Yielded Novice : Maria Von
Trapp
The Mother Superior of a Benedictine Abbey in Austria called in a young novice. The pretty girl, with twinkling eyes, was a trifle worried about the reason for her summons; she was often in minor trouble for her independent, sometimes mischievous ways.
"How much have you learned while you've been here? What is the most important thing in life?" the Catholic nun demanded sharply.
Maria Von Trapp, hoping that she wasn't going to be reprimanded for some violation, replied without hesitation: "To find the will of God and then go and do it."
"Even if it is hard?" asked the Mother Superior.
Maria answered quickly. "Of course, even if it is hard."
Maria Augusta Von Trapp was to become the heroine whose life has been portrayed in The Sound of Music. She and her family escaped from Austria during the takeover by Adolf Hitler and came to the United States in 1938. Mrs. Von Trapp, who has lived here ever since, now di-
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vides her time among writing, speaking engagements, and her duties as house mother at the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vermont.
But many events ordained by God have interviewed between the present and that day when she, as a young novice, stood before the Mother Superior.
"Right then and there I was notified that a certain Navy captain, Baron George Von Trapp, had been asking for ten months for somebody to be a teacher for one of his seven children," Maria recapitulated as she refreshed my memory about her well-known life.
The nuns at the abbey had selected her for the job, and the Mother Superior had confirmed what would soon be known as well to Maria as truly the will of God for her life.
But at the moment, the news fell with a leaden sullenness.
"This was a great big cross to me," Maria recalled. "I didn't want to leave."
Still, her answer to the head of the abbey about finding the will of God and doing it was like a dowry that Maria took with her. For she fell in love with the baron's children — and the baron. They were soon married.
GO AND DO IT
"In that critical moment, it had proven to be the absolute right thing — to look for the will of God and then go and do it," Maria said during an interview at a national conference on charismatic renewal in Kansas City where she was speaking.
And that principle, which has been an abiding one throughout her life, was soon handed on to the Von Trapp children, who ranged in age from four to fourteen.
"Even the little ones caught on," Maria remembers. "I recall the youngest at age five talking to herself about whether she could go outside and play or whether she should stay inside and do her homework. With a resigned
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sigh, she said to herself that she knew it was right to do the homework first.
"Doing God's will became second nature in our whole family."
Turning to God for special guidance was also the key resource for the Von Trapp family when Hitler invaded Austria. At first, the Von Trapps tried to ignore the turmoil, hoping the storm would blow over. But it got worse. Details about the family's life are told in one of Mrs. Von Trapp's six books, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, the true story on which three films and the musical The Sound of Music are based.
One day Baron Von Trapp called the family together and asked about finding the will of God. "Do we want to keep money and material goods?" he asked. "What about friends? What about spiritual things? What about honor and our faith?"
Within five minutes, Maria related, all opinions had been voiced and the family had made its decision. The children said they had to spy on other children at school, that they were constantly told what was wrong with the books they read and the friends with whom they associated.
WHERE THE WILL OF GOD WAS LEADING
"There was no question where the will of God was leading us," Maria said firmly. "We saw we could not stay." So they left, fleeing through a tunnel in the high Alps into Italy.
By this time the Von Trapps had nine and one-half children, Maria said with a smile.
Though the family had often sung together for entertainment both for themselves and others, they had never relied upon music as a livelihood. But now they were faced with the problem of earning enough money to live from day-to-day in a new country.
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And once again the matter of finding God's will for their daily bread came into focus.
"The only thing we could do well together was sing, our family hobby," Maria noted. But her husband, a former Navy officer and a member of the nobility, passionately opposed putting the family on the stage.
"God had to show us this was the only thing left," Maria recounted, adding that God's will often — at least at first — seems to be contradictory to what we would naturally infer.
And so, in the summer of 1937, before Hitler's troops swarmed in, the family assembled and asked: "What is the will of God in this situation?"
The question, honed to razor sharpness, was: "Is it morally wrong to present a concert for money?"
"We decided it was not," Maria said with the air of definiteness that characterizes many of her expressions. "This was the only way my husband, very much against his will, consented — because he felt it was God's will."
A concert in Salzburg was arranged during the special concert festival there by a famed opera singer, Lotte Lehmann. Because there were talent scouts in the audience, the Trapp Family Singers were on their way towards fame.
At first there were small parties and performances, with barely enough money to get through the day, according to Maria. Then the family's fame spread. A concert in Turin, where they had settled in the Alps in southern Tyrol, opened the gateway to the Italian opera circuit in Florence, Milan, and Rome.
"And concerts became our way of living for twenty years," summed up Maria. "God closed all of the other doors."
