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 She had to be withdrawn and isolated for 40 days because she had caught scarlet fever while looking after a pupil with the illness at St. Michel.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.