Theresa Benedicta Joh 4,19-24

On August 9, 1942, philosopher Edita Stein perished in the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz II – Birkenau. She came from a Jewish family, was baptized as an adult, and after entering the Carmelite order, she took the name Therese Benedict of the Cross. In 1998 she was canonized and proclaimed co-patron of Europe. The Church celebrates her feast day on August 9.Man is called to live in his innermost self and to gain mastery over himself in a way that is only possible from here; and only from this center of his being is he also able to deal correctly with the world, only from here can he find the place in it that is destined for him. Yet he never fully sees his innermost self. It remains a mystery to him that only God can reveal to him – to the extent that he pleases. And yet man has his innermost self in his own hands: he can dispose of it in perfect freedom, but he also has the duty to protect it as a precious treasure entrusted to him. In the realm of the spirit, this treasure must have immense value: angels have been ordered to guard it; evil spirits try to seize it; and God himself has chosen it as his dwelling. Neither good nor evil spirits, however, have free access to the deepest depths of the soul.he right to decide for itself belongs to the soul. The fact that God also respects this right is the great mystery of personal freedom. God wishes to rule over created spirits only on the basis of the free gift of their love. He knows the thoughts of the heart. His gaze penetrates the furthest abysses and depths of the soul, the bottom of which the soul itself will never see unless he illuminates them for it. However, God does not want to seize possession of it unless it itself wants to do so. And yet God does everything so that the soul freely surrenders its will to him as a gift of his love and allows itself to be led by him to a blessed union.

God is love. Therefore, if God captivates the soul, it means that the soul burns with love, if its spirit is ready for it. For everything that is finite, eternal love is a consuming fire. And all the movements that awaken created things in the soul are finite. If the soul surrenders itself to created things, it will betray this love of God, but it will never completely escape it. God’s love will then become a consuming fire for itself.

In Christ, thanks to his nature and his free choice, there was nothing that was contrary to love. He lived every moment of his life in unreserved surrender to the love of God. However, by becoming man, he took upon himself the whole weight of the sins of humanity, seized them with his merciful love and hid them in his soul: in the Ecce venio (Behold, I come…), with which he began his earthly life and which he explicitly renewed in his baptism, and in his Fiat (Become…) in Gethsemane. Thus was fulfilled the fire of reconciliation that had been burning within him throughout all the sufferings of his life, but which, however, flared up like an unstoppable conflagration in the Garden of Olives and on the Cross, because there the Father took away from him the tangible bliss of indissoluble union in order to give him over entirely to the last and most painful test: the experience of ultimate abandonment by God. The words It is finished… announce that this fire of reconciliation has burned out, and the phrase Father, into your hands I commend my spirit… proclaim the definitive return to eternal, untarnished union in love.

In the suffering and death of Christ, our sins were consumed by fire. If we accept this by faith and if we accept the whole of Christ in the surrender of this faith – which means, however, that we choose the path of following Christ and also follow it – then he himself will lead us “through his suffering and death to the glory of the resurrection”. This is what we experience in contemplation: through the heat of the conciliatory fire we pass to the blissful union in love. This also explains the ambiguous character of contemplation, which is at once death and resurrection. After the dark night, the living flame of love shines.