Autobiography

7. “Those who weep are those who know.” – Ruysbroeck

Today is March 10, Ash Wednesday. Lent is thus beginning. For me, always a time full of events leaving an indelible mark.

On close examination, many of the principal things in my life have taken place in that time going from Ash Wednesday to Easter.

Birth, first of all. Just like the violet, I am a Lenten floret. I blossomed to life and grace in this time of penance preparing the way for Easter, and my little eyes, which wept over having lost Heaven, first of all saw the Church’s sad vestments....

In Lent my first Confession.

In Lent my starting school.

In Lent my leaving school and going back to my family.

In Lent my first awakening to human love.

And, finally, in Lent my most intimate embraces with God when human love, having died like an ephemeral flower not made for my soul, yielded its place to singular Love, He Who had already shown Himself and caused Himself to be loved since my girlhood, with his face tinged vermilion with blood and his members transfixed.

Born in a period of sadness and penance, destined to love the sorrowful Jesus, I quite properly had to be familiar with weeping, ever more weeping. May it be blessed as well, for it was the dew which quenched the thirst of the seedling of love and made it a “great tree on whose branches the birds of the air come to take their rest.”

The little mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds and symbol of the Kingdom of Heaven, for me is Love. For only Love can give us, who are so imperfect, the capacity to conquer the Kingdom of Heaven for ourselves.

But the love God had deposited as a small seed in the little child’s soul had descended thereunto together with a divine teardrop and needed weeping, sorrow, to put forth roots and foliage and rise up towards the sky.... Yet to reach the sky I had to gather together my branches in the form of a cross and nail myself to it, after having struggled under all the gusts of wind, trying to free myself from sorrow.

Oh, then the tree nourished by tears, warmed by love, and pruned by sorrow became gigantic, and I hope that its foliage, eternally alive, will supply my angel with the palm and shoot for my crown of victory and my insignia of martyrdom.