Immediately after Easter I began to weaken. I lost ten kilograms or so. Alas, my joy and exultation were replaced by such terrible physical and spiritual weakness that I will not attempt to describe it. Last week I fainted twice. The sisters are very gentle and caring. Our life is complicated by inner relationships. By no means everything lies on the surface, but I always knew this was the price we pay for our closeness to the Source.
L. is back in Kaunas and I do not see him. That upsets me, because his compassion would be so precious to me. I ask your prayers, dear sister.
May the Lord bless you,
Teresa
3. May 1978, Vilnius
F
ROM A LETTER FROM
T
ERESA TO
V
ALENTINA
F
ERDINANDOVNA
… indescribable fear. I fell asleep with difficulty and awoke five minutes later in a fit of panic. I kept returning in my mind to that moment when, in a state of exaltation incompatible with a sober spirit, I asked for this substitution. I was then in such a state of grace that my departure at that moment would have been blissful. Now however I was at the very bottom, and a heaviness was crushing me. I was in a dreadful state and my horror at the imminence of death, an all-enveloping animal fear, sickened me. Although I had eaten nothing, I was constantly vomiting a foamy acid which tasted horrible. It was the taste of fear. One further completely appalling thing began to happen to me. Against all the laws of nature, excrement, buckets full, began to gush from me. You could not imagine anything more vile. I felt at that time as if my whole physical self was being expelled from me in that stinking form, and that in a few days’ time, I would have been consigned in my entirety to the sewers. There would be nobody left to flush away the last pile of filth. And then I cried out. This was not what I wanted! In sacrificing myself I had been expecting rewards, beauty, justice for heaven’s sake, but I had received something quite different! But then, where had I gotten the idea from that a sacrificial victim would experience joy? There was only nausea and terror, and not a hint of bliss. As I knelt at a toilet brim full of excrement, I prayed. Not before the image of the Virgin, not before the Crucifix, but before an evil-smelling pile of shit I prayed, “Let me not die now. Let the worst thing imaginable happen, let me even be expelled from the convent, only let me not die now.”
A week later I was able to walk again, and three months after that I was expelled. The prioress treated me as if I had deceived her. She had not expelled Sister Joanna, even though she is an incorrigible thief. The sisters shunned me like the plague, after looking after me and expressing so much sympathy.
For the first time in 20 years, my Easter has been not a resurrection but a dying. There is no joy. Like Lazarus, I am in my grave clothes although my life has not been taken. My isolation is complete, almost without relief. It is only your letters, sister, if I may call you that, which support me, and one of my old colleagues from the library who attended our meetings. He still comes to visit me and sometimes takes me outside for a walk.
I am so sad that you cannot come in the summer as you had planned. We could have gone to the Curonian Spit. My aunt still lives there and cells could be found for us in her house.
Remember me in your prayers,
Teresa
4. July 1978, Vilnius
L
ETTER FROM
T
ERESA TO
V
ALENTINA
F
ERDINANDOVNA
Dear Valentina Ferdinandovna, dear sister,
As things have turned out, you are the only person left I can talk to about what is most important to me. I am only too aware that an admission of this kind may cause great embarrassment to the person to whom it is made, but knowing your immense spiritual reserves, I implore you to hear me out. The form of a letter is best suited to this because there are things about which it is even more difficult to speak than to write, but I know that you cannot fail to understand me. It is precisely because you have had that rare and ineffable experience you told me about when we last met, the experience of direct communion, the experience of hearing and seeing the invisible. The existence of the spiritual world was revealed to me when I was still barely a child, and that revelation distanced me from girls of my own age.
I told you I lost my father very early and have no memory of him. My mother died when I was nine and I was brought up by an aunt, a good woman but very dry. She was childless and no longer young. She married for the first time when she was around 40, and her marriage brought me many trials. Her husband had some admixture of oriental blood. Although his surname was Russian, his appearance was completely Tartar, and he had the cruelty of a Tartar. My aunt worshipped him. She was attached to him like a cat, and I have ever since been revolted by physical love. We lived in the same room, and their proceedings during the night made me feel literally sick. I prayed to the Mother of God to protect me from this, and then I started to hear music. It was the singing of the angels and it enveloped me like a cloak. I became peaceful and fell asleep, and my dream continued to the sound of that music. My aunt’s marriage lasted four years. It was a carnal frenzy, and their shamelessness continued to be an ordeal for me although the music shielded me from much.
And then that dreadful Gennadiy was transferred away. He was a soldier, and he disappeared forever. At first my aunt tried to find where he had gone, but he had evidently given instructions that she should not be given his new address. Their marriage had never been formalized and, to tell the truth, I think he already had a wife who had refused to move to Vilnius with him and had gone to live somewhere else. But that is neither here nor there. My aunt went completely mad. She was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, and it was a great relief for me when I went away to St. Petersburg to study. I am ashamed to say I visited her rarely, and she met me with such hostility every time that I couldn’t be sure whether I should go to see her at all. I remember from those difficult years the protection granted me by the Virgin and her angelic music. How often I have lamented that God did not give me the gift of memorizing that music and noting it down. Ever since, I have been certain that the great composers like Bach and Handel were only writing down sounds which reached them from heaven by the grace of God.
I almost starved during my student years in St Petersburg. But what do I mean, almost? I did starve. The girls with whom I shared a room in the hostel were just as poor as I was but, as if by design, all of us were pretty. In the second year one of us began engaging in what was little short of prostitution, then a second. The third, like myself, suffered from the situation, but one way or another our enterprising roommates brought back men, usually during the day, because it was more difficult to gain admission to the hostel in the evening. Sometimes, though, they brought men to stay the night, and then I seemed to find myself back in the times of my unhappy childhood, when the squeals and grunts of concupiscence kept me from sleep. Once again, only prayer and the music were my consolation. I graduated with distinction. I am an art historian by profession and was invited to stay on as a postgraduate student, but I was so weary of that hostel! Imagining another three years of living like that, I declined the offer. My aunt was almost constantly in the hospital and I was left on my own in a large room.
What a joy it was to be alone, not to hear other people you had no wish to hear. I started work at the library. By then I was already so accustomed to praying and had grown so firmly into the Catholic life that I resolved to enter a convent. Soon I was introduced to a prioress and became a novice. Needless to say the convent was clandestine. We lived in apartments but under a strict rule.