As if Already in Eternity: The Wisdom of Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity (as found on Anthony’s “Beginning to Pray” blog site)
Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity is a witness to the primacy of contemplation in the life of the Church and the mystical wisdom contemplation releases into human history. This is the wisdom that understands how God is present in both the public square as well as in the intimacy of our hearts. Today, when the whole world needs this wisdom renewed, the Church celebrates her feast day and invites us to consider her powerful spiritual doctrine.
She wrote a famous prayer to the Holy Trinity that has helped many contemplatives recover devotion to the Divine Persons in their life of prayer. This work is cited to support the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s teaching on the Divine Works and the Trinitarian Missions. The teaching itself is that God calls every individual to a great and beautiful purpose, to become a dwelling place for His presence in the world:
The ultimate end of the divine economy is the entry of God’s creatures into the perfect unity of the Blessed Trinity. But even now we are called to be a dwelling for the Most Holy Trinity, ‘If a man loves me,’ says the Lord, ‘he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and make our home with him’ (CCC 260).
This is a rich teaching because it says that our ultimate fulfillment is not simply something waiting for us in a remote future, in a distant afterlife. Instead, the Catechism proposes that heaven can begin now in faith. This means that our faith offers us a fullness of life. We do not have to be content with managing through life’s ambiguities and uncertainties with the hope that someday it might get better. Instead, our faith gives us a real foretaste of the fullness that awaits us — so that the excessiveness of God’s love can pour into our lives here and now, if we will believe in Him.
To encourage this decision to believe in the love that God has for us in the here and now of our lives, the Catechism cites the beginning of Blessed Elisabeth’s prayer to the Trinity, “O my God, Trinity whom I adore, help me to forget myself entirely so to establish myself in you, unmovable and peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity.”
Blessed Elisabeth’s prayer helps us consider what it means to have faith, to believe in God and what He calls us to become. This kind of faith is a matter of a love that takes us out of ourselves. It is, in this sense, an ecstatic movement of heart, a decision to lay aside everything so that there is space for God to dwell in us. Faith helps us see that our own bloated egos need to make way for God. To love Christ to the point of welcoming His word in our hearts means He can begin to help us forget our very self. He is the One who frees us so that the fullness of life that awaits us in heaven begins here on earth.
Her words suggest that the biggest obstacle to prayer is not anything outside ourselves, but proclivities within. The ego has its own specific gravity. Its force, if left unchecked, its deadly. Anxieties over our own plans and for security, our lust for control and to put others in their place, our need to be right and esteemed, our obsession with being liked or affirmed, our gluttony for comfort and entertainment; all of this fails to provide any firm ground for rectifying our existence. Unchecked, these tendencies suffocate the heart, and as long as one’s heart is pulled by these forces, it can find no peace.
