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.

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.

Religious of Jesus and Mary

Dina continues on an upward path. She grows in intimacy with Jesus, she identifies with him. She still hears the voice which, since she was small, she had heard interiorly, often not only during prayer, but when working or even during times of recreation. As always, nobody noticed anything outwardly. Dina joins in with her companions, enjoys herself with them and interiorly Our Lord communicates with her.  Her confidence in Jesus dominates her life more and more and sometimes she takes the liberty of telling him mad things, yes mad ones. Is it not true that when two people love other very much, they cannot find the right words to express this love? And more and more Jesus becomes the “life of her life”; one day she hears him say: “I am who works in you and through you. From now on I shall call you Jesus, but, when you do something stupid, this will come from you and I will call you Cecilia”. And do you know what? Dina becomes aware of her fickleness and then she hears a voice which says: “Cecilia has done this”.  Jesus begins to take her place and this ever growing substitution demonstrates what St Paul says “It is not I who lives, but Christ who lives in me”.

Her love of the Eucharist, which had filled  her the day of her First Holy Communion grows.  One day, at the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament in the noviciate chapel, she seemed to see a crowd of people rushing towards their perdition. Jesus tells her that she can save them by praying for them and offering up small sacrifices. As a true apostle she does so immediately and sees how grace prevails and those who were running to their perdition, abandon that path. Many times she feels a burning desire to save souls and a great responsibility for them, something that she will retain throughout her life. She cannot shut herself up in her inner life; she needs to make space for other people. Frequently Dina repeats: “My God, I ask you for the grace to live and die a martyr of love, a victim of love, an apostle of love”.  In June 1923 her motto becomes “To love and to suffer”. Everything within her is a constant and rapid ascent. Her love and her desire to unite herself to God are so intense that, with St Teresa, she can say “I die because I do not die”…

As the days pass the desire to belong radically to Jesus, to give herself totally to him through the vows of obedience, poverty and chastity grows continually within Dina. Already eighteen months have passed since she entered the noviciate and eventually the long awaited 15^th August arrived.  Her parents are present and one of her cousins celebrates the Mass. The priest who had been her spiritual director for half her life was also there. Dina pronounces, in public, the vows that she had already offered privately to the Lord. Bernadette, her friend from New York, made profession the same day. Dina is now a Religious of Jesus and Mary in the Congregation founded by Claudine Thévenet in Lyon, France.

Before leaving the noviciate she expresses her feelings in a poem, it is the ideal which pursues her “Jesus, I will be a saint”.

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”.

God calls her

 Three years have now passed since Dina returned from New York. We have seen something of her life in the city. 

Now she spends her holidays in the country. Nature had a very special attraction for her. She was moved by the twilight, moonlight, plants, flowers, fruits, stream, rivers, butterflies and the twittering of the birds, As someone who loved all that is beautiful, she loved the order in nature, the silence of the firmament, the beauty of the stars… their infinity. It is as someone in love who  lets  herself  be captivated – everything is directed to God and helps her to unite herself to Him. Doubtless her being, filled with music and harmony, enabled her to rejoice intensely and become ecstatic in the face of the marvels of creation. Dina is like a harp which vibrates with music. The contemplative is a person not caught up with themselves, but full of admiration, emotion and gratitude, with a tremendous capacity for awe.  Dina is a person who has been captivated, seduced by God; she does not bother about herself and deep down is always turned towards God.

We have now reached the summer of 1920. Dina is now 23 years old and the desire for religious life grows within her. She does not feel called to the Congregation of Our Lady where she had been educated. She is attracted to the contemplative life, but has doubts because of her studies and is inclined towards teaching. Three possibilities seem to lie before her – the Ursuline  Congregation, the Religious of Jesus and Mary and the Society of the Sacred Heart. But she cannot see clearly. She continued to discern and one day heard the voice of Jesus speaking to her, ”I want you in Jesus and Mary”.  

Dina responded, “Wherever you wish, Lord. You know that I don’t like teaching, but I want to respond to your call, I don’t mind where, all I want is to answer your call, all I want is what will most please you”. The Master replied “You will not teach for long”. Dina did not understand, but her doubts vanish.

The time had come to speak once more to her parents. She wrote: “I had no doubts about their consent, but yes, I foresaw their sorrow and my heart was broken”. At last she spoke to them and was consoled by their consent. None of this is easy; if any one of you has lived through such a critical moment you know what it means to break intimate ties. But the strength of God works in such moments and Dina experienced that. If one day you have to face a similar situation, don’t be afraid, Jesus will take your place and, without knowing it, you will feel very strong.

During the final months while Dina was still living at home, her parents went out of their way to make her happy. They had done so all her life, but now they excelled themselves, without meaning to turn her away from her vocation in the least. In order to give her all the happiness that was in their power, they proposed a trip to the Niagara Falls, offering her every kind of pleasure and amusement. These were very happy days in a wonderful natural setting which again raised Dina’s mind and heart to God.

The day came to say goodbye. Dina tells us that the waiting was agony for her- she would leave her home for ever. She departed with no hope of ever seeing it again. He herself tells us that, without some superior strength, she would not have been able to take this step.