aeternus

As we are getting ready for Pentecost, I remembered to dig out one of my favorite poems from a dear Carmelite, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. It was a poem that was never completed and one of her last writings before she was taken off to Auschwitz and killed during  August of 1942. The manuscript itself remains in the Carmel in Echt and was probably written in the Summertime of 1942.

By St. Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)

Who are you, sweet light, that fills me
And illumines the darkness of my heart?
You lead me like a mother’s hand,
And should you let go of me,
I would not know how to take another step.
You are the space
That embraces my being and buries it in yourself.
Away from you it sinks into the abyss
Of nothingness, from which you raised it to the light.
You, nearer to me than I to myself
And more interior than my most interior
And still impalpable and intangible
And beyond any name:
Holy Spirit eternal love!

Are you not the sweet manna
That from the Son’s heart
Overflows into my heart,
The food of angels and the blessed?
He who raised himself from death to life,
He has also awakened me to new life
From the sleep of death.
And he gives me new life from day to day,
And at some time his fullness is to stream through me,
Life of your life indeed, you yourself:
Holy Spirit eternal life!

Are you the ray
That flashes down from the eternal Judge’s throne
And breaks into the night of the soul
That had never known itself?
Mercifully relentlessly
It penetrates hidden folds.
Alarmed at seeing itself,
The self makes space for holy fear,
The beginning of that wisdom
That comes from on high
And anchors us firmly in the heights,
Your action,
That creates us anew:
Holy Spirit ray that penetrates everything!

Are you the spirit’s fullness and the power
By which the Lamb releases the seal
Of God’s eternal decree?
Driven by you
The messengers of judgment ride through the world
And separate with a sharp sword
The kingdom of light from the kingdom of night.
Then heaven becomes new and new the earth,
And all finds its proper place
Through your breath:
Holy Spirit victorious power!

Are you the master who builds the eternal cathedral,
Which towers from the earth through the heavens?
Animated by you, the columns are raised high
And stand immovably firm.
Marked with the eternal name of God,
They stretch up to the light,
Bearing the dome,
Which crowns the holy cathedral,
Your work that encircles the world:
Holy Spirit God’s molding hand!

Are you the one who created the unclouded mirror
Next to the Almighty’s throne,
Like a crystal sea,
In which Divinity lovingly looks at itself?
You bend over the fairest work of your creation,
And radiantly your own gaze
Is illumined in return.
And of all creatures the pure beauty
Is joined in one in the dear form
Of the Virgin, your immaculate bride:
Holy Spirit Creator of all!

Are you the sweet song of love
And of holy awe
That eternally resounds around the triune throne,
That weds in itself the clear chimes of each and every being?
The harmony,
That joins together the members to the Head,
In which each one
Finds the mysterious meaning of his being blessed
And joyously surges forth,
Freely dissolved in your surging:
Holy Spirit eternal jubilation!

image above: Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Folio 79r - Pentecost the Musée Condé, Chantilly.

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“Happy the virgin who denied herself and took up her cross. She imitated the Lord, the spouse of virgins and prince of martyrs… “

It was with undivided attention to Christ and uniting her cross to His own that today’s saint, Teresa Benedicta, was able to walk in the silent confidence of loving witness and martyrdom in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

I often think of Teresa and her testimony when in the liturgy of the hours we remember the three young voices crying out from the fiery furnace, “Blessed be God”. How incredible it seems to me that these holy martyrs have the courage to meet their end with such super human strength. Obviously it is because they understood it was NOT the end but the BEGINNING and have been granted special graces in order to brave such agonies. But these graces surely are only given to souls who are already united so beautifully with our Lord.

In todays office of readings we hear from Edith Stein in her own words:

“Stand before the Lord Who hangs from the cross with
His heart torn open. He poured out the blood of His heart
in order to win your heart. In order to follow Him in holy
chastity, your heart must be free from every earthly
aspiration. Jesus Crucified must be the object of your every
longing, of your every desire, of your every thought.

The world is in flames: the fire can spread even to our
house, but above all the flames the cross stands on high,
and it cannot be burnt. The cross is the way which leads
from earth to heaven. Those who embrace it with faith,
love, and hope are taken up, right into the heart of the
Trinity.

