How do you rediscover a lost blessing? I was reminded about a time when my faith life needed a kick in the rear this week when we celebrated the Memorial of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The memory involved the study of the German Language, some beer and Edith Stein.
I wrote a few years ago about my adventures in Germany when I was at university and how the language and beer became objects of study and examination that gave me much joy and blessing during my year abroad. But there was a lot more to the year than those two blessings. We, the study abroad group I was with, had to write a final paper on some aspect of German history and how it helped us to better understand our experience in Germany.
As a philosophy major I had sampled many classes at the University of Constance and found them very interesting it was here that I came across Edith Stein. Edith Stein was a brilliant philosopher from the early part of the 20th century who worked mainly in the study of the philosophy of Phenomenology. All I can remember of reading her and other writings on the subject was that I had a headache and I spent most of my time trying to deconstruct and reconstruct the German sentences into something I could understand…failing most of the time…and this is where the beer helped.
I also read a few small articles about her and then began to do more research into her life. What intrigued me most in her life was that she was born of Jewish parents, converted to Catholicism, became a Carmelite Sister and was murdered in a Nazi death camp. During her doctoral studies she tells this part of her conversion, “(I) went to Frankfurt Cathedral and saw a woman with a shopping basket going in to kneel for a brief prayer. “This was something totally new to me. In the synagogues and Protestant churches I had visited people simply went to the services. Here, however, I saw someone coming straight from the busy marketplace into this empty church, as if she was going to have an intimate conversation. It was something I never forgot.”
What Edith Stein witnessed was in truth a conversation, a brief chat with our Lord. As I reflected on this during the last month or two that I was in Germany I began to remember during my travels how often I would find myself sitting quietly in a church, yes admiring the beauty of the art and architecture, speaking softly to God in prayer. It was the most natural thing in the world. It was also here that my faith took a step forward in recognizing the call of God is one to conversation and conversion.
Edith Stein upon entering the Carmelite order took the name Teresa Benedict of the Cross and was in 1997 canonized by Pope Saint John Paul II.
It is reminder that when are hearts are ready God speaks to us even when we are not looking.
God bless
Fr. Mark