A girl with character

Once again with Dina. I told you that I was going to tell you the reason for her tantrums.  Here we go.

Her mother had told her to do something, but Dina, who was not yet four years old, did not want to obey.  Her mother repeated her order but the reply was “no, no, no”   and the refusal was accompanied by kicking and screaming. Her father, who witnessed the scene from a distance, got up and, taking Dina by the hand, told her that he wanted to help her to cry and to dance in order to finish it sooner and, lo and behold, he achieved it. The two of them began to dance together and Dina’s tears stopped immediately and her feet paralysed, but her father did not give in and continued to jump…  Later on Dina wrote: “I have never forgotten that lesson; it cured me forever of the desire to stamp when I was annoyed”.

I’ve said that Dina wrote this but “where?” and “when?”  Of course, I did not tell you earlier that when she was 24 years old Dina decided that she wanted to be a religious sister and entered “Jesus and Mary”.  I will tell you about this later on because there is still a lot to say.

When Dina had become a religious, her Superior, who in conversation with her, perceived the depth of her interior spiritual life, asked her to write an account of her life. Thanks to this, we have today the Autobiography in which she relates all that she experienced and what Our Lord communicated to her, and so we too can penetrate the mystery of Dina. She herself said that having to write it was the thing that cost her most in all her life.  She had to reveal what was happening with in her and, above all, what she heard from Jesus, for ever since she had been a small child she had felt that she heard Him speaking to her. If it costs us all to reveal our most intimate secrets, we can imagine what it meant for her to have open her heart to others. Yet, what was so difficult, she did with the utmost simplicity, as she did everything. When the Superior said to her, “Sister, you are going to write your life” she replied, “Is that what you want Mother?”  “Yes, I do“.  “Very well, I will do what you ask of me”. And so she began to write, and turned the account into a ”Hymn of Thanksgiving”, thus revealing God’s goodness in such an insignificant person as herself.

Well, I am not, for now, going to get ahead of events.  I only told you all this so that you would know where what I have already told you about, can be found.  Let us now follow Dina because, from the episode of the kicking tantrum to this moment, there is a long path of discovery to follow.