By Father MieczysЕ‚aw Piotrowski TChr,
Love One Another! 9/2008 → The main topic
Saint Edith Stein was one of the most outstanding figures of the
European philosophical and cultural elite of the twentieth century.
An uncompromising search for the truth led her from the depths of
atheism to the heights of sainthood. In 1942 she suffered a martyr’s
death at Auschwitz. In 1998 she was canonized by Pope John Paul II and declared patroness of Europe.
Childhood
Edith
Stein was born in Breslau, Germany [now Wroclaw, Poland], on 12
October 1891, to a well-to-do Jewish family living in a house in
what is now Dubois Street. She was the youngest, eleventh child
of Siegfried and Auguste Stein; four of her siblings died soon after
birth. Edith’s father died suddenly when she was barely two
years old. After Siegfried’s death, Auguste had to take over
as manager of her husband’s timber business. Edith’s
mother was an exceptional person, whose warmth and demanding love
kept the family together. She exem-plified deep faith in God, prayed
daily, and observed the required fasts and other religious practices.
“A simple life lived in a natural and unaffected atmosphere”
– this was the family environment in which little Edith grew
up. In her autobiography she admits that although she exuded joy
and a cheerful spirit, she could also be obstinate and mischievous.
“In my early years I was like quicksilver, always on the move,
seething over with ideas, audacious and nosy, and incredibly stubborn
when something went against my will. … But there was another
world inside me. I would relive everything I saw or heard in the
course of the day. The sight of a drunkard would haunt and torment
me day and night. … Never could I understand how people could
laugh at this. In my student years, though I did not belong to any
organization or pledge any vows, I began to abstain from alcohol
altogether so as not to lose my freedom of spirit and human dignity”
(Life of a Jewish Family, Krakow, Carmelite Press, 2005, pp. 87-88).
Edith never settled for the mediocre. From her childhood, she learned
to be demanding of herself, to carry out her responsibilities conscientiously,
and to achieve her goals through hard work and the subjection of
her feelings to her will — by no means an easy task considering
her highly sensitive nature.
Radical rejection of faith
Edith was brought up in a family of religious but non-orthodox
Jews. With her mother and siblings she prayed in German rather than
in Hebrew. On Saturdays — the Sabbath — the family firm
remained open for business. In 1897 she entered primary school and
between 1908 and 1911 attended Victoria Lyceum in Breslau. She was
a gifted student, self-disciplined, tenacious, and persevering;
and thanks to these qualities she achieved excellent marks.
At the age of fifteen, Edith stopped praying and renounced her
faith in God. At that time she was staying with her sister Elza
in Hamburg. This is how she describes this momentous decision in
her autobiography: “After doing the domestic chores, I would
read. I read and heard things that were not good for me. My brother-in-law’s
profession required that he keep a library of books that were by
no means suitable reading for a fifteen-year-old girl. What is more,
both Max and Elza were confirmed atheists, and there was no trace
of religion at their house. It was there that I consciously decided,
of my own volition, to give up praying” (Ibid, p. 179). Edith’s
spiritual crisis had begun two years earlier. Her search for the
truth gave her no peace of mind. She saw her brothers pray without
any deep conviction in the existence of God. Especially traumatic
for her were the funerals of her two uncles who had committed suicide.
In her young, extraordinarily susceptible heart, she sensed that
the mourners prayed without believing in life after death or in
the prospect of meeting the deceased again. Years later she would
write, “The immortality of the human soul is not an article
of faith with the Jews. All their efforts are focused on earthly
life. Even the devotion of the pious is directed at making this
life holy” (Ibid, p. 98).
Edith was an uncompromising seeker after the truth. Having renounced
her faith in the God of her childhood, she considered herself an
atheist until she was twenty-one. “The state of my soul before
my conversion was the sin of radical unbelief” – she
would write later. Yet throughout this period of “radical
unbelief,” Edith never stopped longing for the truth, and
earnestly sought after it in philosophical inquiry. Later, in one
of her letters to Roman Ingarden, she would write: “When I
look back at those times, I always see, lurking in the background,
my desperate state of mind, that incredible confusion and darkness.”
