Apostolic life

Let us now continue with Dina. The doctor detects the beginning of an illness which is more serious than the previous one.  It means that although Dina takes up her teaching again, she has to interrupt it on several occasions. Dina makes the sacrifice of having to leave the pupils she has known and loved and for whom she had always been an excellent teacher. Sometimes when things are not as we had anticipated, great indifference is needed to accept them and the consequences. Dina feels her limitations and is aware of being a mere creature before God; she has to renounce many things so as to continue to have Jesus as her only Principle and Foundation.

Dina  gives  continues at various times to give herself passionately to the teaching of music in St. Michel and Sillery.  But her frequent enforced absences, in the infirmary, distance her from teaching but never manage to extinguish her apostolic zeal. Dina realizes that among many attractive possibilities, one must choose some and renounce others.  She had already done it before entering religious life and now she is convinced that this is “to love and let Jesus and Mary have their way”.

On the other hand, Dina never forgets that religious life is consecration for a mission and that she is part of an essentially apostolic Congregation. Mission is passion for Jesus and at the same time passion for humanity. Now she has to leave teaching, but not the apostolate. When she can no longer be with the students, she increased the help she gave to her sisters, by means of musical compositions, literary works, English translations, copying registers, poems, one-act plays for feast-day celebrations, writing letters to past pupils, friends and relatives who ask for help, or for a religious, teacher of the piano, converting this correspondence into an authentic music lesson. This inactivity, imposed by illness was completely apostolic and thus she could be fully contemplative in action.

During one of the periods spent at St Michel, in March 1924, she begins to write her Autobiography, about which I have already told you. In it she describes for us the stages of her mystical journey. It is a fascinating text, a progressive dialogue with Jesus in the midst of dark nights and great consolations, which leads to unsuspected heights of the greatness of God.  I am not going to translate it for you, one must read it directly because in many places it is of such great depth that it makes one feel faint.  If some day you read it don’t forget that is written by someone with a marked artistic sensitivity and, as I said, in the spiritual language of the early twentieth century, which is very different from that which we use today. Moreover it has to express the most profound stages of contemplation of the Trinity in a dialogue that goes far beyond the merely human - a symphony between God and Dina, which often can only be transcribed by silence or the use of terms that are humanly speaking absurd, with which to try to express such deep realities which escape our understanding.

Piano teacher

Apostolic life then began for Dina. She is sent to replace a sick religious as music teacher in St Michel School in Bellechasse. When the religious returned, Dina went back to Sillery where she continued her teaching, but for only eight days. She had to be withdrawn and isolated for 40 days because she had caught scarlet fever while looking after a pupil with the illness at St. Michel. Two things were a source of suffering while she was in the infirmary: not being able to go to communion for several days, because she was in isolation and the knowledge that the religious who were replacing her in the employments which she could not carry out, were overworked in consequence.

During this long period of solitude Jesus is with her and teaches her to live completely abandoned to his action. Jesus substitutes himself for her and she lets him have his way. Dina tells us: ”We are no longer two people, Jesus and myself, we are one, only Jesus. He makes use of my faculties, my feelings, my limitations. He is the one who thinks, loves, acts, prays, looks, speaks, walks, writes, teaches – in one word, it is he who lives in me. I am very small in the centre of his heart, so small that only he can see me. I have abandoned everything to him. My only employment is to contemplate Him and to tell him without ceasing: Jesus  I love you …! It’s the heavenly chorus, my eternity has begun. I am happy!” So this is her ideal: ‘Let Jesus have his way’. This ideal will carry her take her to the height of intimate union with God. This self- abandonment does not mean doing nothing; she is going to fill her life with apostolic love and she knows that love cannot be without suffering, she leaves off the last part of her motto so that only “To love” remains.

The period of isolation was prolonged for a further nine days after which, on 7^th December, Dina was able to return to normal life. Once more she takes up her teaching and other employments with the students. She is happy giving herself to others. During the end-of-year retreat, aware that the Virgin Mary Our lady, is always present when she wants “to let Jesus have his way” Dina also wants to include Mary.  From that moment she finds the motto for which she has been searching for so long and which sums up all her aspirations,   “Love and let Jesus and Mary have their way”. It is an echo of St. Augustine’s “Love and do as you please.”

For Dina, love means to love madly, even to martyrdom. Let Jesus have his way, that is total abandonment, it is to let him work freely. To let Mary have her way is to confide everything to her so that Jesus will operate fully in her life. Thus it is completely apostolic, because to let Jesus work is to make one’s own the task of saving humanity.

We find ourselves before someone who has completely disappeared, so that Jesus can be the only one living in her. God surpasses everything and He alone can fill our smallness with his infinity. It is what John the Baptist announced one day by the Jordan “He must increase and I diminish.” This growth has been realised in such a way in Dina that it has already totally overwhelmed her and taken her over completely. 

This substitution will be the thread of her whole life and will even lead her to desire to exhaust Jesus the infinite One, so as to fully satisfy the Infinite One “ Exhaust the Infinite, satisfy the Infinite” - absurd words in human terms. Dina says that it does not matter because there are no words in heaven, love is the sublime language and that whatever she is incapable of expressing, it is enough to know that God understands it.

Religious of Jesus and Mary

Dina continues on an upward path. She grows in intimacy with Jesus, she identifies with him. She still hears the voice which, since she was small, she had heard interiorly, often not only during prayer, but when working or even during times of recreation. As always, nobody noticed anything outwardly. Dina joins in with her companions, enjoys herself with them and interiorly Our Lord communicates with her.  Her confidence in Jesus dominates her life more and more and sometimes she takes the liberty of telling him mad things, yes mad ones. Is it not true that when two people love other very much, they cannot find the right words to express this love? And more and more Jesus becomes the “life of her life”; one day she hears him say: “I am who works in you and through you. From now on I shall call you Jesus, but, when you do something stupid, this will come from you and I will call you Cecilia”. And do you know what? Dina becomes aware of her fickleness and then she hears a voice which says: “Cecilia has done this”.  Jesus begins to take her place and this ever growing substitution demonstrates what St Paul says “It is not I who lives, but Christ who lives in me”.

Her love of the Eucharist, which had filled  her the day of her First Holy Communion grows.  One day, at the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament in the noviciate chapel, she seemed to see a crowd of people rushing towards their perdition. Jesus tells her that she can save them by praying for them and offering up small sacrifices. As a true apostle she does so immediately and sees how grace prevails and those who were running to their perdition, abandon that path. Many times she feels a burning desire to save souls and a great responsibility for them, something that she will retain throughout her life. She cannot shut herself up in her inner life; she needs to make space for other people. Frequently Dina repeats: “My God, I ask you for the grace to live and die a martyr of love, a victim of love, an apostle of love”.  In June 1923 her motto becomes “To love and to suffer”. Everything within her is a constant and rapid ascent. Her love and her desire to unite herself to God are so intense that, with St Teresa, she can say “I die because I do not die”…

As the days pass the desire to belong radically to Jesus, to give herself totally to him through the vows of obedience, poverty and chastity grows continually within Dina. Already eighteen months have passed since she entered the noviciate and eventually the long awaited 15^th August arrived.  Her parents are present and one of her cousins celebrates the Mass. The priest who had been her spiritual director for half her life was also there. Dina pronounces, in public, the vows that she had already offered privately to the Lord. Bernadette, her friend from New York, made profession the same day. Dina is now a Religious of Jesus and Mary in the Congregation founded by Claudine Thévenet in Lyon, France.

Before leaving the noviciate she expresses her feelings in a poem, it is the ideal which pursues her “Jesus, I will be a saint”.