is an essential part of how God’s love is given, returned, and known. The brotherhood and sisterhood of the saints clearly imitates the self-giving of the Trinity. They forever share the good freely and find neither satiety nor lack. But this divine charity also is made concrete in the sense that we can relate to the sinful and the forlorn as members of the body of Christ. Wherever the least amongst us is present, and wherever the elect dwell, God can be found. The person of Jesus that walked through ancient Palestine has been taken from our eyes, hidden behind and within the sacraments of bread and wine. But through the Church the long siege of the eternal against the city of the Prince of this world can be continued
The Son is the ring that binds Heaven and Earth. He is the most open and yet most mysterious sign of the work of the Trinity in the realm of time. Through the incarnation the temporal was fully made eternal while we remain still distinctly creaturely beings, swimming like fish in the sea of divine peace. The incarnation is the climax of the process that was set in motion by the primordial revelation of the Father in creation and continued in the work of the Spirit in the Church. As St. Paul said so eloquently in his letter to the Colossians:
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in Him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through Him and for Him.
This union is not the modernizing heresy of Hegel and company that portrays the descent of the Messiah to man as the abandonment of the divine to the world, revealing that God was dead from the beginning all along. Rather, it demonstrated how the divine wine maintains its distinctiveness without being lost or diluted by the contents of the world. Rather it has the miraculous power to turn ordinary bland water into itself. The corruption of the grave did not conquer Jesus, but Jesus overcame death itself. And in doing so He has shown the way to live like a god in the world. The philosophers of the Greeks sought to make themselves impervious to pain by focusing on the citadel of finitude that could defy the endless hordes of suffering through self control, either through virtue or pleasure. But Christ took up the unending task of self-giving so that the endlessness of pain in this world can be surpassed by the greater infinity of glory. And this is not a task too great for us, but one that is easy and light when done with our Lord.
Highest, perhaps, of all such mysteries is the manner in which the eternity of the Father is revealed by time. The Father is commonly thought of as the most untouchable member of the Trinity. Hence there the common presentation of Him in artwork as a monarch, a lordly patriarch, in relation to His incarnate Son and the dove. But we should not forget that we who have seen the Son have seen the Father, and thus the common divine life was also present at the Birth, Cross, and Resurrection. The Pater did not take on human flesh, He did not come down in Power upon the Apostles and the Mother in Jerusalem. But in His giving of the Son and the Spirit, He has manifested Himself as the One in time who shines with indifference upon the good and bad alike, expecting nothing in return. His impartial generosity shines through creation and salvation history. This points to the saving separation between His transcendent life and our own which allows a gift to be given. He knows our frailty, yet He loves us anyway. And in this, the Father allows us to be nothing in relation to Him, but also to be free to love and loved in return. As Jean Luc Marion said eloquently in his brilliant work of negative theology The Idol and Distance :
To for-give Being it’s inanity is to abandon to it it’s proper field as a gift which receives itself. Being has no more ‘why’ than the rose-but only forgiveness can grant it that one not impute that absence to it as a fault. Only the distance that gives for nothing, unless for the pleasure of a grace, forgives Being it’s inanity, and gives it the chance to abandon itself to a game without reason. That vanity should become a gift without reason-only distance can give this to Being, because distance alone, which abandons itself to these gifts, knows how to recognize in Gelassenheit an icon of charity.
Vanity of Vanities is the world and its ways; yet in the divine permission that it be such an airy light and insubstantial thing we find a mercy that is sweeter than life itself. Whenever we recite the Lord’s prayer, we ask again and again for the empty breath on which our existence depends, and which we can not provide for ourselves. We are known, and in this knowledge the Father Himself is known.
Thus, with the inspiration of St. Elizabeth, we are drawn to see how eternity already dwells in the temporal in a way that honors the threefold nature of God, through the Church, the Incarnation, and the Paternal gift of life. Each element of our existence in time corresponds to the persons of the Trinity. God is beyond the world, but emptied into all the richness of His interior life.
This finding of the Trinity in the world under modern circumstances by Elizabeth of the Trinity had and has implications for the wider life of the Church. The sacralization of everyday life in the 20th century throughout post-Tridentine Catholicism can be traced in part, strange as it may seem, to the influence of Carmelites, particularly via Therese of Lisieux, but also through our dear Elizabeth. By making their simple sacrifice the center of their life, with their little ways, inconspicuous in the eyes of the world, the conception of Catholic sanctity was democratized. You don’t need to flee to a monastery to become like Therese or Elizabeth. You only had to read their words with a sincere heart and a willing mind to enter into the chamber of the soul that the dear nuns had prepared before you had even known it was there. The honorable reputation of the contemplative life raised the value of the mundane, while the holiness of the mystic love of God increased the dignity of love in general. To this we can thank a deeper appreciation and integration of the Trinitarian life. The heights of theological speculation led the soul to the strength to live the ordinary, apparently unheroic life well.
I was not ultimately accepted by the Carmelites at Holy Hill. But what the few short days that I spent with them gave was a prize worth many disappointments and tears. My latent trust in divine providence was given a noble language that allowed me access to the secrets of the heart as well as the mind. Whether I became a monk or a chaste layman, a father in the order of the spirit or the father according to the order of the flesh, God would be with me. I remain open to the trumpet sound, regardless of which direction it comes from. The Trinity is within me and around me, and the world is a theatre covered with grand sets and whispering symbols in which the King of Kings can manifest His glory. Let me only be a good actor who can answer gracefully to each cue, and I can join Elizabeth in an eternal act of praise.