Prayer that looks at the real and compares it with the
goodness of God cannot ignore Kosovo/Iraq
and the violence mentioned in our daily news. These terrible realities of
violence, war and ethnic cleansing remain in our thoughts and challenge
us to integrate the good and the evil that comes from within and without.
As we daily experience these challenges, at least on an emotional level,
we look for guides who can point us toward integration and wholeness in
a broken world. Edith Stein, or St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross,1
is growing in popularity and respect as one who embraced the sufferings
of her age (which are unfortunately similar to the sufferings of our age)
and who integrated them into her own spiritual life.
This recently canonized Saint2 was able to take
what seemed to be opposite ideas and find the common thread that bound them
together. Her genius in philosophy was to use the phenomenological method
to examine the notion of empathy3 and to rescue the new philosophy
from solipsism. For this she earned the gratitude of her teacher, Edmund
Husserl,4 and furthered the development of this modern school
of philosophy. Lest one think of this aspect of her work as some esoteric
problem for the scholars, let us remember the project of the late Cardinal
Bernadin urging us to discover Common Ground in the Church. In order to
search in truth for places of agreement in the midst of increasing diversity
in our culture and in our religion, we need the same kind of fortitude that
sustained both Edith and Cardinal Bernadin. Further, we also need to develop
the kind of empathetic understanding that reunites the feelings of the heart
and the logical reasons of the head while we embrace the apparent darkness
of seeming opposites.
The
Spirit’s Gift Of Fortitude
This Jewish woman, who became an atheist, who converted
to Catholicism, and who became a Carmelite Nun (Sr. Teresa Benedicta, O.C.D.)5
and a canonized saint, can be for us a companion and vector pointing the
way to holiness in the midst of our own change and uncertainty. The Holy
Spirit's gift of fortitude lets us passionately and lovingly seek the truth
maintaining a both/and approach to new people and ideas rather than a strict
either/or. Fortitude enables us to look at the real good and evil within
our own consciousness. It lets us take violence and Kosovo before the Lord
in our prayers and gives us the courage to trust these events in
our daily news to the power of Christ's Death and Resurrection. Fortitude
is the cement on the ground that lets us walk the good walk. It lets us
cope with the everyday, knowing the truth of Edith's statement that, "What
did not lie in my plans, lay in God's plans."6
The Science of the Cross