Elizabeth of the Trinity, an ordinary mystic

This article was first published in Spirituality March/April 2006. See www.dominicanpublications.com

Although many years have passed since I first made the acquaintance of Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity, I always find myself at something of a loss when trying to explain her to someone who does not know her. When I tell people that she has been beatified and is heading towards canonisation, they invariably ask "Why? What did she do?" This means, of course, "What extraordinary things did she do?" "Well", I begin, "she was a contemplative, a mystic …" "Ah!" they nod, satisfied, "visions and ecstasies and so on." I begin to get defensive. "No, she had no visions, no ecstasies; she was a very ordinary person…" Now they are puzzled. Why has she been beatified then, if she is just an ordinary person? How is she a mystic, if she never had a vision?

These are the sort of questions that make me realise what a misconception many of us have of both sanctity and mysticism. We confuse sanctity with perfection of a superhuman kind, and we confuse mysticism with the extraordinary and the paranormal. Yet a saint is not someone who has achieved a state of inhuman perfection, a sort of superperson. A saint is someone who has become fully, completely, perfectly human, because he or she has reached and become united with the very core and essence of being: God, the only Holy One. And we all have a capacity for mysticism, because we all have within us a spark of the divine. A mystical life may indeed involve supernatural visitations and paranormal experiences, but they are not essential, and when they occur, tend to be an overflow into the senses of what is occurring all the time at the deep level where God dwells. When we begin to get in touch with that spark of God within us, when we embark on a relationship with the Holy One, we begin to live a mystical life. And it is in that sense that Elizabeth of the Trinity was a mystic.

Elizabeth Catez was born in Bourges, France, in 1880, the daughter and granddaughter of army officers. Her father, Captain Catez, was quite an extraordinary man in his own right. He grew up in a poor, rural family, where both parents and children were illiterate. He left home to join the army at the age of fifteen. The army was his school and his college; it provided him with all the education he ever had. He rose through the lower ranks, obtained his commission and continued to rise until he achieved the rank of captain. He then put the seal on his achievements by marrying Marie Rolland, the daughter of his commanding officer. This unlikely union proved to be a very happy one until the untimely death of the Captain when his two little daughters, Elizabeth and Marguerite, were aged seven and five. From then on, Madame Catez raised her two daughters alone on the pension of an army officer.

Elizabeth was a close contemporary of Thérèse of Lisieux, who was just seven years older. Although the two never met, they had much in common; both entered Carmel, both lived lives remarkable for deep spirituality, and both died in their twenties. But in spite of these coincidences, the lives of the two young women prior to entering Carmel could hardly have been more different. And it is perhaps in this very difference that Elizabeth speaks in a special way to today’s youth. For while the young Thérèse led a life that would be alien to most young people today, so sheltered in the bosom of her family that she was distressed whenever she had to move outside it, Elizabeth had broader upbringing and a large circle of friends with whom she shared the normal interests of most young girls.

As a child, she was extremely strong-willed, with a temper that manifested itself whenever any desire was thwarted. One incident is particularly amusing. One Christmas when Elizabeth was two or three, a nun friend asked Madame Catez to lend her Elisabeth’s favourite doll, Jeanette, to play the part of the Child Jesus in the parish crib. Elizabeth didn’t miss the doll at first. However, when her mother brought her to a special children’s ceremony in the church, the child spotted the doll. She was outraged. Her mother describes in a letter what happened:

"I brought little Elizabeth to the ceremony. Our seats were right at the front, and the crib was in the choir. The child was distracted at first by all the comings and goings, but when the priest went up into the pulpit to announce the blessing, Elisabeth’ noticed the crib, recognised her doll and in a fury, her eyes ablaze, yelled "You bad priest! Give me back my Jeannette!"

She then had to be carried screaming from the church. Following some further misbehaviour during a catechism class when she was eight or nine, the local curate said to the mother of her friend Marie-Louise Hallo:

"With the nature Elisabeth Catez has, she is going to be either an angel or a demon …"

Her hot temper was something she fought against for years.With tenderness and firmness, her mother (who had a similar temperament) attempted to teach her how to overcome it. To be deprived of her mother’s bedtime kiss was the supreme punishment for the young Elizabeth. As a family friend, Canon Angles, said later:

"Elizabeth had two loves that kept her wilfulness in check: the love of her mother and the love of God."

Ironically, Elizabeth’s success in finally overcoming her temper was so great that in later years her mother, irritated by an equanimity that she was unable to match, would sometimes say:

"Oh, for goodness sake, Elizabeth, get annoyed! You drive me mad, you are so calm!"

