Leprosy keeps St. Alice from the chalice; a voice from heaven answers

LA CAMBRE, Duchy of Brabant, the 1240s AD — The nuns of La Cambre came up to the altar together, as their order’s custom is. Saint Alice of Schaerbeek went up with them and was given the Body of the Lord. Then, alone of all of them, she was moved away before the cup reached her. Lepers are forbidden to come near the Blood for fear of the disease. She grieved over it and could not be comforted, and she was answered from heaven that nothing of Christ had been kept from her.

St. Alice had belonged to this Cistercian house outside Brussels since she was a child. Leprosy struck her at twenty-two, in the early 1240s AD. Being separated from the community cost her the choir, the common table and the cup.

St. Alice’s parents sent her to La Cambre at seven, to be taught and brought up. She took the habit there. In her years in the choir St. Alice cried out to God, over and over, the words Rachel uses in Genesis when she has no child: “Give me children, or else I die.” The other nuns of La Cambre came to her when they were unhappy. Her biographer calls her the consoler of them all.

When the leprosy came she was moved out of the community the same night, because the disease was catching. Her biographer writes that it had come to her “not for the guilt or the punishment of any crime, but by way of a visitation”. That first night alone she was struck with such grief that she collapsed. She prayed, crying, and afterwards she was calm. The nuns she had left grieved at losing her. She said that if her health were offered back to her she would refuse it, and that she would rather stay as she was and be visited by God than rule the whole world.

For nearly four years she lodged in another building while a house was put up for her alone on the abbey’s ground. On the first day St. Alice walked into the new house, the Lord stood in the middle of the room with his arms spread wide. He took her into his arms and said: “Welcome, dearest daughter; welcome, long desired, into this tabernacle of my covenant; as long as you live in this body I will stay with you, and I will be, as it were, your cellarer, providing for you whatever you need.”

A laywoman who used to hear Mass and pray near the oratory of that house saw the building one day wrapped in flame from the outside. The laywoman got up to look in, and saw St. Alice as if she were made of fire.

She could not go into the choir any more, so she took the Office from her own doorway. On the feast of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, kept on October 21, she stepped over her threshold at the hour of Matins and stood there listening to the nuns sing in church. For Mass she still walked the road to the church.

For the whole day before she received Communion she burned with desire for it, and kept her heart ready for her Bridegroom and empty of everything else. At Mass she longed for God so violently that the veins of her body seemed about to burst, and she did not know what she felt or what was happening to her.

By then she was about twenty-six. She came up to the altar with the rest of them, in front of the whole house, and was given the Body of the Lord. Then the cup went to the others and not to her, and she was moved away from it because of her sickness. One day, with the Body of the Lord just given her, she wanted his Blood so badly that she complained she had been robbed of something great, and nothing anyone said to her settled it.

A voice from heaven answered her: “O most loving daughter, do not be troubled, and stop complaining that anything of me is withheld from you” — and went on: “for it agrees with firm faith that whoever has tasted of my Body should rejoice that he is beyond doubt refreshed by my Blood also; because where the part is, there is the whole, and it cannot be called a part, but must be reckoned the whole.”

Her sadness was changed into joy.