In fact, her sincere and passionate search for the truth was a road
leading her to God, though she was not aware of it at the time.
When eventually she found the truth in the person of Jesus Christ,
she would write: “Longing for the truth was my only prayer.
…Those who search for the truth search for God, even without
knowing it.”
Even in the depths of that confusion and darkness which her atheism
spawned, Edith never wavered from her inner integrity, self-discipline,
purity of heart, and fidelity to ethical radicalism. Her search
for the truth was utterly without compromise, and for this she was
ready to make the greatest sacrifices. She wrote, “A scholarly
life required dedication. I led the life of a nun.” Thanks
to her purity of heart, Edith was able to grow in her understanding
of the truth and avoid sinking “into the abyss of extreme
agnostic scepticism” (J.I. Adamska OCD, Blessed Edith Stein,
Krakow, Carmelite Press, 1988, p. 32).
As a student, she was especially attracted to her Polish colleague,
Roman Ingarden, and Hans Lipps. “Despite my great devotion
to my studies, I cherished a hope in my heart that one day I would
experience great love and happiness in marriage” – she
wrote in her autobiography. “Being completely ignorant of
the Catholic faith and its moral principles, I was nonetheless thoroughly
imbued with the Catholic ideal of marriage. Among the young men
I went out with, I was fond of one in particular and would have
been very happy to marry him” (Life of a Jewish Family, p.
284). Edith was able to spiritualize her affections and turn love
into a desire for the good of the beloved rather than a desire to
win and possess. She defended her virginity as a precious jewel.
She recalls in her autobiography: “I based our friendship
on the firm conviction that this was a very pure person. …
I did not wish to have any contacts with people wanting in this
respect” (Ibid, p. 264).
Collapse of atheistic prejudices
In 1911 Edith Stein was one of the first of a small number of young
women to begin studies at the University of Breslau. For two years,
she read psychology, history, and German language and literature.
In 1913 she went to Göttingen to study under Edmund Husserl,
the world-renowned philosopher and founder of the famous school
of phenomenology. Most of its students were Jews. “Husserl
and his wife were of Jewish origin, but they had long since converted
to Protestantism” (Ibid, p. 320). Phenomenology was a
new philosophical movement that led many of its students to embrace
Christianity. Kantian idealism, the reigning philosophical movement
of the day, had reduced human experience and the nature of God to
purely subjective concepts. Husserl, on the other hand, stressed
the possibility of perceiving reality, including supernatural reality,
in objective terms. In this way, Edith realized that she too could
come to a knowledge of the existence of an invisible God. She
was particularly fascinated by the lectures of two Jewish professors:
Adolf Reinach, who had accepted baptism shortly before his death
in the trenches of World War One, and Max Scheler, who had converted
to Catholicism in 1899. The latter’s brilliant lectures on
humility and sanctity opened up for Edith new cognitive vistas in
the spiritual realm that had previously been closed to her. Her
years at Göttingen, the most prestigious seat of humanist learning
in Europe of the time, caused the walls of atheistic prejudice to
crumble and collapse around her, and gradually disposed her spirit
to an acceptance of the mystery of an invisible God.
In Edith Stein’s own words: “Max Scheler overflowed
with Catholic ideas and knew how to win over followers by his sheer
brilliance of spirit and power of expression. This was my first
contact with a world that had been closed to me until then. Though
it did not yet bring me to faith, it set the parameters of a ‘phenomenon’
that I could not blindly pass by. To good purpose was it drummed
into our heads that we should approach all things without prejudice
or any suspicion of ‘fear.’ One by one, the towers of
rationalistic prejudice in which I had grown up crumbled even without
my knowing it, and suddenly the world of faith lay open before me.
After all, people whom I saw every day, people whom I regarded with
admiration, actually lived by this faith. Here then was something
that, at the very least, deserved reflective consideration. But
at the time I was too busy with other matters to examine the questions
of faith in any systematic fashion. I contented myself with absorbing
uncritically the impulses of my surroundings; and these were — almost
imperceptibly — transforming me internally” (Ibid, pp.
