Daily Archives: August 9, 2017

In today’s gospel (Matthew 15:21-28) we hear of the encounter between Jesus and the pagan woman who begs Jesus to cure her sickly daughter. After much persistence, Jesus tells the woman that it is her faith that allowed Jesus to intervene and cure her daughter.

And of course this message is the same for us.

Jesus wants us to know that as long as we have faith in Him as our Lord and Savior, in the end we will find the healing and peace that makes us whole. Jesus tells us that as long as we trust in His love and concern for us, even those heavy crosses that we must bear will become bearable. Jesus tells us that with faith in Him we will have the courage and fortitude to deal with the difficulties of life and to persevere in a world where good can sometimes be eclipsed by evil.  Jesus tells us that it is our faith in Him that allows God’s power to work in us and through us for the benefit of our world.

And today we celebrate the saintly life of Edith Stein, (a.k.a. Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) who never lost faith in Christ even as she bore her own very heavy cross.

Edith Stein was a Jew who converted to Christianity shortly before the the Nazi regime took hold in Germany.  She spoke out against the hatred, oppression, and killing that the Nazi’s brought about, and eventually lost her life in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.  Her life was one that was fixed on Jesus – a life that she gave up in order to help bring attention to the Nazi atrocities, and the killing of her Jewish brothers and sisters.

It was Edith Stein’s great faith and trust in Jesus that allowed her to live courageously while confronting absolute evil.  She once said “the deeper someone is drawn to God, the more he/she has to get beyond him/herself and go into the world and carry divine life into it”.  This is exactly what she did as her faith allowed the power of God to work in her and through her for the benefit of our world.