The world is in flames: do you wish to put them out?
Contemplate the cross: from His open heart the blood of the
Redeemer pours, blood which can put out even the flames
of hell. Through the faithful observance of the vows you
make your heart free and open; and then the floods of that
divine love will be able to flow into it, making it overflow
and bear fruit to the furthest reaches of the earth.

Through the power of the cross you can be present
wherever there is pain, carried there by your compassionate
charity, by that very charity, which you draw from the
divine heart. That charity enables you to spread every-
where the most precious blood in order to ease pain, save
and redeem.

The eyes of the Crucified gaze upon you. They question
you and appeal to you. Do you wish seriously to renew
your alliance with Him What will your response be?
“Lord, where shall I go? You alone have the words of life.”
Ave Crux, spes unica!”
I pray that I may meet my cross today with love of our Lord.

_____________

Part II of this post is from the most beautiful Novena to Saint Teresa Benedicta composed by Elias Friedman, O.C.D., founder of the Association of Hebrew Catholics (AHC). The Association now has its headquarters in St. Louis (read the story here). This is the final day of the Novena and the description of life at the time of Edith Stein’s death in Nazi Germany is helpful in explaining her story. There is a link at the bottom to the AHC website and the entire novena.

Novena to Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)

Day 9 Sunday, August 9th, 1942
The Auschwitz Extermination Camp

Auschwitz was at that time a small provincial Polish town, which was to give its name to the notorious concentration camp, opened nearby by order of Himmler for political prisoners on April 27, 1940. The first camp was rather small in size and was called, subsequently, Auschwitz I. In October 1941, a far more extensive camp was set up, named after a neighboring village, Auschwitz II-Birkenau (Encyclopaedia Judaica Vol. 3, Coll. 854-871). From March 1942, Jews were directed to the second camp.

Mass murders of Jewish prisoners by Zyklon B (prussic acid) gas was instituted at Birkenau as from January 1942, at the instigation of Adolf Eichmann, who was in overall command of the execution of the “Final Solution” of the Jewish Problem by genocide, decided on by the Nazis at Wansee in 1941. The gassing continued for two years and ten months, during which time a million Jews perished in the camp.

The convoys arrived at the rate of three or four a day; they were usually met at the platform by the Camp Commandant, Rudolph Hoess, later executed for war-crimes, and the infamous Dr. Mengele, who performed the “Selektion”, strong prisoners being separated for forced labor in mines and factories, the remainder being consigned for immediate “elimination.”

The first transport of prisoners from Holland arrived in July 1942; the one carrying our Saint was, perhaps, the third, being preceded by a transport of men which had reached the camp that afternoon.

The newcomers were taken to barracks and told to leave their clothes on a numbered peg, to be retrieved after the shower, which they were falsely led to believe would follow. Women usually had their hair cut off. The prisoners had then to walk four hundred meters along a path till they came to a large room, with tubes running across the ceiling. Force was used to get them to enter, when necessary. The metal doors were locked, levers operated and the gas introduced into the rooms. Twenty to twenty-five minutes later, electric-pumps evacuated the gas, allowing special commando-units to enter and empty the chambers. Not all the victims were dead. Gold dentures were removed and the corpses carted away to be thrown into a common fosse. Crematoria had not yet been installed at Auschwitz; but, later, to obliterate traces of their crimes, the Nazis exhumed the corpses and had them burnt.

From the moment of the arrival of a convoy to the extermination of the victims, no more than an hour and a half would elapse, as a rule. The killing of human beings became a monotonous routine.

Saint Edith, her companions and a thousand other Hebrew Catholics died in the gas-chambers of Auschwitz II-Birkenau on the morning of August 9th from suffocation by prussic acid fumes. She then entered into her glory, accompanied, as we like to believe, by many others.

Visit the Associations of Hebrew Catholics website for the entire, and most beautiful, Novena to Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Listen to the SAINT CAST (podcast) about St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

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Today is Ascension Thursday and it makes me a little sad. I feel like we are loosing a bit of our Catholic tradition and heritage by transferring the celebration of this remembrance to Sunday. I understand some of the reasoning, but by doing that, we miss the opportunity to celebrate the greatest and most ancient of Novena’s we have in our church. If we celebrate Ascension on Sunday there are only 7 days to squeeze in a 9 day prayer before Pentecost. I don’t see how that is possible. I guess though we should remember that God is infinite and so our earthly time-line doesn’t really matter to Him!

