Who was Dina?

Dina was a simple person, noted for her great artistic sensitivity, who only desired “to love and let Jesus and Mary have their way”. She was not just a young pianist, composer, apostle and mystic, gifted with a great musical talent, applauded and praised, with a brilliant future which she renounced in order to give herself completely to Jesus, but she was also the religious who let herself be totally captivated by Jesus in silence with an intense spiritual experience. God alone was her all and she never said “no” to him. Her whole existence was consumed by him with constant and faithful correspondence with grace.

 We cannot grasp what it means to go deep into the depths of a God who is Trinity. Neither can I explain it to you. God gave this gift to Dina and with simplicity she tells us about it in her Autobiography with all the beauty and sensitivity of the artist, always attentive to the interior voice of Jesus. But you see Dina’s holiness does not lie in these extraordinary aspects which are comparable with those of many great mystics. She was holy because she never denied anything to God, she made her life a rhapsody interpreted  in the key of love, written on the score of the gospels: ”If anyone loves me, he will keep my word and my Father will love him  and we shall come to him and make our abode with him”.

After her death there was unanimous agreement in declaring that the holiness of her life corresponded to what she had written and that, thanks to her great reserve, she was able to hide from the eyes of others, without anybody being able to imagine what she was experiencing interiorly. The testimonies received speak of a constant fidelity to grace, of having always been very sincere, of being unable to recall any occasion in which Dina had spoken ill of anyone, of always, when something was being said against  another , of knowing how to take their part , of never having seen her to be disheartened in moments of difficulty or, during her long illness, of never complaining, accepting everything without showing either her likes or dislikes, taking on what is hard and continuing to be joyful afterwards, being ingenious in passing unnoticed and bringing out the worth of others, of seeing the amount of work she had to do in spite of being ill and isolated in the infirmary, of having always been very good to her students, of doing everything with great simplicity and not drawing attention to herself in anything, of not ever boasting of her musical talent, always emphasizing that of others.

Perhaps you can say the same as a young lady who had lived with her expressed it; “I had a saint for a friend and did not know it”. Dina can be your friend today and you will not regret it.