8/9/2012 – Thursday of 18th week of ordinary time – St Edith Stein – Jeremiah 31:31-34, Psalm 51:12-15, 18-19

        We hear a lot about hearts in today’s readings.  The psalmist asks the Lord to create a clean heart in him, to renew a steadfast spirit within him.  As I we heard about the shooting in Wisconsin over the weekend in which worshippers were killed at a Sikh temple, we saw images of the shooter as a young boy growing up here in the United States and as a young man serving in the military, then as an adult associated with white supremacist organizations, as a man wanting to kill people gathering in their house of worship.  We wonder what would turn a heart to do something like that. From time to time, we all might ask the Lord to cleanse our hearts, to create a new spirit within us that would devote our hearts only to him.

         Then we hear the prophet Jeremiah talking about a new covenant that the Lord will make with his people, one that is written on the hearts of the people.  I think if we search our hearts, we hopefully will find messages from God written there.  I think there is something innate within us that draws us to God, that desires a relationship and a covenant with him. 

         We have many saints that we celebrate who were members of the Carmelite religious order.  We think of St Teresa of Avila, St Therese of Lisieux, St John of the Cross, and St Teresa of the Andes.  Today we celebrate another great Carmelite saint – St Edith Stein.  She was born in part of the German empire in the late 19^th century to an observant Jewish family.  She earned a PhD in philosophy.  Her study of the writings of St Teresa of Avila drew her to Catholicism.  After her conversion and baptism, she became a Carmelite nun, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.  She was transferred to a convent in the Netherlands during WWII, where she was thought to be safe, but a statement read in Catholic parishes in the Netherlands in 1942 condemning the Nazis brought about the imprisonment of Jewish converts to Catholicism in that country.  She died in Aushwitz at the age of 50 in 1942. 

         We look into the human heart at the grace of God that can be at work in our hearts, but we also see a lot of violence and destruction that can come out of our human heart as well.  We see the horror of WWII, the shootings at a temple or a movie theater, and we wonder how a human heart can do such things.  We need hearts that are focused on God and what he teaches us.  That is what we need.