Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

TERESA, after a silence. The feminist philosopher Edith Stein, who became Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, remembered them too, inevitably, as she offered herself up for God. “Come, we go for our people,” she told her sister Rosa, on August 2, 1942, as the Gestapo hustled them out of the Carmel of Echt, in Holland, where they had taken refuge.¹² She refused all privileges, unwilling to be an exception to her people’s fate or take advantage of having been baptized.…Like the Carmelites of Compiègne, she was thinking of you, Father, when she chose this self-sacrifice.…I’m sure of it…more of you than of me, anyway. There will be periods like that, in the history of men and women, when chastisement will be salutary. “With his stripes we are healed,” the prophet Isaiah said.¹³ The concentration of evil will be such that martyrs will be needed to testify that the relationship between Heaven and earth has broken down.…Had I lived then, and had they sewn a yellow star onto my sleeve, I would have behaved exactly like Sister Teresa Benedicta, don’t you think?…I hope I would have taken that decision, or done something similar like joining the Resistance or the maquis.…Not really the Carmelite style, I grant. But who knows? I’m asking you, as an expert in martyrdoms.…

(A large photograph of Edith Stein floats above the walls of Avila.)

TERESA, voice breaks, then steadies. Look at that smile.…The strength, the steadfastness that supported her along the road to Auschwitz.…She must have known she’d enlisted in the struggle between Christ and Antichrist. Why, on Palm Sunday 1939, she gave her prioress a note requesting to be given up as an offering. (Reads.) “Dear Mother, permit me to offer myself up to the sacred heart of Jesus as the expiatory victim for true peace, so that the reign of the Antichrist might collapse if possible without another world war, and a new order may be established. I would like to do it today, for we are at the eleventh hour. I know I am nothing, but Jesus wishes it, and He will surely call many others in these days.”¹⁴ All for the love of God, indeed…“the love that gives itself unstintingly,” as she wrote in a little biography of me, Love for Love’s Sake, while she was still only a postulant at the Carmel of Cologne, so you see…I could have written those words, couldn’t I?…I feel fulfilled, dear John, I can say this to you, at having been the inspiration for such a soul, who harbors divine grace within her so absolutely.…Do you think I’m committing the sin of pride, out of stupid vanity — that this is too much honra for the wretched creature that I am? (Sidelong glance at the photograph of Edith Stein as a young philosophy student, passing swiftly over the Avilan fortress.)

(Silence from John.)