“When you consecrate the host where Jesus, ‘who alone is Holy,’ will be incarnate, consecrate me with Him ‘as the victim of the praise of glory’ until all my aspirations, all my movements, all my actions pay homage to the Holy One.” --St. Elizabeth of the Trinity
November 8 marks the feast of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, born in France in 1880 and canonized on October 16, 2016. She entered the Carmelite monastery in Dijon, France at the age of 21.
The silence of adoration allows the words of the Word to echo in the soul. St. Elizabeth is convinced that the Lord’s presence in the Blessed Sacrament is a dynamic presence, one in which God speaks to us and evokes a response—a response in adoration and obedience. To obey means to listen with the heart to the words of another and to allow these words to influence how we see the world and how we act in it. It implies a letting go of our own agendas and surrendering to the plans of someone else. Placing ourselves before the Blessed Sacrament, we are invited to surrender to the Father through Jesus’ real presence.
Contemplative prayer is not the attainment of the psyche or the achievement of a state of consciousness, but instead a humble surrender to the Father’s saving gaze. Mental prayer is not an
accomplishment of the spiritually elite, but the refuge of the spiritually weak and poor. Such prayer, raised up in the Eucharist, is not therapeutic in the sense that such a conversation with God is merely a method for managing life’s problems—rather, it confers a strength that even at the moment of death can never be overcome.
As the life and words of St. Elizabeth attest, when contemplative prayer flows from and is directed toward the Eucharist, we become capable of uttering—and becoming—a praise of glory that offers hope where hope is most needed.
--Anthony Lilles, A Primer on St. Elizabeth of the Trinity’s Eucharistic Spirituality in adoremus.org