"God is there
in these moments of rest
and can give us in a single instant
exactly what we need.
Then the rest of the day can take its course,
under the same effort and strain, perhaps,
but in peace
and when night comes
and you look back over the day
and see how fragmentary everything has been
and how much you planned that has gone undone,
and all the reasons you have to be embarrassed and ashamed:
just take everything exactly as it is
put it in God's hands
and leave it with Him
Then you will be able to rest in Him
really rest
and start the next day as a new life
St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)
I wake in my fresh white end of summer morning bed
take my freshly brewed cappuccino
my little pink laptop
and my Word Among Us
to the front porch swing
and begin my daily quiet time
and with what began as a slight curiousity
about the saint of the day
two hours later ends
when
I have to pull myself away
to get on with my little life
but not without first having been blessed
by the life of an ordinary Jewish woman
who comes to 'faith'
thru her life of ordinary circumstances
college, work, friends, books...
during an extraordinary time of war
She wrote about 'women'
and 'vocation'
and 'faith'
and became what I long to be
what we are all called to be
...a Saint...
holy
born October 12, 1891
as her family was celebrating Yom Kippur,
the most important Jewish festival
the Feast of Atonement
of Jewish parents
Siegried Stein and Auguste Courant,
in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland)
the youngest of 11 (four died in childhood)
her father, who ran a timber business, died when she had only just turned two
Edith abandoned Judaism as a teen, becoming a self-proclaimed atheist
'seeking truth'
but she continued to admire her mother’s attitude of total openness toward God
By the time of the outbreak of World War I
she had studied philology and philosophy at the universities of Breslau and Goettingen.
After the war, she resumed her higher studies at the University of Freiburg
and was awarded her doctorate in philosophy Suma Cum Laude in 1916
and emerged as one of Europe's brightest philosophers
In the midst of all her studies, Edith Stein was searching not only for the truth,
but for Truth itself and she found both in the Catholic Church
As part of her growing interest in Catholic teachings she read Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises
and felt that one could not just read a book like that, but had to put it into practice
In 1917 she was called to a collegue's home to sort thru his personal papers
after his death on the battlefield at Flanders.
What she discovered in his widow was
a living faith that touched her life
"This was my first meeting with the Cross,
with the divine strength it brings to those who bear it.
I saw for the first time within my reach
the Church,
born of the Redeemer's sufferings
His victory over the sting of death.
It was at that moment that my incredulity was shattered
and the light of Christ shone forth,
Christ in the mystery of the Cross".
In June of 1921 when she was 29 visiting a friend's summer house
in Bergzabern (in the Palatinate) near France
Edith picked up the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila,
founder of the Carmelite Order
and read all night.
"When I had finished the book, I said to myself: This is the truth."
Later, looking back on her life, she wrote:
"My longing for truth was a single prayer."
During this period she went to Frankfort Cathedral
and saw a woman with a shopping basket going in to kneel for a brief prayer.
"This was something totally new to me.
In the synagogues and Protestant churches I had visited
people simply went to the services.
Here, however, I saw someone coming
straight from the busy marketplace into this empty church,
as if she was going to have an intimate conversation.
It was something I never forgot."
in her dissertation she wrote:
"There have been people who believed that a sudden change
had occurred within them
and that this was a result of God's grace."
At 30 Edith Stein was baptized 1 January 1922 .
It was the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus,
when Jesus entered into the covenant of Abraham
"I had given up practising my Jewish religion when I was a 14-year-old girl
and did not begin to feel Jewish again until I had returned to God."
she wrote:
"Things were in God's plan which I had not planned at all.
I am coming to the living faith and conviction that
- from God's point of view -
there is no chance
and that the whole of my life,
down to every detail,
has been mapped out in God's divine providence
and makes complete and perfect sense in God's all-seeing eyes."
Immediately after her conversion she wanted to join a Carmelite convent.
But she was advised to teach and speak by her spritual mentors.
Edith spent her days teaching, lecturing, writing and translating,
and she soon became known as a celebrated philosopher and author,
She learnt that it was possible to "pursue scholarship as a service to God..."
"During the time immediately before and quite some time after my conversion
I thought that leading a religious life meant giving up all earthly things
and having one's mind fixed on divine things only.
Gradually, however, I learnt that other things are expected of us in this world
I even believe that the deeper someone is drawn to God,
the more he has to `get beyond himself' in this sense,
that is, go into the world and carry divine life into it."
But her great longing was for the solitude and contemplation of Carmel
in which she could offer herself to God for her people.
It was not until the Nazi persecution of the Jews
brought her public activities and her influence
in the Catholic world to a sudden close
that her Benedictine spiritual director gave his approval
to her entering the Discalced Carmelie Nuns’
cloistered community at Cologne-Lindenthal on 14 October 1933.
Twelve years after her conversion
She was 42
The following April, Edith received the Habit of Carmel
and the religious name of "Teresa Benedicta ac Cruce,"
and on Easter Sunday, 21 April 1935, she made her Profession of Vows.
"I told our Lord that I knew it was His cross
that was now being placed upon the Jewish people;
that most of them did not understand this,
but that those who did
would have to take it up willingly in the name of all.
I would do that.
At the end of the service,
I was certain that I had been heard.
But what this carrying of the cross was to consist in,
that I did not yet know."
In 1938 she had to be smuggeled across the border into the Netherlands,
to the Carmelite Convent in Echt in the Province of Limburg.
Edith Stein was arrested by the Gestapo on 2 August 1942
She died with her sister Rosa, who had also converted to Catholicism
in the gas chambers at Auschwitz on 9 August 1942
She was fifty years old
Pope John Paul II beatified Teresa Benedicta
as a martyr on May 1, 1987, in Cologne, Germany
and canonized her on October 11, 1998
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