Your Will be Done

How do we set our feet toward God if we are not on our knees responding to His Will?

Tip again goes to Doctors of the Catholic Church and the Magnificat

Today the Church honors Edith Stein who was born of Jewish parents and became an influential philosopher. Then she had a conversion to Catholicism and later became a Carmelite nun. She was arrested by the Nazi regime in 1942, along with all Catholics of Jewish extractions and transported by cattle train to the death camp of Auschwitz where she died in the gas chambers that same year.

Meditation of the Day

Beginning the Way of the Cross

The words “Your will be done” must be the rule of the Christian’s life in all their fullness. They must be the principle that regulates his day from morning to night, the course of the year and his whole life. It then becomes the Christian’s only concern. For all other cares the Lord will make himself responsible; this alone will remain with us as long as we live. From the objective point of view it is not absolutely certain that we shall always remain in the ways of God. Just as the first man and woman became estranged from God though they had been his children, so every one of us is always balancing, as it were, on the edge of the knife between nothingness and the fullness of the divine life. Sooner or later we shall be feeling this also subjectively.

In the infancy of the spiritual life, when we have just begun to surrender ourselves to the guidance of God, we see his guiding hand very strongly; it is clear as daylight what we have to do and what to avoid. But it will not remain like this. If we belong to Christ, we have to live the whole Christ-life. We must mature into his humanity, we must one day begin the way of the cross to Gethsemane and to Golgotha. And all sufferings that come from without are as nothing compared with the dark night of the soul, when the divine light no longer shines, and the voice of the Lord no longer speaks. God is there, but he is hidden and silent.

God became man in order once more to give us a share in his life. This is the beginning, and this the last end. But between these there is something else. Christ is God and man, and if we would share his life, we must share both in the divine and the human life. The human nature which he took enabled him to suffer and to die. The divine nature which he possessed from eternity gave his suffering and death infinite value and redemptive power. Christ’s suffering and death are continued in his mystical body.

Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein; +1942) was a German philosopher and a convert from Judaism who became a Carmelite nun and was put to death at Auschwitz.