Edith Stein’s Courage to Listen

Edith Stein (Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) was a philosopher, a martyr, a Jew, a Christian, and a prophet. Born into an observant Jewish family in Poland in 1891 (on the holy day of Yom Kippur), she turned away from the faith of her childhood as an adolescent and began her career as a philosophy student studying with the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. When someone gave her a biography of Teresa of Avila after she was forced to leave her teaching post in Germany (for not being “Aryan”), she was transformed. She began discerning her faith, became a Christian and, later, a nun.

She spoke out against the Nazi regime, writing to Pope Pius XXI encouraging him to also speak out. He never responded. In 1938 Edith’s monastic order sent her to the Netherlands as a way of protecting her from the Nazis. But four years later on August 2, 1942, the Gestapo arrested nearly 250 Catholics of Jewish origin including Edith and her sister (who had also joined her order) and sent to Auschwitz where they were murdered days later.

Edith was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1998 and added to the 2022 Episcopal Calendar of Lesser Feasts and Fasts. She lived a life of extraordinary witness to her faith and to her values of solidarity, truth, and justice. Watching an allegedly Christian government oppress its people, she wrote in April 1933,

Everything that happened and continues to happen on a daily basis originates with a government that calls itself ‘Christian.’ For weeks not only Jews but also thousands of faithful Catholics in Germany, and, I believe, all over the world, have been waiting and hoping for the Church of Christ to raise its voice to put a stop to this abuse of Christ’s name.

Edith’s life naturally poses several questions.

• How are Christians in the contemporary United States taking refuge in our own political privilege rather than in the truth and grace of Jesus Christ?
• Do we respond to contemporary “abuse of Christ’s name?” 
• How do we discern our call to speak out in times of crisis?
• How and to whom do we speak? 

The only sure thing I have is writing with more questions than answers. Of course, in a world that casts things in terms of right/wrong and up/down, I want to know that I am doing The Right Thing. But before rushing to self-judgement—either complimenting myself for speaking out or chastising myself for remaining silent—at any given time and on any given issue, something else needs to happen first.  

In his book The Drowned and the Saved, Holocaust survivor Primo Levi shared a persistent dream of the imprisoned: they had been released and were at home, but their loved ones would neither believe nor even listen to what had happened to them.

This raises more questions.

• Who are the people trying to speak their truth to us?
• What am I not hearing from my friends who fear the course American politics could take (and already has taken)?
• How would my life be different if took them more seriously? 

A friend shared these words by the monk Curtis Almquist recently:

Our word courage comes from the Latin word for heart, cor, then the Old French, corage. Courage emanates from the heart, the heart symbolizing the essence of a person. We hear Jesus say, ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid’ (John 14:27). But courage is not something to work on. Becoming courageous is not a spiritual calisthenic. . . Courage simply flows from a heart that is fully committed. 

The first place to look for courage isn’t the newspaper or the White House or Congress. 

The first place to look is our own hearts. We must ask, what is my relationship with those who suffer? With our hurting creation? With those who speak out? Or are we those dream-relatives of Primo Levi’s fellow prisoners who simply won’t believe things are as bad as they are? 

Before I declare to myself or to others our condemnation or commendation, is my heart committed? Have I yielded to the Spirit’s opening of spirit and mind that needs to be done to find courage in the first place? Edith Stein’s courage came from her faith in the Jewish Jesus she followed and her solidarity with those who suffered. Before I presume to have the courage to speak or to follow, do I have the courage to listen?