Singing for their own joy multiplied the joy, ultimately, of multiple millions of persons.
Expanding her comments about knowing the will of
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God, Maria advised that when perceiving the Lord's direction seems hard, consider eliminating all but one thing, even if it seems so against your grain. "Then you are left with what God wants. And you set your teeth and with a big sigh, you do it.
"And if that choice truly is God's, then peace, security, and joy — not anguish and unhappiness — will follow," she said.
The singing Trapps traveled all over Europe, living very frugally in order to save money for their emigration to the United States.
When they finally arrived in 1938, it was "still under the will of God," according to Maria who reiterated that the only important thing is to find the will of God, and that finding it is to know the kind of inner peace without which it is impossible for the Christian to live.
"Perhaps, however, the will of God is not always plain. What should a person do then?" I asked Maria.
GETTING IN TUNE WITH THE WILL OF GOD
"Start today. Begin right now," she responded. "Say in the morning, 'What does God want of me today?' Most of the time it is easy to find duties to do. People are waiting for us. But now and then you come to a crossroads."
Then, she believes, the charismatic experience of knowing the power and direction of the Holy Spirit can come to our aid.
"Ask the Holy Spirit to show you and help you," she advised. "Then it often becomes a process of elimination. The least popular thing is left, and that's the thing you go into."
For Maria, who is in her seventies, and for nearly all who try to follow God's leading, some days His will appears crystal clear. Other days it seems obscure.
On occasions when His guidance is wrapped in haze,
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keep praying, says Maria. Pray, as Jesus and His mother, Mary, did, "Thy will be done."
A time for that kind of prayer came to Maria on the day her husband George died. "Then you can only say, 'Thy will be done,' " she said. "If you try to rebel, you end up saying, 'There can't be a God or He wouldn't have done this.' And you quarrel with God the rest of your life. This will undermine all your future happiness."
Maria, a devout Catholic, practices daily spiritual disciplines to keep spiritually fit.
First thing in the morning she has a heart-felt prayer. "I ask for guidance and offer up everything that will happen during the day as it comes," she explained. "I renew my will to do His will."
Most days she attends mass, for she receives strength through the Eucharist, she says.
Comparing the need for spiritual food to our bodily requirement of three meals a day, Maria said her spiritual diet consisted of going to mass, "spiritual reading" — books about other Christians and what they did to come closer to God — and a time for reading the Bible and praying.
SPIRITUAL DRYNESS
Maria did not speak about doubts or anxieties. But she did talk about the common problem Christians have of spiritual dryness. Most of it, she thinks, is the result of excuses: Too busy for mass or prayers.
When she travels through spiritual deserts, she tries to "talk it through with Jesus. I just plain sit it out."
Sometimes she takes her watch, sits down for fifteen minutes and concentrates on her need to pray and receive God's guidance.
She prays: "This time I promised to You and now I want my soul to listen to You, Jesus."
Because she is willing to discipline herself in this way,
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it usually isn't long before the dry period passes, and Maria has, from God, "some splendid, good idea."
The devotional life, she feels, is an individual thing arising from the unique experiences of each person.
"Some say the rosary and have a devotion to Mary," she elaborated. "Others get great comfort from meditating on the Passion of Christ and the Stations of the Cross. For still others, devotion to the Sacred Heart is helpful if they have difficulty in daily loving. The heart of Jesus is a symbol of love."
The old tradition of each believer having a guardian angel is also a helpful concept for some people, Maria believes, for the idea of a spiritual being attached to a person to help him through life — if he turns to that help — is a source of security and comfort.
"Angels in communion with God are eager and so willing to help us," she said, adding, however, that helpful devotions are frowned on in some religious circles these days.
"But they will come back," she predicted. "The pendulum will swing to a middle point."
Maria, a sought-after speaker who always causes heads to turn wherever she is recognized because of The Sound of Music, believes that knowing the will of God is the same for everyone regardless of circumstances or station in life.
"When we come out of our various concentration camps, we are on the same level again," she said, indicating that World War II experiences are still very much a part of her memories. "Then comes the everyday battle, which we face day after day. Sometimes it is easier to face the big battles like the concentration camps than it is to face the tedium of everyday battles."
Quoting from her German Bible, Maria paraphrased from Revelation 2:10: "Whoever keeps up to the end will be given the crown of life eternal."
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"It's the everyday keeping up," she nodded. "It is a continuing struggle — and also a joy.
"Life is not a constant joy for anyone," she continued in her noticeable but not distracting German accent. "First and foremost, it wasn't for our Lord. He had to struggle every day.
"There is a long, long exercise in bearing a daily cross. There is still a yoke and a burden, but He makes it easier."
