Living Life to the Full

Today we celebrate the feast day of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein).   Edith Stein was born in 1891 into a prominent Jewish family in Breslau, Poland.  She stopped believing in God at the age of 14.  She was a brilliant philosopher, having earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1916 and taught at the University of Goettingen until 1922. During her years as an distinguished philosopher, she published 17 volumes of writings.  Her appointment as a lecturer at the Education Institute of Munich ended under pressure from the Nazis. 

She was enamored by the life of St. Teresa of Avila.  Inspired by this saint, she was converted to Catholicism in 1922.  She entered  the Carmelite community in Cologne, Germany, professing her vows as a Carmelite in 1934. In 1938 she moved to the Carmelite monastery in Echt, Netherlands. In 1940, Dutch Jews who had become Christians were arrested by the Nazis in retaliation for being denounced by the Dutch bishops. A few days before her deportation from the Netherlands, Sister Teresa Benedicta dismissed the question about a possible rescue: ‘Do not do it! Why should I be spared? Is it not right that I should gain no advantage from my Baptism?....”  She, along with her sister Rosa, also Catholic, died in the gas chamber in Auschwitz on August 9, 1942. (Source: “Edith Stein,”  American Catholic.org.)

As I reflect briefly upon her life, I am in awe of life itself in its likeness to the life and death of Jesus. Like Jesus, also hunted down by authorities, who goes to his death like a sheep led to slaughter, Edith Stein does not rebel or resist those seeking to destroy her.  Am I willing to live and die for the Lord? Would I, like Edith Stein, ask: “why should I be spared”  the traumatic events of life here on earth, even if such events are the result of other people turning against me, rejecting me, tossing me into a “gas chamber,” treating me as trash?  Or would I allow myself to sink into a state of “poor me?  Would I pout and react violently when I am treated poorly with no entitlements to my name, no privileges!  When I find myself thinking this way, perhaps the strength and the humility of Edith Stein will help me let go of such destructive ways of looking at life and follow Jesus to the cross, where all sin, mine included, was destroyed by God’s love and mercy.