The Praise of Glory

‘After Jesus Christ, of course, and as far away as the infinite is from the finite, there exists a created being who was always the “praise of glory” of the Most Holy Trinity. She corresponded fully to the divine vocation of which the apostle speaks; she was always holy, unspotted, blameless in the sight of the thrice holy God.

Her soul is so simple, its movements so profound that they cannot be detected; she seems to reproduce on earth the life of the Divinity, the simple Being. And she is so transparent, so luminous that she might be taken for the light itself. Yet she is but the mirror of the Sun of Justice.

“His Mother kept all these things in her heart”. Her whole history can be summed up in these few words. It was within her own heart that she dwelt, and so deeply did she enter it that no human eye could follow her. When I read in the Gospel that Mary “went into the hill country with haste into a city of Juda” to perform her charitable office to her cousin Elizabeth, I picture her to myself as she passes - beautiful, calm, majestic, absorbed in communion with the Word of God within her. Her prayer, like his, was always; “Ecce - here I am!” Who? “The handmaid of the Lord”, the last of his creatures, she, his Mother!

Her humility was so genuine! For she was always forgetful of self, unconscious of self, delivered from self. So she could sing: “He that is mighty has done great things for me; henceforth all generations shall call me blessed”’.

St Elizabeth of the Trinity, 1880-1906