AN ORDINARY WOMAN - EXTRAORDINARY MYSTIC

Someone who appears once in a while in the Magnificat, is a little known mystic- at least in our country.   She is a good example that one does not have to be a religious living in the cloister to become a saint . She gives hope to all who feel that they are too far away from holiness to follow Christ.

LUCIE CHRISTINE (b.1844) was the pseudonym of an upper middle class Frenchwoman, Mathilde Boutle. She married at 21, raised five children, all the while suffering verbal and physical abuse at the hands of an alcoholic husband.

She grew up in a religious home, and even in childhood seems to have been attracted to silent devotion or "mental prayer."

Mathilde was of the leisured class, leading the ordinary life of a person of her type and position. She married in 1865 and at the age of forty-three she became a widow. In 1908, after nineteen years of blindness, she died at the age of sixty-four.

Lucie Christine said her mysticism was "very simple. “My soul lives in God, by a glance of love between Him and myself". Anyone can learn to "be silent before God," she said, "to look at Him, and let Him look at you."

Her time was spent in family and social duties, sometimes in Paris, sometimes in her country home.  She appeared to her neighbors remarkable only for her goodness, gentleness, and love of religion. Nothing could have been more commonplace than her external circumstances.

Her inward life, unsuspected by any but her parish priest, for whom her journal was written, had a richness and originality which entitle her to a place among the Catholic mystics. Her writings show that she was intelligent and also had and an almost psychic gift of premonitions of important and tragic events. This peculiarity, which she disliked and never spoke of, persisted through life.

Her spiritual journal, published in 1912, reveals a sensitive, idealistic, and affectionate woman who was somewhat unpractical, very easily wounded, tempted to irritability, and inclined to worry.

"The excessive wish to be loved, appreciated, admired by those whom I love," was one of the temptations against which, as a young woman, she felt it necessary to pray: another was the longing for enjoyment, for personal happiness. It was only after eight years of intermittent mystical experience that she learned the secret of inward peace: to "lose her own interests in those of God, and receive a share in His interests in exchange."

Her spiritual life developed gradually and evenly, and unlike some mystics, there was no falling off her horse, like St. Paul. One day, when she was meditating on a passage in the Imitation of Christ, she saw and heard within her mind the words  “God alone”.  From this time on she aimed to conquer her natural irritability and dislike for the boredom and unrealities of a prosperous existence, and give her all to Christ in her daily duties as mother and wife.

More and more, as her mystical consciousness grew, the life of contemplation became her delight; and it was plainly a real trial to be distracted from it for trivial purposes. In company, or busied with household duties, she went for hours with "her soul absorbed, its better part rapt in God." She "tried to appear ordinary," and made excuses if her abstraction was observed. (Reminds  me of Raissa Maritain- see Blog  2/15/11).  

Her religious practice certainly centered on the Eucharist, so she is a good “saint” for us to study this Lent. "I am nourished by God's substance."  God, she says, gives Himself to us that we may give Him again through our love of others.

Lucie-Christine makes clear to us, as few mystics have done, the immense transfiguration which can occur even in the most “ordinary life"!    "My one prayer is, that I may not feel joy and grief so vividly: that I may feel only Thee."