The Noviciate

Although we know that Dina now has a new name. We shall continue to call her Dina because it is more familiar to us.

The period of the noviciate begins and Dina’s motto is: Not to deny anything to Jesus. She has a great desire to give herself completely to Him. Her heart burns with the fire of the Ignation “magis”, which means “always more” - she desires to give Jesus always more and more, being faithful to grace in everything. She sums up her desires saying: “Jesus I want to be holy and with your grace I shall be”.

To want to be holy is to be very clear about the primacy of God in life and to work for His greater glory.

In Baptism, all of us, you and me as well, are called to be holy and to be holy is nothing else than to develop as fully as possible the graces received that day. On account of our negligence the strings of love sometimes get out of tune and it is necessary to re-tune them constantly; often we are unable to do this, but if we allow him to do so, God will take charge and do it. With her artistic temperament, Dina, who was always sensitively and unconditionally faithful to grace, wishes to keep the harp of her life very much in tune, so that Jesus would always be able to play it. The motto which she drew up on leaving boarding school, “Death rather than sin” is no longer enough for her; she desires to impregnate everything with love and wants her most beloved names to appear in her motto. She finds what she wants; “Jesus and Mary, the law of my love and my love the law of my life”.

Dina dedicates herself to the tasks that are usual in the noviciate: cleaning, sewing, washing, studying … everything that is going to prepare her for religious life and teaching. She participates in the recreations and amusements. As she is very clever, she writes one-act plays in which she herself takes various roles. 

She continues to give piano lessons and likes her pupils very much, but following the preferences of Claudine Thévenet, the Foundress of her Congregation, her favourites are the least talented ones. She herself personally carried on with her musical studies and also begins literary work. She revises the rules of rhyme and begins to compose poetry. At the beginning she does not find it easy and according to her has the dictionary in her hand, searching for words, longer than it is lying on the table. She does not become discouraged and with the help of the Lord the rhymes come to flow more easily. Could it be that what Jesus had said is being accomplished: “You will do good through your writings”?   Dina never managed to fully understand the meaning of these words. Little did she imagine that it would be through her Autobiography.

The days pass.  Dina does not always feel tangible fervour; there are long periods when Jesus is silent, but she is determined to follow her desire not to deny him anything. When the darkness is greatest, she places herself in Mary’s hands so as not to reduce, in her heart, the  ever –more “magis”  that she has promised Jesus.  Suffering is present in the midst of great consolations. She does not want to let herself be carried away by illusions, she need to discern and although on account of her reserve and timidity it costs her a great deal to communicate what she is living interiorly, she shares it in all simplicity with the religious responsible for the noviciate. Obedience “before all else” is a characteristic which Claudine wanted to stamp on her Congregation; Dina makes it completely hers and tells us that obedience was always her refuge.

If you begin…

Dina enters the noviciate and the first thing that she reads on a mural is: “If you begin, do so perfectly”. This made a great impression on her and she is ready to put it into practice. 

Community life continues to be a source of great suffering or her, not because she did not care for her companions, she would have given her life for anyone of them, but given her sensitivity even small difficulties offered her an opportunity to constantly put others first.

For nothing in the world would she abandon her vocation, but her homesickness continued for several weeks. She writes “Sometimes, when I was taking a stroll, I got the idea of slipping away without hat or coat, or of escaping from the window during the night”. She struggles with this ceaselessly and it is painful when her natural feelings are evident to others. Because at times tears fall, she decides to undertake the challenge of smiling continuously, because she tells herself “a sad saint is a sorry saint”. Jesus makes her understand that true interior joy must be reflected exteriorly. It’s not always easy. If at any time you have been through it, you will know the cost of not showing your feelings when you are annoyed by things around you.

The days pass. She begins to give some piano lessons. She loves it and tells herself that Jesus will be the real teacher. This is not hard, because she knows that Jesus lives in her. These classes are happy times for her and for her students; she is demanding, but so kind that all remember her with great affection.

