St Elizabeth of the Trinity (18 July 1880 – 9 November 1906) was a Discalced Carmelite, mystic and spiritual writer. Her Feast is today.
From Aleteia
By Philip Kosloski
A little-known Carmelite Saint of the 19th century has much to teach us, reminding us of what is truly important in our modern lives.
It doesn't take too much to see that the world around us is not ordered towards God. We see war, political tensions, and domestic disputes everywhere. Furthermore, our own hearts are not properly ordered, leading us to make decisions that take us away from God.
What we need is someone to remind us of how to live a life centered on God, radically open to his holy and divine will. The good news is that we have a panoply of saints who can inspire us, such as St. Elizabeth of the Trinity.
Availability to the Word of God
Born in 1880 in France, St. Elizabeth lived around the same time as St. Thérèse of Lisieux, though she entered a Carmelite monastery in Dijon in 1901.
In a similar way as her Carmelite sister, St. Elizabeth was able to reach the heights of sanctity at an early age; she died in 1906 at only the age of 26.
St. Elizabeth was deeply contemplative, and it was that devotion to prayer and intimacy with God that made her life a shining example to the world.
Pope John Paul II praised her example when he beatified her in 1984, seeing in her an antidote to the modern world:
To our disoriented humanity that no longer knows how to find God or that disfigures him, that seeks a word on which to base its hope, Elizabeth gives testimony of a perfect availability to the word of God that she has assimilated to the point of truly nourishing her reflection and prayer with it, to the point of finding in it all the reasons to live and consecrate oneself to the praise of its glory.
He explained how she is a bright light in the darkness, showing us how the true source of all joy, the Blessed Trinity:
We dare today to present to the world this cloistered nun who led a “hidden life with Christ in God” (Col 3, 3) because she is a luminous witness of the joy of being rooted and grounded in love (cf. Eph 3, 17). She celebrates the splendor of God, because she knows herself inhabited in her innermost being by the presence of the Father, the Son and the Spirit in whom she recognizes the reality of infinitely living love.
She teaches us that while we search and search for things in this world to preserve our happiness, what we really need to do is to look interiorly, finding the Holy Trinity dwelling within us.
It is in the Trinity's boundless love for each one of us that we will discover true and lasting peace.
Our disordered humanity can become ordered again, once we dig deep into our hearts, finding God's presence there, and letting him heal us of our wounds. St. Elizabeth of the Trinity is a great example, one we should look to especially in our times of deepest sorrow.
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