333-334). “In Göttingen I learned to respect the questions
of faith and people who believed. Sometimes I even accompanied my
friends to a Protestant church (obviously, the mixing of politics
and religion that characterized the sermons I heard there could
not help me to come to know the true faith; indeed, it discouraged
me), but I had not yet found the way to God” (Ibid, p. 409).
And so, with her studies at Göttingen, Edith began
gradually to shed her atheism and discover the fascinating and mysterious
reality of supernatural faith.
In 1915, with
the First World War raging, Edith interrupted her studies to serve
for five months as a Red Cross nurse in a field hospital in Moravia.
There, with great commitment, care, and unselfish love, she tended
to the wounded soldiers and those suffering from conta-gious diseases.
After her return, in August 1916, she passed her doctorate in philosophy
summa cum laude at Freiburg University under Edmund Husserl. It
was a great achievement, for in those days women were not generally
accepted in academic circles. Recognizing her extraordinary abilities,
Husserl invited her to work with him as his assistant.
This is the truth
Edith began to be increasingly drawn into the orbit of
the Christian faith. All around her she observed believers whose
authentic relationship with God enabled them to radiate a special
warmth of love and inner peace. In this way she was able to discover
an unknown supernatural world, which, while not recognizable to
the senses, fascinated her with its spiritual beauty. She began
to read the New Testament and study the Lord’s Prayer and
the works of the great Christian philosophers: St. Augustine, St.
Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus.
In 1917 she was devastated by the news of the death of
her dear professor, Adolf Reinach. His wife, Anna, asked Edith to
help her to set her late husband’s papers in order. As someone
who did not believe in life after death, Edith expected to find
the young widow in great dis-tress. To her surprise she found Anna
in cheerful spirits and not at all in need of consolation, despite
her deep grief over the loss of her beloved husband. Edith attributed
this great spiritual strength to Anna’s faith in the Risen
Christ and eternal life. Years later she would write: “Reinach’s
funeral was my first encounter with the Cross and the divine power
it imparts to those who bear it. For the first time in my life,
I saw the Church in her victory over the sting of death. That was
the moment when my unbelief collapsed and I saw Christ in the mystery
of the Cross” (The Mind of Edith Stein, Verbinum, 1995, p.
27).
Anna Reinach’s example of deep faith pointed Edith
in the direction of Christianity; but still she could not find her
way clear to making the final decision. She had to mature toward
it, and this would require another five years. In 1918, after a
year of uneasy collaboration with Husserl, Edith gave up her position
as his assistant. With the publication of several of her books and
the delivery of a number of brilliant lectures at various philosophical
symposiums, Edith Stein won recognition as one of the leading lights
of the Europe’s philosophical and cultural elite.
It was then that Edith Stein’s persistent search
for the truth brought her to the threshold of Christianity. The
immediate cause of her decision to devote herself entirely to Christ
and enter the Catholic Church was an all-night reading of the autobiography
of St. Teresa of Avila. This took place on a summer’s evening
in 1921, at the home of her university friends Jadwiga and Conrad
Martius. Left alone in the house, Edith picked out a book from the
couple’s library. Years later this is how she remembered the
event: “I reached for a book at random. It bore the title:
The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila Written in Her Own Hand. I began
reading it. It held me spellbound! I read it through at one sitting.
On closing it, I said to myself, ‘This is the truth.’”
It was now clear to her that the truth was the person of the Risen
Christ, who lives and acts in His Church. To believe in Him was
to enjoy a personal relationship with Him through prayer and the
sacraments.
That very morning she went to a bookshop and bought herself
a Catholic catechism and a missal. Her long and painful search for
the truth ended with her decision to enter the Roman Catholic Church.
Saint Teresa’s mystical experiences of God merely completed
Edith’s long period of searching, which she characterized
as a special kind of prayer leading to faith or “resting in
God,” as she called it. Edith understood that the real experts
in the field of faith were the mystics and saints, for only they
can claim to have a true experience of God.
This is how Edith described her liberation from atheism:
“My coming across the Life of our Holy Mother Teresa in the
summer of 1921 put an end to my long search for the true faith.
