St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) - August 9 - Carmelite Saints

This Saint of Carmel began life in a Jewish Family, as she tells us in the book she wrote about it called Life in a Jewish Family.  It is a book worth reading to help anyone watching family members drift away from faith, to atheism, and then in the search for real truth, come to believe in our God, Who is Love and Truth.  She lived from 1891 to 1942, making many contributions to the field of Philosophy and becoming a sought-after lecturer before entering the Carmel at Cologne, Germany, in October of 1933.  Her definition of empathy states it is built on an understanding of people in a community with each other. This means it is a purposeful perceptive ability that we employ as we navigate our way into the future in cooperation with each other. We find this in her doctoral dissertation, and she develops it later as well in On the Problem of Empathy.  This is what we seek to do in all our Catholic communities as we relate to one another daily, and certainly underpins the importance of small groups.

The varied circumstances of her life, cut short by her martyrdom, allow many people to see in her an example to emulate, a helpmate through their own lives, and a Saint with whom they can form a deep, lasting friendship, knowing she will help Mary lead them to Christ.  She lost her father at the tender age of 4 and was the youngest of eleven siblings. Only 7 of them lived to adulthood.  As a child, she was very precocious and insisted on going to kindergarten when her sister, Erna, her older sister began to attend it.  This same determination to get things done was characteristic of her entire school career.  She did all her degrees efficiently.  Her devotion to school makes it all the more amazing that she was willing to volunteer as a Red Cross nurse during World War I before she finished her doctorate in Philosophy.  Her patients and co-workers thought highly of her there, and she loved being able to help people communicate via letter to folks back home.  Fellow students, in their memories of her, share that she was a tender, understanding companion who knew how to balance working hard by taking recreation on hikes, expeditions to nearby places of interest, and making simple visits.   Her family and her nieces and nephews loved to have her visit, attesting to her joyful presence among them.  One of her older sisters asked to have her sent to help her at one point. Later in her life, a cousin’s wife asked that she come to Gottingen, where her road from student of Psychology to a student of Philosophy, particularly Phenomenology, began.  So, despite the loss of her father, which could have caused her to have a spirit of closed bitterness, the very closeness of her family, which then had to work together more determinedly, became part of her character, giving her an open heart ready to receive love from her Mother and older siblings as the youngest and give back to them in joy. 

Although her conversion to Catholicism (baptized Jan 01, 1922) did not please her Mother, Auguste, who felt it as a greater abandonment of their Jewish faith than even atheism, St. Edith Stein, as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, wrote her Mother, Auguste, every week from the convent.  It seems both of them knew how to love in difficult situations.  One sister, Rosa, joined St. Edith in her conversion and followed her into a life connected to the Carmelites in Cologne as an extern sister, called to service and hospitality as a sister who carried out duties that connected the outside community to the enclosed convent without disrupting the rhythm of prayer of the cloistered Sisters (October 14, 1933).  So, although everyone in her family may not have understood St. Edith’s conversion, we see that she was supported by at least one of them in as complete a manner as possible.  

For those of us living a busy life, her guidance as she taught in a Dominican high school for forming teachers, and began to be famous as a lecturer is a key to bringing silence and peace to our days, allowing the Lord to have His Hand in our lives, giving ourselves fully to Him as she did.  With reference to her job as a teacher, and truly for all jobs, this quote rings very true:  Secondly, St. Edith says of her endeavors: “Surely it is most important that the teachers truly have this [Christ’s] spirit themselves and vividly exemplify it.  At the same time, they also need to know life as the children will find it. Otherwise, there will be a great danger that the girls will tell themselves: ‘The Sisters have no notion about the world;’”  For it is our temptation as we become more close to the Lord to become distant from the ways of those around us and we fail to meet people where they are, and this in itself can be one of those sins of omission.  Jesus, after all, met with all people, where they were. 

Her key to being successful in her endeavors, without losing her own closeness to Him, as she says in a lecture, was to give the first hour of the day to Him in prayer, finding time at noon to at least go to one’s interior and seek silence with God there, and to end the day with Him.  This should sound familiar to many who pray the Morning and Evening prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours, and/or who pray the Angelus three times each day at 6 am, noon and 6 pm.  Certainly, those who give that morning prayer time and the evening examen are following in her trail up the mountain of Carmel that all through this time, she desired to enter.  However, in obedience to the Abbot of Beuron, a Benedictine abbey, where went for her yearly retreat, who was her spiritual director for part of this time (hence the Benedicta part of her name), she did not enter the Carmelite order for he felt she had much to give in her work as a lecturer to the Church at large. Certainly, his instinct and her obedience have provided the Church with great works, such as all her lectures (collected in Essays on Woman), and from within the Carmel, Eternal and Finite Being and the Science of the Cross.

We see her complete embrace and understanding of the Cross after her years of purification in the Carmelite order in these last words before she was gassed in Auschwitz on August 9th, 1942:

“Our Savior hangs before you with a pierced heart.  He has spilled His heart’s blood to win your heart.  If you want to follow Him in holy purity, your heart must be free of every earthly desire.  Jesus, the Crucified, is to be the only object of your longings, your wishes, your thoughts . . . He wants your life in order to give you His.  Hail to the Cross, our only Hope!”

Picture in the public domain.  Rosa Stein and Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross in Echt, Holland in 1939