The article of the month

This Month… by Teresa Caldecott Cialini

One of the prayer intentions the Church gives us for the summer segment of Ordinary Time is “A Deeper Understanding between Christians and Jews”. This is especially appropriate for August since on the ninth of the month we celebrate one of the patronesses of Europe, Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a Jewish convert and scholar. She was born Edith Stein on 12 October 1891 while her Jewish family were celebrating the Feast of Atonement, and it was on the same day in 1933 that she said her final, painful farewell to her family before joining the Carmelites. She told the prioress, “Human activities cannot help us, but only the suffering of Christ. It is my desire to share in it.” And share in it she did, all the way to her death at Auschwitz in 1942. Her last words as she was taken from the convent were addressed to her sister (who had also converted): “Come, we are going for our people.”

The Feast of Atonement, or Yom Kippur, is the holiest day of the year for Jews and the crescendo of a whole season of High Holidays. A day of fasting whilst clad in simple white garments, the spiritual focus is on union as children of God praying for forgiveness, just as Moses prayed on Mount Sinai after the golden calf incident (Exodus 32). A spirit of confidence in God’s mercy infuses the solemnity with an undercurrent of joy, akin to the attitude of the Christian martyrs throughout the centuries. It seems a fair guess that Sister Teresa Benedicta donned her white Carmelite cloak as she left with her Nazi arrestors.

At her beatification, Saint John Paul II, who had himself lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland and lost many Jewish friends to the Holocaust, honoured “a daughter of Israel, who remained faithful to the crucified Lord Jesus Christ and, as a Jew, to her people in loving faithfulness.” In her will, Stein had written the following intention: “I ask the Lord to accept my life and my death…so that the Lord will be accepted by His people and that His Kingdom may come in glory, for the salvation of Germany and the peace of the world.”

Prayer as Intimacy

A rigorous intellectual, the young Edith Stein was not merely won over to the Catholic Faith by arguments. Just as formative was a moment where she witnessed a woman with a shopping basket dropping into Frankfurt Cathedral to offer a brief prayer on her knees. “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.” At the time, she was working on her Doctorate in Philosophy, clearly on a quest for Truth. Another turning point was reading the biography of Saint Teresa of Avila (in a single night), the Doctor of the Church who wrote about the life of prayer as an interior castle. Stein later reflected, “My longing for truth was a single prayer.”

Sinai to Tabor

Moses, through his intimacy with God, attained not only freedom for the people of Israel but also their reconciliation after their abuse of that freedom. This intimacy was centred around the times he spent on Mount Sinai, but he appeared on another mountain of course: at the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor. That feast, which we celebrate on 6 August, is the fulfilment of those mountain encounters for Moses as for Elijah. These two figures seem to be taken outside of the regular timeline to converse directly with God-made-man, for it is the Incarnate Son who allows us to see the face of the God they worshipped. In our Art Enclosure this issue you will find a 15th century iconographic depiction of the event, and Amy Giuliano explores how the apostles are exposed to Jesus’ Divinity just as Prophets are exposed to Christ’s humanity. Anthony Esolen also writes about Mount Tabor and spiritual ascent this month, as does Father Nolan in our Jubilee series. But whether it is Tabor, Calvary, or Mount Greylock we climb, the call to “ascend” in the intimacy of prayer is a call to the purity of heart that allows us to see God (see Ps 24 and Mt 5:8).

Significantly, on the 2nd we find the crucial reading about Moses receiving the teaching on jubilee years (Leviticus 25:1, 8-17), something which reminds us of the emphasis that the late Pope Francis placed on social justice and the alleviation of debt. This inspiration derives not from a political position, but from the vision that the ascent of the holy mountain imparts, which stands above the heated fray of the world, demanding to be heard.

Further Up and Further In

It is not easy to give up a social position, whether in academia or elsewhere. This month, inspired by Saint Teresa Benedicta and Saint Clare (11 August), we focus on “Saints Who Abandoned Riches”, and invite you to reflect on how they obtained the motivation to leave their worldly goods to follow Christ: time spent with Him in prayer. As intimacy with Jesus grows, the spiritual treasure of his presence in our lives washes away the attachment to the other kind.

One way or another, we must ascend that mountain in order to be in the presence of Christ and hear the Word as it reverberates in the interior castle of our heart. The late Pope Francis once said that prayer is a struggle, a kind of combat, which goes on all our life. The effort we put into the spiritual ascent slowly refines our will and unites it with God’s. Then, we must descend from the mountain, radiant with the joy of his presence, and apply what he has imparted to us, without fear or favour.