The silent music of Elizabeth of the Trinity

This article was first published in Spirituality May/June 2006. See www.dominicanpublications.com

Elizabeth’s mission

I think that my mission in heaven will be to draw souls by helping them to go beyond themselves and cling to God in a simple and loving movement, and to keep them in that great interior silence that allows God to imprint himself on them and transform them into himself.

Elizabeth of the Trinity wrote these words a short time before her death in November 2006. This year we are celebrating the centenary of that death, and it is perhaps a good time to look more closely at this statement, which summarised for Elizabeth everything she had learned during her long hours of prayer and contemplation. Last month we spent some time looking at the life of this gifted woman, a brilliant musician whose final five years were spent in the silence of the Carmelite cloister. In that silence, she found that the music she loved so much was replaced with something far better: the "silent music" which St John of the Cross celebrates in his Spiritual Canticle:

My Beloved, the mountains, the solitary wooded valleys,
The strange islands, the sonorous rivers,
The whisper of the amorous breezes.

The tranquil night, at the time of the rising of the dawn,
The silent music, the sounding solitude, the supper that recreates and enkindles love.

The contradictions of silence

In the verses above, John of the Cross speaks – seemingly in contradiction – of a solitude that is full of echoes, of a music that cannot be heard. Silence is itself a contradiction. It is at once absence and presence; the path to a place, and the place itself. It is the absence of noise, but it is never empty. The strange fullness of silence alarms us, and it is because its fullness is at times so unbearable that we fill it with noise instead.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread,

said Pascal. Yet it is in silence that we hear the things that really matter. Deep silence allows us to listen to our own heart, the place where God speaks to us, the place where God dwells.

In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness, said Mahatma Gandhi.

In the world of today, the taste for silence is gradually becoming lost and with it, the wisdom of the ages. Today, our ears are assaulted by noise wherever we turn. Travelling to work each morning on the bus, we are surrounded by the by the whirring and beat of personal stereos, the ringing and bleating of mobile phones, the endlessly repeated "Hallo? I’m on the bus!" as commuters impart this invaluable piece of information to their friends and relations listening on their own mobile phones somewhere else. If we go into a shop or café during our lunch break, a radio or CD will invariably be playing full blast over strategically located speakers. Even our churches are no longer the places of prayerful silence they once were, and, of course, the voice of the television is heard throughout our land.

A prophetic voice

Into the noise of our daily life speaks the prophetic voice of Elizabeth of the Trinity. How had Elizabeth, the musician, whose life had on one level been filled with the sound of music, come to such a love and appreciation of the virtue of silence?

Elizabeth loved the exterior silence of Carmel from her first day. She who had been obliged to get up early in the mornings at home in order to find some peace and quiet for prayer ("how many matches I was obliged to hide so that my mother wouldn’t find out!" she said later) now found that even during work periods her mind and heart could rest in God, undisturbed by any exterior distraction.

What was Elizabeth’s understanding of silence? What was the richness that she found there? We get some hint of the answer in her Last Retreat, a written record of the final retreat she made in this life, just three months before she died. It was written at the instigation of her prioress, Mother Germaine, who was more aware than anyone else in the community what a treasure they were about to lose. She asked Elizabeth to jot down each day the thoughts that occurred to her during the ten-day retreat, and the result is a mini spiritual treatise that sums up so much of what she had learned through a life of intensive and loving contact with God.

Unity and union

The second day of the Retreat opens with the words "My soul is always in my hands". This, Elizabeth says, was what Jesus sang (she is referring to a particular translation of Psalm 59), and this was why he remained the Calm and Strong One in the midst of anguish. His soul was fully in his possession – he was "self-possessed" in the deepest and truest meaning of that term. Explaining that she, as the Bride of Christ, ought to emulate him in this, she ponders the basis for such strength and concludes that it is to be found in silence. "In silence and hope shall your strength be" says the Carmelite Rule which she knew so well, read aloud as it was every Friday in the nuns’ refectory.

I think, (writes Elizabeth), that this means creating unity throughout ones being by interior silence; it means gathering all one’s powers together so that they can occupy themselves only in loving.

Silence, for Elizabeth was a means to an end, but paradoxically, it was also the end of the journey: it was the path that led to the union of love, and it was the silent place of arrival written of by John of the Cross, the "place where none appeared". It was at one and the same time ascesis, because the practice of silence leads to unity in one’s being, and fulfilment, because only in the deepest interior silence are we united with God.

The practice of silence

Elizabeth was faithful to the practice of silence, both exterior and interior, from the earliest days of her Carmelite life. A week after her entrance, filling out a questionnaire during community recreation, she wrote that her favourite point of the Carmelite Rule was silence. She found that silence above all in her cell, that little room which to a Carmelite is bedroom, study and oratory.

I love above all the hours of Great Silence, and it’s during one of those that I am writing to you. Imagine your Elizabeth in the little cell she loves so much; it’s our sanctuary, it’s for Him and me alone. You can imagine what wonderful hours I spend there with my Beloved. she wrote to Canon Angles, a family friend on 11 September 1901.

