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.

 

 

 

Mother Frances Streitel: Finding meaning in suffering

Amalia Frances Rose Streitel, Foundress of the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother, aka Sister Angela Streitel:  In this morning’s meditation was a quoted reflection by Viktor Frankl on how anyone is able to survive suffering. He states, as quoted in the November 2011, Magnificat,  p. 151, “In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of sacrifice….In accepting to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end…My comrades’…question was, ‘Will we survive the [concentration] camp? For, if not, all this suffering has no meaning.’ The question which beset me was, ‘Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance—as whether one escapes or not—ultimately would not be worth living at all.’”

Sister Angela found meaning in her suffering and is the reason she was able to say to Mother Salesia, her Superior General, that taking up the assignment at the Marian Institute caused her no suffering.  When I first read that my reaction was: “Oh, yeah, sure. Who are you kidding! I just read that you stood beneath the cross with a bleeding heart (Walk in Love,  p. 29) and that you could neither eat nor sleep and asked the Lord to allow this chalice to pass you by! And then you say: “Before God I can declare that the occupying of the Marian Institute caused me absolutely no sorrow or pain” (Letter of July 8, 1879). 

Reflecting on Dr. Frankl’s experience of the concentration camp shed light on Sister Angela’s statement. She had found meaning in suffering, the same meaning that Jesus found in offering His life for His flock, in being obedient to the Father’s plan for our salvation. In explaining herself to Bishop Pankratius concerning this period in her life, Sister Angela states that she realized that she could offer her pain in reparation for her own sinful behaviors.  Not only did finding meaning in her sufferings help her, so, too, was the fact that Sister Angela lived for others and for something beyond herself. Dr. Frankl explains that “being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself…” (Ibid.)  Truly Sister Angela became more human through her suffering and became more and more her unique self, coming to her full potential as a human being.