Today Jesus calls disciples to lay down their lives: to take up their cross and follow him. This involves trusting that God will work things out for the greater good and bring us to him in glory. This was the kind of faith that Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross had and put into action.
Born into a prominent Jewish family in Breslau, Germany as Edith Stein, she abandoned Judaism in her teens. She studied philosophy under Edmund Husserl, a leading proponent of the philosophy of phenomenology. Edith earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1916. Later, she was influenced by the writings of Saint Teresa of Avila, and she became a Catholic on January 1, 1922. She taught in various schools until 1933, when anti-semitic legislation went into effect, and at that time entered the Carmelite convent at Cologne, where she took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
At the end of 1939, she moved to the Carmelite monastery in Echt, Netherlands. The Nazis occupied that country in 1940. In retaliation for being denounced by the Dutch bishops, the Nazis arrested all Dutch Jews who had become Christians. Teresa Benedicta and her sister Rosa, also a Catholic, died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz on August 9, 1942.
Putting our lives at the service of Jesus always requires sacrifice in some way. For Teresa, this meant actually giving up her life because she lived the faith and loved Jesus. For all of us, it means different things, but whatever it means, we need see Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross as our example and take up our cross, whatever it may be, depending on her intercession.
Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, pray for us.