Yet that silence was full of activity – not her own, certainly, but that of her Beloved. In her prayer to the Trinity, written when she was 24 years of age, she asks for the grace to forget herself entirely so that she might live in God "still and peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity". Why? So that she might "pass my life listening to You, become wholly docile, that I may learn all from You." Silence was the school where the Holy Spirit taught her, the fruits of which can be seen in the notes of her Last Retreat.

How very necessary that beautiful interior unity is for those who want to live the life of the blessed here below", her retreat notes continue. "I think that must be what Jesus meant when he spoke to Mary Magdalene of the ‘one thing necessary’. How well that great saint understood this! The eyes of her soul enlightened by faith, recognised God behind the veil of his humanity, and, in silence and in the unity of her powers, she listened to the word that he spoke to her.

Ultimately, the interior silence in which she lived became a great space in which she moved throughout the minutiae of her daily life, and in which she saw with ever greater clarity, eternal vistas. "Christ wishes to be himself my peace so that nothing can ever distract me or force me to leave the invincible fortress of holy recollection," she wrote in her retreat notes. Silence had now become a Person. She no longer needed to "practice" silence; it was her life force, the God in which she lived, moved and had her being. Her Beloved had become her silent music.

[The Carmelite] is hungry for silence and prayer that she may always listen to Him and penetrate more deeply into His infinite Being" wrote Elizabeth. "She identifies herself with Him whom she loves, she finds Him everywhere. She sees Him shining through everything. She belongs to Him alone, and trusts completely in His loving and faithful providence. Is that not heaven on earth?

The silence within

Does this silence of Elizabeth mean anything to those of us who must live in the midst of the noise and bustle of every day modern life? It is one thing for a Carmelite living in the silence of the cloister to say that silence is the sine qua non of union with God, but what about those of us who can only rarely enjoy the luxury of silence? How are we to hear the still, small voice of God and come to Divine Union?

Elizabeth has an answer for us. She knew well how the demands of daily life for those who live outside the cloister leave little time and space for the enjoyment of exterior silence. She herself, as we saw last month, lived a very active and full life before she entered the convent. Later, she watched her sister Guite being pulled this way and that by the many demands of running a home and raising a family. Other friends were caught up in the new responsibilities of adult life. They looked to her for advice.

You must build a little cell within your soul as I do," she wrote to a friend. Remember that God is there and enter it from time to time; when you feel nervous or you're unhappy, quickly seek refuge there and tell the Master all about it. Ah, if you got to know Him a little, prayer wouldn't bore you any more; 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.

Exterior silence, while it is helpful, is not essential to that deep inner silence where God’s voice can be heard. But it requires at least occasional withdrawal into that still place, that "little cell" in the soul. "I know you don’t have time for long periods of prayer" Elizabeth wrote to her mother. "Just withdraw into yourself for five or ten minutes whenever you can". On another occasion, she reminded her mother to take advantage of a forthcoming journey to pray. "I remember that the train was a wonderful place to pray!"

Listening to the voice of Another

How are we to build this inner place of silence? It is not simple, as anyone who has tried it will readily agree. Nothing makes as much noise as that inner voice which keeps up running commentaries and discussions on every conceivable topic.

The soul which holds discussions with itself is not oriented totally towards God" Elizabeth notes in her Last Retreat. "In order to be totally orientated towards God, we must be silent, we must put a stop to inner discussions, forget about our sensitivities. The greatest commandment that God gave to the people of the Old Testament was this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One.

We cannot put a stop to that inner discussion alone. That inner voice will never be totally quiet unless God takes a hand. Inner silence is in the end a gift. We can make efforts to obtain it, but we cannot achieve it on our own. This is why Elizabeth asks in her prayer to the Trinity "help me to forget myself entirely so that I may establish myself in You, as calm and peaceful as though my soul were already in eternity."

Silence requires self-forgetfulness", she writes. "To forget ourselves, we must listen to another, to the One who is Totally Other, who is all love and who calls the soul, saying ‘Listen, O daughter and lend your ear, forget your people and the house of your father and the King will greatly desire your beauty’. I think that this is an invitation to silence.

For this is yet another of the many paradoxes that surround silence: we cannot obtain inner silence by our own efforts, yet we must never stop trying to listen to the One who alone can create that silence within us. How are we to do this? Elizabeth points to Mary of Bethany, who sat at Jesus’ feet listening to him. We obtain silence by prayer, and in the increasing silence that is produced, prayer becomes deeper, leading us to our own deepest depths where the voice of God and the secret promptings of the Holy Spirit are louder and stronger than all the noise of the world or our own inner cacophony. As John of the Cross tells us:

The Father has spoken only one word: his Son. He has spoken it in an eternal silence and it is in the silence of the soul that it is heard.

It is to this silence that Elizabeth wishes to lead us, so that the Eternal Word may resound throughout creation, teaching us how to participate in the building up of his kingdom in our present world and beginning even now to speak to us of those things which no ear has yet heard. With her we pray:

O Eternal Word, Utterance of my God, I long to pass my life listening to You, to become wholly docile, that I may learn all from You. Through all darkness, all privations, all powerlessness, I yearn to keep my eyes ever fixed on You and to dwell beneath Your great light. O my beloved Star, so fascinate me that I can no longer withdraw from Your radiance.

Noreen Mackey