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.