Lesley Stahl, of CBS News, once used an analogy to describe the difficulties of being a working mother. She said, “When you’re juggling all those balls, you need to remember which ones are rubber … and which ones are glass.” With all due respect for working mothers, who have a vocation on top of a vocation, the analogy also applies to simply living the faith, to being always faithful to the Gospel, and to becoming Christ for others. One of the most important parts of a faith-filled life is caring for the most fragile thing of all: the human soul. Keep that in mind as you encounter the world this week. Assume that the problems a friend is going through, the prayer request of a family member, the demands for attention from a child or a grandchild, and everything else this week … is made of glass, it is fragile. Handle all of it with caution, tenderness, and grace.
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On August 9th the Church remembers St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, also known as St. Edith Stein. She converted from Judaism to Catholicism in the course of her work as a philosopher, and later entered the Carmelite Order. She died in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz in 1942.
As a young woman with profound intellectual gifts, Edith gravitated toward the study of philosophy and became a pupil of the renowned professor Edmund Husserl in 1913. Through her studies, the non-religious Edith met several Christians whose intellectual and spiritual lives she admired. In 1921, while visiting friends, Edith spent an entire night reading the autobiography of the 16th century Carmelite nun St. Teresa of Avila. “When I had finished the book,” she later recalled, “I said to myself: This is the truth.” She was baptized into the Catholic Church on January 1st, 1922.
Edith intended to join the Carmelites immediately after her conversion, but would ultimately have to wait another 11 years before taking this step. In 1933, the rise of Nazism, combined with her Jewish ethnicity, put an end to her teaching career. After a painful parting with her mother, who did not understand her Christian conversion, she entered a Carmelite convent in 1934, taking the name “Teresa Benedicta of the Cross” as a symbol of her acceptance of suffering. “I felt,” she wrote, “that those who understood the Cross of Christ should take it upon themselves on everybody’s behalf.” She saw it as her vocation “to intercede with God for everyone,” but she prayed especially for the Jews of Germany whose tragic fate was becoming clear. She was arrested along with her sister Rosa (who had also become a Catholic), and the members of her religious community.
Pope John Paul II beatified Teresa Benedicta of the Cross in 1987 and canonized her 12 years later. She is the patron saint of converts to Catholicism.
Let us pray. “O my God, fill our souls with holy joy, courage, and strength to serve. Enkindle your love in us and then walk with us along the next stretch of road before us. We do not see very far ahead, but when we have arrived where the horizon now closes down, a new prospect will open before us, and we shall meet it with peace. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
