Jesus summed up God’s law in the commandments to love God and love our neighbor. St Paul sums up God’s law in the same manner in today's reading from his letter to the Romans. Living in God’s love will help bring us closer to God’s commandments. Yet, this is not always easy to put into practice. Even for me as a priest, it is not always easy to apply God’s law to some of the situations I face in the parish and in my other ministries. That is what is so interesting for us to learn about the saints, to find out how they applied God’s laws and commandment in the reality of their lives.
Elizabeth of the Trinity is the saint we celebrate today. This quote sums up how she saw God as intimately connected to how we need to live in our everyday reality. She wrote: “We must be mindful of how God is in us in the most intimate way and go about everything with him. Then life is never banal. Even in ordinary tasks, because you do not live for these things, you will go beyond them.”
Like another beloved Carmelite nun, Therese of Lisieux, Elizabeth died young: at the age of 26 in 1906 in Dijon, France. In that era in France, there was great unrest for the Church and for her community of Carmelite nuns.
Earlier in the year she died, the French government turned against the Church. The local Bishop had been removed by Rome. Embracing secularism, the French government was attempting to confiscate Church property and close down the Carmelite monastery. In the midst of all this turmoil and distress, Elizabeth of the Trinity tried to encourage others and pointed out how the transformative power of God was still there amidst the darkness of the world. She wrote: “Everything is a sacrament that gives us God.”
Elizabeth of the Trinity was canonized by Pope Francis in 2016, so rather recently. She is a great saint for our times, in the midst of social unrest, political uncertainty, and growing secularism. Let us unite our prayers with her prayers on her feast day.
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