… God is the Truth. Those who seek the truth, seek God, even
if they do not know it. … Some may be nonbelievers through
no fault of their own (for they may be totally ignorant of God)
and, for this reason, the images of Holy Scripture make no sense
to them. We know that the burden of original sin causes a darkening
of the spirit. But when this is further darkened by the environment
in which we live, what blame and responsibility it must bear! Still,
the unbeliever always bears a share of the responsibility. It is increasingly
rare for a person never to come into any contact with God. …
God leads each one of us in his own way. Some reach the goal sooner
and more easily, others later and with more effort. Everything we
do is a trifle compared to what we receive. But that little trifle
we must do ourselves. Above all, we must pray constantly for knowledge
of the right path and, once knowing it, embark on that path freely,
under the inspiration of grace. Those who em-bark on this path,
and bear it patiently, cannot say their efforts are useless; only
we must not impose deadlines on God” (The Mind of Edith Stein,
pp. 46-47).
Edith Stein stresses that faith is a divine gift, but man
must endeavor to dispose himself toward this gift and accept it:
“When man opens himself up to the grace working within him,
he faces a long struggle to tear himself away from the natural world
and the self. … Grace must come to him of its own accord.
By himself, man may at best approach the gates, but he can never
force them open” (cf. J.I. Adamska OCD, Blessed Edith Stein,
p. 47). “It is God who stirs to action and perfects, but He
expects man to cooperate with Him and make a spiritual effort. The
human spirit must rid itself of everything that engrosses it according
to its nature. It must be taught to know God and rejoice in Him
alone” (Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross, Krakow, Carmelite
Press, 1994, p. 32).
In a letter to a fellow-seeker after God, Edith gave the
following simple advice: “You want advice? I have already
given it. Become a child and place your life and all its quest-ing
and philosophizing into the Father’s hands. If you are not
yet prepared to do this, then beg help from the unknown God who
awakens your doubt. You must surely be looking at me in amazement
that I should dare to recommend to you such a simple, childish wisdom.
This is true wisdom, because it is simple and embraces life’s
hidden mysteries. It is also the way that will bring you safely
to your goal” (Blessed E. Stein, p. 62).
Born again
After several months of intensive preparation, Edith was
baptized in St. Martin’s Church in Bergzabern on 1 January
1922. She saw in the Sacrament of Baptism an experience of spiritual
rebirth, of taking root in the reality of God. She wrote: “There
is no doubt that when a soul is born again in Spirit, the soul is
utterly transformed. … The Spirit of Light does not destroy
man’s individuality, but weds it to Himself and, thanks to
this, man is reborn” (Ibid, p. 62).
On being baptized and receiving her First Holy Communion,
Edith resolved to devote herself entirely to God in the religious
life; however, so as not to cause her mother too much pain, she
decided to wait a few years. Having professed private vows of chastity,
poverty, and obedience, she accepted a position as teacher of German
in a secondary school run by the Dominican Sisters. She refused
to take a salary. From the day she was baptized, Edith received
the Eucharist every day. She also had a regular confessor. Jesus
Christ became her greatest love, and she cherished Him with all
her heart and will. She observed holy hours in front of the Blessed
Sacrament, meditated on Our Lord’s passion and death, and
spent many more hours in prayer and contemplation. In this way she
opened herself up to the One Divine Reality, who is both Love and
Truth. She came to the conclusion that man, in and of himself, is
nothing; he can find his infinite value and dignity only by uniting
himself with Christ. Her urgent call that we strive daily for holiness
applies to each one of us: “Those who follow the truth of
faith, who seek God, will, by that freely made effort, be drawn
in the same direction as those who are endowed with mystical graces:
they will free themselves from their senses and the ‘images’
of their memory, and even from the natural activity of their reason
and will. They will enter into the utterly bare solitude of their
inner self and there abide in the darkness of faith, in a simple,
loving contemplation of the unseen God, who, while hidden, is nevertheless
present.”
Here is what Edith’s own experience taught her to
say about prayer: “A boundless and loving giving of oneself
to God, a full and enduring union with Him — that is the highest
a soul is capable of; it is the highest degree of prayer. Souls
who reach this point are truly the heart of the Church. Christ’s
priestly love lives in them. Hidden with Christ in God, they know
nothing apart from God’s love, which fills them and radiates
out towards others.”
