Pray with
St Edith Stein
1891–1942
Edith Stein, or St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, was a Jewish convert to Christianity. She was a towering intellect who had a promising academic career in Philosophy cut short by the persecution of the Nazis. When she was staying with Lutheran friends, she read the Life of St Teresa of Avila and found herself saying ‘this is the truth’. She entered Cologne Carmel in spite of the reluctance of her mother, and there wrote many helpful works. She was born on the Day of Atonement and identified her life with that of her Jewish people. She died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz in 1942.
‘It all depends on having a quiet little corner where you can talk with God on a daily basis as if nothing else existed… and one is to consider oneself totally as an instrument, so that you treat your most frequently demanded talents not as something you use, but as God working through you’ (Letter 45 in Self-Portrait in Letters, p. 54).
‘My yearning for Christ was one continual prayer’ (in Posselt, Edith Stein, p. 55).
Prayer is God’s initiative. He draws us. It is we who respond.
‘You lower your gaze full of love, into my eyes
And bend your ear to my whispered words
And deeply fill my heart with peace’ (Hidden Life pp. 136-7).
‘Prayer is looking up into the face of the Eternal. We can do this only when the spirit is awake in its innermost depths, freed from all earthly occupations and pleasures that numb it’ (Hidden Life, pp. 3-4).