Photos of Elizabeth as a teenager show an extremely attractive, beautifully dressed young woman. She loved nice clothes. After her death, her best friend, Marie-Louise Hallo remembered that she dressed very well and was always anxious to wear the latest fashion. In a letter written to her mother who was temporarily away from home, Elizabeth, aged twenty, recounts an outing with Marie-Louise and her mother, with whom she was staying in her own mother’s absence:

"After seeing you off, we went into town to buy material for Marie-Louise in the new drapers shop in the rue de la Liberté. They have a ravishing selection […]. We chose a red tartan, and we are going to try to make it up now. I hope we’ll be successful; I’m certainly going to do my best! After our visit to the draper, Madame Hallo brought us to have afternoon tea at the pastry-cook’s, then we came home."

She also enjoyed dancing and took regular lessons.

"We were in the same dancing class," remembers another friend, Alice Chervau, "We had a professor who came from Paris to give us lessons. Elizabeth was always very vivacious."

Yet another friend recalls that she danced extremely well, because "She was a girl with rhythm in her head."

She was a fine, even an outstanding, pianist; indeed, at one time she had been destined for a career as a concert pianist. All those who remember her talk about her musical ability and about the effect her playing had upon them. One friend in particular recalls:

"I used to love to listen to her. I can still see her playing Diémer’s Nautonier, a piece that flows along in a series of arpeggios representing the waves of the sea, sometimes following each other, sometimes tumbling over each other. Elizabeth’s whole body, slightly bent forward, used to follow the movement of the arpeggios on the keyboard. You felt that her body was moved by her soul; her body itself vibrated, although not in any exaggerated way. Everything was in moderation, as though she was guided by some inner music. Many years later, I was in Belle-Île-en Mer, in a small cove where waves crashed incessantly against the rocks, and suddenly I remembered Elizabeth’s playing."

Musician, lover of fashion, dancer – how did such a girl end up in a Carmelite monastery? Those who were closest to her knew that there was another, deeper, side to this friendly, outgoing girl. Her awareness of God was strong from her earliest years. Marie-Louise Hallo remembers how taken aback she was when, coming out of the church with Elizabeth on the day they had both received their First Communion, Elizabeth said to her, "I’m not hungry, Marie-Louise. Jesus has fed me." Elizabeth was then eleven years old. From about that time, she began to experience an inner attraction to prayer that was clearly a gift from God. And through prayer, her relationship with him grew and strengthened. Her music, which she loved so much, became yet another way of reaching him. For Elizabeth, her piano was a place where she met God. Speaking once, after she had become a nun, about a little girl who was apprehensive about performing in a concert, Elizabeth said:

"She needs to forget about the people who are listening and imagine herself alone with the divine Master. When one does that, one plays for him with all one’s heart, and one draws the best from the instrument – strong and sweet music. I used to love speaking to him that way!"

So it was that, as the years progressed, Elizabeth began to wish to live a life totally dedicated to God. She was already familiar with the nearby Carmelite monastery, which she could see from her bedroom window, and she felt that only there could she live a life that was wholly centred on God. She had first, however, to overcome maternal opposition and even to refuse an offer of marriage – an offer which, reading between the lines of her own account of it, seems to have left her not totally unmoved. But finally, on 2 August 1901, at the age of twenty-one, Elizabeth entered the Carmel of Dijon. She received the habit the following December, and with it, the name "Elizabeth of the Trinity", a name that delighted her, because by then, the Three Divine Persons, that mystery of love and communion at the heart of the Godhead had become the keynote of her spirituality and the focus of her prayer.

She was to live only five short years in the monastery, dying of Addison’s disease, for which at that time there was no cure, on 9 November 1906. She was twenty six. During those years she was unknown beyond the circle of her friends and family. Unlike Thérèse of Lisieux, she never wrote the story of her life. Yet such was the profound effect of her deep spirituality upon those closest to her that her prioress published a short account of her life within a few years of her death. This account, which we would perhaps find off-putting today, written as it is in the rather romantic style typical of the period, nevertheless cannot conceal the deep attractiveness of Elizabeth’s personality and of her profoundly contemplative nature. People making their own spiritual journeys, sometimes very different from hers, found themselves drawn strangely to her. It seemed to be her particular grace to draw people in her wake into those profound depths where she herself had lived. Her posthumous fame began to spread slowly, and although she never achieved the huge popularity of Thérèse of Lisieux, she has always been greatly loved by those who seek to know God through prayer and contemplation. In her they find a guide and friend, who, when she has led them to the fountain of living water, moves into the background and leaves them alone with the Alone. She was beatified in Rome on 25 November 1984. In his homily at the beatification, the late Pope John Paul described her as "a brilliant witness to the joy of being ‘rooted and grounded in love’ (Eph 3, 17)"

During her hidden life in Carmel, she found food and strength for her spiritual journey in the scriptures; above all, in the writings of St Paul. In his letter to the Ephesians, she discovered his summary of the divine Plan: namely, that we have been set apart to be the praise of God’s glory. There Elizabeth believed she had found her true vocation, and the last few years of her life were lived in a conscious effort to fulfil it. Throughout the terrible sufferings caused by the slow progress of her disease, she was sustained by this and by her devotion to the Trinity, who were "her Three, her All, her Beatitude", as she herself described it.