Abandonimg Self

St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, born of a Jewish family in Germany, and known until her entrance into the Carmel of Cologne, Germany, as Edith Stein, through her life leaves a lesson in abandonment to God's will that even her lectures as  professor of phenomenolgy at the University of Freiburg, could not surpass.  A bright girl, she began her studies while quite young and earned her doctorate in her early twenties.  While house-sitting for friends and looking for something to do, she came across the Life of St. Teresa of Avila, began reading it and finished it in one night, saying, "This is the truth."  That began the process of her entrance into the Catholic Church in 1922.  Eleven years later in 1933 (as Hitler was rising to power), she entered the Carmelite Convent. When Hitler's anti-semitic stance became obvious and dangerous, she was assigned to a Carmel in Holland, but Hitler's invasion made her vulnerable to arrest even there,  and she was shipped by cattle car to Auschwitz in 1942 where she died in the gas chamber that same year.
 Her life's path was certainly full of surprises as she abandoned herself to what she perceived as God's call, God's will for her: leaving behind her practice of Judaism, leaving behind her position as professor to enter Carmel, and finally, leaving behind her life as her final act of total abandonment.  She wrote that in placing our souls and lives in the hands of God, we find a freedom there we could never replicate, a strength and a sense of being loved completely by Love itself that is the purpose of our existence. When we find ourselves asked "out of the blue" to do something we hadn't planned, even a small thing, we have an opportunity to practice abandonment, and if done for love, then certainly we find a certain amount of joy as well as practice for the greater acts of abandoment to which God might be calling us.  St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, help me to abandon myself to God's plan. Amen.
Bro. Rene