ELISABETH LESEUR
Elisabeth Leseur was not a Carmelite, not a religious and is not a canonized saint, so why is she the subject of this article? The answer is that she was a French contemporary of Therese of Lisieux and Elizabeth of the Trinity. She was a married lay woman whose way of life bore a strong similarity to our Third Order Rule. Her example may be of great interest to Lay Carmelites.
Lay Carmelite formation is very much oriented to the study of the lives of saints who were friars, priests or brothers, or sisters or enclosed nuns. A very good reason for choosing them is that we have good records of their lives and their writings, which are so valuable in defining Carmelite spirituality. Lay people, even saintly lay people, have not left us much written material, so we cannot easily use them as our exemplars. Of course, we do have Elijah, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and St. Joseph, the principal protector of our Order, as models, and all of them were lay people, but we do not have anything that they wrote.
It is difficult for Lay Carmelites to relate their lives to those who lived in circumstances so very different from their own. They could well wish to discover the writings of a modern saint who lived “in the world, but not of the world”. Elisabeth Leseur may be the kind of person they are looking for. She is not a canonized saint but her cause is progressing.
Born into the privileged Arrighi family in 1866, Elisabeth died in 1914. Like Zelie Martin, St. Therese’s mother, she died of breast cancer. At 23 years old she married Felix Leseur, a non-believer, and faced profound challenges to her faith. Despite their religious differences, they loved each other dearly. Her spirituality was thoroughly lay in character, a subject we will return to shortly. The marriage was childless, but Elisabeth compensated for this with a deep involvement in their extended families, charitable works, and a disciplined program of study to develop her own intellectual gifts.
The Church presents to us the “universal call to holiness” and Elisabeth shows us in a very practical way how lay people can respond. We do not have to be nuns or friars to be holy or even canonized saints. Elisabeth developed her own rule of life, similar in many ways to our own Lay Carmelite Rule. She had a daily pattern of morning and evening prayer and meditation, and went to confession and holy communion every two weeks. By 1911 she felt fortunate to go to Mass and holy communion three times a week. She made a one day spiritual retreat monthly. Each year she tried to make a retreat of a few days. Although she followed her rule strictly when she was home alone, she was flexible and made sure that others were not inconvenienced by it. Life outside the home was part of her spiritual life and she put family and social responsibilities first. She developed an asceticism based on silence, self-giving and love; what was the loving thing to say or do?
Elisabeth wrote extensively, and in addition to her journal, she wrote thousands of letters, and many essays on various topics. She intended the journal and records of her personal and spiritual life to be destroyed after her death, but providentially they came into her husband’s possession, and he assembled a collection of her writings for publication in 1917. He had returned to the Catholic Church in 1915, converted through Elisabeth’s journal, joined the Dominican Order, and was ordained a priest in 1919. There is much more to be said of Elisabeth Leseur, servant of God and those who wish to learn more can refer to the book “Elisabeth Leseur selected writings” published by The Classics of Western Spirituality.