So, to prepare for our Novena, I thought it might be nice to pray along with some of the beautiful prose of the great Carmelite Saint, Teresa Bendicta…

A little about Saint Teresa Benedicta:

Near the end of her life, Saint Edith Stein (why do we find it necessary to always denote both her given name and her religious name?), wrote several meditative works, which have only recently been translated into English and published. The young German philosopher entered a Carmelite monastery, where she continued to write. She was killed at Auschwitz in August 1942, and was canonized October 11, 1998.

Among her final works is an incomplete “novena” for Pentecost, consisting of seven stanzas in poetic form, collected in The Hidden Life, hagiographic essays, meditations, spiritual texts, Volume IV of the collected works of Edith Stein, translated into English by her great-niece, Waltraut Stein, and published in 1992 by the Institute for Carmelite Studies, Washington DC. The work is copyrighted by ICS Publications and is available on its web site.

I think reading (or listening ) to this novena would be a great way to prepare for the Pentecost Novena which starts tomorrow. You can Listen to Verses for a Pentecost Novena at the Meditations from Carmel Podcast

By Saint Edith Stein
Here is Saint Teresa Benedicta’s verse:

Who are you, sweet light, that fills me
And illumines the darkness of my heart?
You lead me like a mother’s hand,
And should you let go of me,
I would not know how to take another step.
You are the space
That embraces my being and buries it in yourself.
Away from you it sinks into the abyss
Of nothingness, from which you raised it to the light.
You, nearer to me than I to myself
And more interior than my most interior
And still impalpable and intangible
And beyond any name:
Holy Spirit eternal love!

Are you not the sweet manna
That from the Son’s heart
Overflows into my heart,
The food of angels and the blessed?
He who raised himself from death to life,
He has also awakened me to new life
From the sleep of death.
And he gives me new life from day to day,
And at some time his fullness is to stream through me,
Life of your life indeed, you yourself:
Holy Spirit eternal life!

Are you the ray
That flashes down from the eternal Judge’s throne
And breaks into the night of the soul
That had never known itself?
Mercifully relentlessly
It penetrates hidden folds.
Alarmed at seeing itself,
The self makes space for holy fear,
The beginning of that wisdom
That comes from on high
And anchors us firmly in the heights,
Your action,
That creates us anew:
Holy Spirit ray that penetrates everything!

Are you the spirit’s fullness and the power
By which the Lamb releases the seal
Of God’s eternal decree?
Driven by you
The messengers of judgement ride through the world
And separate with a sharp sword
The kingdom of light from the kingdom of night.
Then heaven becomes new and new the earth,
And all finds its proper place
Through your breath:
Holy Spirit victorious power!

Are you the master who builds the eternal
cathedral,
Which towers from the earth through the heavens?
Animated by you, the columns are raised high
And stand immovably firm.
Marked with the eternal name of God,
They stretch up to the light,
Bearing the dome,
Which crowns the holy cathedral,
Your work that encircles the world:
Holy Spirit God’s molding hand!

Are you the one who created
the unclouded mirror
Next to the Almighty’s throne,
Like a crystal sea,
In which Divinity lovingly looks at itself?
You bend over the fairest work of your creation,
And radiantly your own gaze
Is illumined in return.
And of all creatures the pure beauty
Is joined in one in the dear form
Of the Virgin, your immaculate bride:
Holy Spirit Creator of all!

Are you the sweet song of love
And of holy awe
That eternally resounds around the triune throne,
That weds in itself the clear chimes
of each and every being?
The harmony,
That joins together the members to the Head,
In which each one
Finds the mysterious meaning of his being blessed
And joyously surges forth,
Freely dissolved in your surging:
Holy Spirit eternal jubilation!
For more information on St. Teresa Benedicta, you can read Sister Joan Gormley’s considerate article for Women of Faith and family on Edith Stein and the Contemplative Vocation.

Also, remember that Saint Teresa Benedicta is Co-Patroness of Europe as proclaimed by Pope John Paul II in October 1999. Here is his speach from that day. Here is an interesting painting of these Co-Patronesses that I found:

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