SWISS CONNECTIONS

 

Father introduced me to a mystic I had heard of but never looked into- I think mainly because her books are out of reach  in cost.

SISTER MARY OF THE TRINITY (Luisa Jaques) was born in 1901 in South Africa, where her father was a Protestant pastor and founder of missions in Pretoria and Johannesburg in the midst of the Second Boer War.

Her mother died in childbirth, and Louise was raised in Switzerland, her family’s country of origin, with her two elder sisters, by an aunt whom she calls her "little mother". Luisa completed her schooling in the summer of 1917 without a state certificate, as her education had been limited to private schools. She matured to be a subtle and highly sensitive person with lasting health problems caused by a weak lung.

 At the end of 1917, the sixteen-year-old Luisa took up her first job as a secretary with a socially and politically committed couple named Horber, who helped organize the founding of a "Swiss Federation for Transitional Reforms" in the Swiss post-war period. Weakened by anemia and with the beginnings of tuberculosis, the following year Luisa went for treatment at the sanatorium "L'Espérance" in Leysin, run by a Dr. Olivier. There she made the acquaintance of Bluette de Blaireville, who became her lifelong friend. She also met, among others, Adrienne von Speyr, cousin of Dr. Olivier and a classmate of Bluette..

After her dismissal in May 1919, Luisa took a short-term job as an accountant with a notary in Lausanne. In 1920/21, she took care of her elderly and ailing aunt Alice. In March 1924 she again found work as a typist with the theologian and later pastor Lydia von Auw, a friend of her family. An acute hemorrhage shortly after she started work resulted in her being referred to the "Béthanie" house in Lausanne, run by deaconesses, for tuberculin treatment.

 Repeated disappointments at work, a failed relationship with a married man, and great loneliness due to her beloved family being so far away, brought her, at the age of twenty-five to not understanding the meaning of life and to make the bitter pronouncement: “There is not God”.

During a stay with her friend Bluette, on the night of February 13/14 she had a mystical experience – a kind of vision of a religious woman wearing a deep brown garment, belted with a cord – which gave her the inner certainty that she must enter a contemplative order.

 From this moment on she was reborn in an “irresistible attraction” to the cloister, and an ardent desire to receive the Eucharist. Thus began the journey that would lead her into the Catholic Church.

Having moved to Milan in October 1926 because of a job, Luisa decided, through the mediation of a priest, to take catechism classes with the Sisters "Nostra Signora del Cenacolo" in that city. Mother Reggio prepared her for baptism.

Although she was invited several times by her father to South Africa and by her sister Alice to America, she decided to stay in Italy. A change in her job as a tutor and educator introduced her to the world of the Milanese aristocracy, particularly the family of Countess Agliardi. In this context, she completed a kind of Montessori training with Countess Borromeo, who was a sister of her new employer.

Amazingly she tried three orders in one  but through the help of Bluette, Luisa  met the community of the Daughters of the Sacred Heart of Mary, which she entered in 1931. There  she obtained a state diploma at the Teacher Training College. She then taught at the Catholic parochial school in Neuchâtel. In this religious community, which offered her the framework of solid intellectual and spiritual formation, she remained for a total of five years, twice renewing her temporary vows but leaving before final vows.

Due to her unquenched longing for a contemplative monastic life, she left the community in 1936, after having met in Neuchâtel the priest Maurice Zundel. He was known for his (then) controversial books of mystical theology.  He encouraged her to join the Poor Clares and from this point on, Father Zundel was her spiritual advisor.

On September 1, 1936 she joined the Poor Clares in Evian as a postulant, but remained only until April 10, 1937, when the mentally ill abbess dismissed her. After this upsetting convent experience, Louisa worked temporarily as a nanny in Lausanne with a working-class family which had six children, and then again with Countess Agliardi in Cortina d'Ampezzo. Her prospects for a convent life seemed to have disappeared.

Luisa decided to visit her family in South Africa, together with her sister Alice and her children, and arrived in Johannesburg on August 28, 1937, where she was reunited with her parents and siblings. Still uncertain about her future, she took up employment as a home teacher in various Jewish families over the next few months.

In 1938, motivated by reading the writings of  (St.) Charles de Foucauld, she decided to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land reaching Jerusalem. There she entered the convent of the Poor Clares on June 30. 

In the Poor Clare monastery in Jerusalem, Sr. Marie of the Trinity finally found refuge where God was awaiting her and an interior voice, the Lord Jesus. On August 28, 1939, she was clothed as Sr. Mary of the Trinity. Two years later she made an extraordinary vow of total devotion. In June 1942, typhus fever broke out in the convent. Sr. Maria died of it on June 25, 1942.

 She found direction in the day-to-day of a life offered up in in fraternal charity, silence, service. In His own time, the Lord Himself revealed its meaning: “You must forget yourself and discover My Voice” In obedience to her spiritual father, Sr. Marie wrote these “Notes”.

Through her confessor, Fr. Sylvère Van den Broeck, she was urged in the last two years of her life to put down in writing her vocational journey and also to record the words of the "inner voice" she heard. After her death, he published her writings. This edition of 1943, translated into various languages in the years that followed, brought about an unprecedented awareness and engagement with the spiritual content of these writings, especially in Italy through the work of the Franciscans of the Custody of the Holy Land.

The works of Sister Mary of the Trinity have been published in French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Slovenian, Croatian, German, Arabic, Hungarian, Portuguese and English editions.

 This notebook, with the story of her conversion and vocation, has been published and translated in over seven languages.

In his preface to the French edition Hans Urs Von Balthasar emphasizes the main lines of her spirituality : listening to the interior voice of the Lord, profound awareness of the free will God allows his created beings in choosing to respond to him, and the Vow of Victimhood considered as “a high degree of availability and non-resistance to all God’s decisions” within a profound Eucharistic orientation.

 In her short life, she experienced much suffering, and one wonders how much joy, until her last few years. She is an example of fortitude and perseverance in one's call to the Lord.

Notes:

Adrienne von Speyr (d. 1967) was a Swiss Catholic convert, physician, mystic, and author of some sixty books of spirituality and theology.

 Father Maurice Zundel  (Swiss- d. 1975) was one of the great, if often-forgotten, theologians of the 20^th century. Sometimes student of Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, he wrote various works of Catholic philosophy in conversation with existentialism, Protestantism, and personalism. This wide-ranging and erudite scholarship led soon-to-be-Saint Paul VI to call him “a mystical genius.”

Hans Urs von Balthasar ( d.1988) was a Swiss theologian and Catholic priest who is considered an important Catholic theologian of the 20th century. Pope  St. John Paul II announced his choice of Father Balthasar to become a cardinal, but he died shortly before the consistory.