Passion for music

Do you know, Jesus continued to work with Dina and she responded lovingly, making an effort to hide her intense interior life from the other people’s eyes. When she was sixteen a Vocation Retreat confirmed her desire to be a religious, a desire she had cherished for some time.

She eventually leaves boarding - school and returns home. By now she is a splendid young person, tall, graceful, simple, amiable and intelligent – in a word charming.  She is about to enter life in the world, marked out by the social position of a well-off family, but secretly her only ideal in life is Jesus. Her motto was “Death rather than sin” had become fully present in her life and she will be completely faithful to it.

One day she told her mother that she wanted to be a religious. Dina is very young, only sixteen years old and her mother asked her to think about it. Was that which her mother had asked for during her pregnancy going to be realised? The parish priest’s advice is along the same lines; she is too young, she must know more of the world, she owes it to her parents. They are delighted to be able to enjoy her company, expressing their ever- greater affection with gifts. Dina sorrowfully accepts the delay, but is grateful for the love, the clothes, the jewellery that her parents offer her. According to what she tells us, she abandoned her plans into the hands of Jesus and there was no lack of generosity on her part, she was full of peace with the decision.

Dina continued studying the piano until she obtained her Teachers Certificate. She began to give concerts which were received with great praise, a praise which she thought to be exaggerated, for her ideal of a pianist was so high that she knew very well that she did not merit these eulogies. But nevertheless she accepted all the demonstrations of appreciation gratefully. Her outward control was so great that no one realised what these concerts cost her and even her parents thought that she did not mind at all playing the piano in public. She wrote “No one could suspect the martyrdom, yes, I am not afraid to use that word, the martyrdom I experienced in the midst of the flowers and the applause”.

Dina not only continued her piano studies and enjoyed her social life, but also multiplied her works of charity, giving of her time to the apostolate. The love of Jesus and her desire to help others grew. How does she do it? She makes the most of the opportunities that come along. At the beginning of World War I, in 1914, she offered herself totally to Our Lord in a spirit of reparation and love. She would have been capable of giving her life for others. Who could imagine that there burned within this young artist, brilliant pianist so kind and simple, such a deep interior life? The Little Prince was so right when he said “what is essential is invisible to the eye”.

Seeing such exceptional musical talent in their daughter, her parents decided to send her to New York to perfect her studies. Dina, who was passionate about music and the beauty of harmony which she was beginning to discover, was delighted with this decision and even feels a certain vanity in being able to perfect her studies at a great Conservatoire. The vanity does not last long; “Jesus did not allow these illusions to fool me. I already knew that of myself I was not much, even when acknowledging that God had given me a certain talent…”

We will meet again in New York