Jesus continues to communicate with her interiorly. Dina listens in order to please Him in everything. One day, at Christmas, Jesus invites her to play and tells her that whoever loves the most will win. The competition gets more difficult but in the end they tie because Dina tells Jesus that she loves him with the same love that he gives her. Another day, the game becomes more complicated, because this time it is about the Cross and whoever carries it better will win. She sees that Jesus is winning; Dina’s responses are increasingly wavering, until it occurs to her to turn her eyes to the Virgin Mary, begging her help. In no time Dina sees clearly and tells Jesus that she unites her poor crosses to His and that thus they have an equal value.  Does this seem like a childish game to you? Don’t you believe it; when you truly love you say things that others do not understand – but those who love each other need to express such love in a thousand ways.

The 15^th February 1922 arrives. But what happens on this day? I don’t know if you know that in religious life there is an initial period of testing before beginning the noviciate as such. This period ends with a ceremony in which the young woman, in addition to receiving the religious dress, is given a new name. From now on Dina will be known as Mary Saint Cecilia of Rome. For her this was a great joy. It begins with the same name as the Our Lady and, as a good pianist, they could not have added a better one than that of Cecilia, the patron of music and whom she had always greatly liked and invoked for a long time. Moreover Cecilia fulfilled all Dina’s aspirations, virgin, martyr and apostle.

Homesickness

The 11^th August 1921 arrived and Dina was accompanied by her parents to the noviciate of the Religious of Jesus and Mary in Sillery, Quebec. 

She relates that darkness and repugnance reigned within her, but that hardly had she crossed the threshold that an inner force made her say, “I am at home”. This convinced her that she was where God wanted her, without alleviating the conflicting feelings that everyone who is in darkness experiences. Her desire for solitude, her dreams of religious life had disappeared, but on the other hand, Jesus was with her. When someone does something very difficult, but with the conviction that she is doing what she ought to do, is it not true that one feels a mixture of anguish and certainty?  Something that cannot be explained is a source of suffering, but at the same time is a cause of joy.  This is what happened to Dina.

I can tell you that Dina is not the first or the only person to have these feelings, which really just mean not understanding what is happening. There was a woman, the Virgin Mary, who also did not understand anything when the angel announced to her in Nazareth that the greatest of mysteries was about to take place, and yet she said her “Yes”, without seeing clearly. Although Dina’s “Yes” is nothing in comparison with Mary’s, it is quite likely that she remembered it during these moments, because, although I did not tell you from the beginning, Dina loved Mary very much and had recourse to her at difficult times.

With all this you must not think that during these first days that life became easy for Dina. She continued in darkness and both temptation and discouragement afflicted her. Everything seemed almost impossible for her. “Are you going to live here until the end of your days? Are you going to submit yourself to these demands which are so difficult for you?”

Community life was one of the things that cost her most and she was very homesick. No one noticed anything however, nor did she tell anyone, only some very discreet people were going to know. One day she found a chicken coop in the garden and with a heavy heart she said to the hen “You are in your house, make the very most of it, make the most of it!” Such was her state of mind.  Moreover Dina thought that she would not have the possibility of living a life of solitary prayer; at various times during the day everyone came together in the chapel for prayer; Dina came to think that she would no longer be able to speak intimately and alone with Jesus. She was seeking something else. One day she relived the first moment when a voice made her say, “I am at home” and she came to understand that these feelings did not come from God. She rejected them and renewed her great desire to be faithful.

Later on during the retreat in preparation for the official entry into the noviciate, light and peace returned to her. She received two big graces during these days: the intimate communication with Jesus returns and she felt that God had taken her heart and replaced it with those of Jesus and Mary. She does not know how to describe it. She will no longer have to search for them outside herself, she will possess them interiorly. Our Lord reserves ever greater graces for her. A continuous ascent is about to begin for Dina, which she will communicate to us by means of the mottos that she will choose for herself. She sums it up now “Obey blindly, suffer with joy, love until martyrdom”.