Edith Stein: a woman for our time

Edith holding her cousin's son, 1921

Edith the philosophy student

Like Christians in the early centuries, I was confirmed at the same time that I was baptized. Although in my case, it all happened on my way home from the hospital--a mere three days after I was born in the city of Pinar del Río.

As my parents explained, everything was so uncertain and chaotic in 1960 Cuba that our pastor and family friend suggested it. Castro’s communist government had already shipped, literally, hundreds of priests out the country on a boat, and no one could predict how long, or if any, priests would be allowed by the government to stay behind.

After moving to the United States as a teenager and seeing how confirmations here are done, I felt a bit cheated that I never got to pick a patron saint.

Fast forward to my early forties. Writer and dear friend Colleen Smith contacted me with a book idea, one that had been offered to her fist—but that she discerned would be a better fit for me: a biography of a Jewish convert, Carmelite nun, and soon to be saint.

When I first began reading about Edith Stein, I was more than a little freaked out.  She was a gifted, renowned philosopher, a brilliant writer and speaker—and I was entrusted with the task of writing a popular biography introducing readers to this phenomenal woman.

I began by ordering all of her books that have been translated into English by ICS Publications (Institute of Carmelite Studies), which of course, did nothing to appease my anxiety.  Stein was a prolific author and her texts were rich, academic, and spiritually profound.

I looked at how others told her story and found out that there had been a number of biographies already published by people much better versed in both philosophy and Carmelite spirituality. 

What would I have to offer that was new and different?

Everything changed when I picked up Vol 5 of Edith Stein’s Collected Works: “Self Portrait In Letters 1916-1942,” translated by Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D.

In her letters I met a young woman who loved God so deeply, so profoundly that, like the original apostles, dropped everything she had and knew, to follow Him completely.

I fell in love with Edith, my self-adopted patron saint, reading her letters.

If you want to read my biography of this beautiful saint, whose feast day is today, August 9, click here.

published by Our Sunday Visitor

“[I]t is always a small, simple truth that I have to express: How to go about living at the Lord’s hand.”  

~letter by Edith, 1931

“I do not use extraordinary means to prolong my workday. I do as much as I can. The 

ability to accomplish increases noticeably in proportion to the number of things that 

must be done. When there’s nothing urgent at hand, it ceases much sooner. 

Heaven is expert at economy.”  

~letter by Edith, 1930

[this blog post was first published here, under a different title, on August 9, 2013]

Our Lady of Lourdes, pray for us!

On our family’s Jubilee Year pilgrimage throughout Europe, perhaps the most personal encounter took place for me in Lourdes, France, at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes.

Our family at the Sanctuary entrance

Because my full name – or as I prefer to say, my REAL name, is María de Lourdes, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes was one of places I most looked forward to visiting.

My parents named me after Our Lady of Lourdes because of an encounter with a French priest ministering them as young adults in their parish--a man very devoted to Our Lady of Lourdes who became their mentor in the Catholic faith and dear friend, at the Cathedral of Pinar del Río, Cuba.  

Growing up as a Cuban refugee in Puerto Rico, it was easy to request (read MAKE) my teachers and friends call me simply "Lourdes." But when I moved to the United States as a teenager, no one could pronounce Lourdes and I became plain “maría.” But that’s a different story!

[For more on the history of Our Lady's 

apparition at the Grotto of Massabielle, 

Lourdes, go here]

Today is the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes – and I urge you to remember and pray in a deliberate way today for all the people you know who need healing: all who are ill; who live with a chronic illness or an addiction; all who are recovering from or in need of surgery; the elderly facing diminishment in body, mind, and spirit; those facing imminent death; those mourning someone’s death; all who live with cancer; people with a mental illness; those suffering chronic depression.

Take a moment, and bring their names and faces to your mind… ask Our Lady of Lourdes to be a mother to them, and petition that she remind her Son and Our Lord, that your friends “have no wine” and need the miracle of healing. 

Let us pray for one another.

Nuestra Señora de Lourdes, ¡reza por nosotros! 

Nuns, parte dos

I am often struck by the reality that, unlike most friends my age, I did not experience the trauma and upheaval of the 1960s culture and the changing Catholic Church that they describe in the United States. Instead, the Cursillo movement, energized by reforms of the Second Vatican Council—brought increased vitality and renewal to the Catholic Church of Puerto Rico, a stunning tropical island in the edge of the Caribbean.

In Cuba, both of my parents had been Catholic-school teachers in my hometown of Pinar del Rio until Fidel Castro shut down and appropriated the diocesan buildings. Within months, Castro’s militia collected the sisters and priests that had been serving in these schools—my parents’ friends—and ejected them from the country. A group of 300 priests was amassed without explanation, put on a boat, and shipped to Spain. For years my parents and their friends began every conversation comparing notes regarding the location where these religious women and men had been sent.

Largely through the encouragement of these relocated women religious and other Cuban priest friends, I watched my parents’ life evolve from living as newly arrived refugees to immigrants making a new life and home in Puerto Rico. My parents brought with them the energy of their experience as leaders of Pinar del Río’s Juventud de Acción Católica, Catholic Youth in Action, joining Puerto Rico’s Cursillo movement and organizing activities and ministries through the schools and parishes. And they took my brother Ignacio and I everywhere they went. We visited prisons. We collected and repaired toys for needy children.  We attended fund-raising concerts for underprivileged schools. We traveled hours through the island’s windy roads to events hosted by their friends to support their ministry. We hosted organizing meetings in our undersized living room, usually accompanied by my grandmother Josefita’s cooking—just as it would have been done in Cuba.

Looking back on those early years of my life, I am amazed by the reality created by my parents. If having nuns and priests regularly in our house and as part of our activities was weird, I never knew it. It was simply my normal kind of weird! How could I have known that other families didn’t function this way?

I have no stories of nuns with punishing rulers and chastising practices. My experience in Puerto Rico with sisters and nuns, both in Catholic schools and daily life, were enticing and inviting enough to place a seed of desire in my heart for a vowed religious vocation.

Sor Presentación taught me reverence and the reason why we kneel and bow in church. I learned to ask “why” as a way of growing in my faith. My principal Sor Pilar loved to tell me jokes while I waited for my mom to be done with her school work. I learned nuns were funny, real, and loved to have fun. Sor Isabel let me help her in the kitchen. I learned that even nuns had to do chores, clean house and do laundry. And Sor Marta, my mom’s best friend from childhood, invited me as a teenager to come visit and stay in the convent overnight.  I learned that nuns were not just idols, but people who considered me a friend.

The love, dedication, vision and passion for religious life that I witnessed in these women not only enhanced, but also intrinsically shaped my knowledge and experience of the Catholic faith. To them I owe the structure, the roots, within which I built a personal and intimate relationship with Jesus as a young adult.