Edith Stein continued to pray and devote herself to scholarly
work. She wrote several important philosophical works, translated
works by St. Thomas Aquinas and the great nineteenth-century convert
from Anglicanism, Cardinal John Henry Newman. Between 1928 and 1933,
she was invited to give lectures at numerous European universities.
Adolf Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 marked the beginning
of a time of great persecution for both Jews and Christians. In
the spring of 1933, Edith wrote to Pope Pius XII with a request
that he publish an encyclical condemning Nazi atheism. In October
of the same year, she entered the Convent of Discalced Carmelites
in Cologne, where she took the name of Sister Teresa Benedict of
the Cross.
Taking the commandment of loving one’s enemies seriously,
she prayed fervently for persecuted and persecutor alike, offering
herself as an expiation on behalf of the Jewish people, the German
nation, and world peace. She wrote: “It became clear to me
that God had once again placed His heavy hand on His people and
that the fate of this people was also my fate. … I talked
to my Savior and told Him that I knew it was His cross that was
now being placed on the shoulders of the Jewish people. The public
does not understand this, but those who do, must, in the name of
all, take it readily upon themselves. I wish to do this; only, may
He show me how. When the devotion was over, I had an inner conviction
that my prayer had been answered. But what this carrying of the
cross would entail, I did not know.”
On entering the convent, Edith radiated joy as never before.
How could a great intellectual, who loved dancing, climbing, rowing,
playing tennis, attending concerts and plays, and discussing philosophy — how
could she be deprived of all these things and still be happy in
a cloistered convent? Such joy could have but one source, as she
herself observed. It came from “starting a new life with my
hand in the Lord’s.” Never in all her life, she confessed,
had she known so much happiness as during those two years of her
novitiate. Her joy flowed from deep contemplation and humility,
from a close bond of love with Jesus Christ. It was from prayer
that she drew her great powers of concentration and creativity.
Witness her monumental 500-page-long philosophical work entitled
Finite and Eternal Being, which she wrote over a period of nine
months in her free time between her conventual duties.
After the infamous Crystal Night of 9 November 1938, when
tens of thousands of Jews throughout Germany were arrested and interned
in concentration camps, Sister Teresa Benedict knew that she would
have to leave Germany. To stay would only give the Nazis further
cause to close her convent. Driven by their hatred of the Catholic
Church, the Nazi atheists had already dissolved many convents. Nuns
suddenly found themselves out in the street. On New Year’s
Eve of 1938, Sister Teresa Benedict and her natural sister Rose,
who had converted to Catholicism in 1936, were smuggled across the
border to the Carmelite Convent in the Dutch town of Echt. In the
early months of 1939, Hitler mounted a massive propaganda campaign
against the Jews and Poland. Writing to her Mother Superior on Palm
Sunday of that year, Sister Teresa Benedict expressed her readiness,
if such was God’s will, to accept death in a spirit of expiation
for world peace, the Church, the Jews, the German people, and the
downfall of the Antichrist — Hitler.
In 1939, during the octave of Corpus Christi, Edith wrote
her last will and ended it thus: “Even now I accept in complete
submission and with joy the death that God has prepared for me.
I ask the Lord to accept my life and death for His honour and glory,
for all the intentions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and Mary, for
Holy Church, especially for the safety, sanctity, and perfection
of our Congregation, for the Carmel in Cologne and Echt, in expiation
for the unbelief of the Jewish people, for their acceptance of the
Lord, that His Kingdom may come in glory, for the German people,
for peace in the world, and finally for my family members, living
and dead, and for all those whom God has sent my way, that none
may perish.”
Ave crux, spes unica!
Hitler’s
invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 set off the cataclysm of
the Second World War. Two weeks later, Sister Teresa Benedict wrote
a highly moving essay entitled, Hail the Cross, Our One Hope, in
which she stressed that prayer and compassionate love were sure
means of helping the wounded, the dying, and the orphaned. Those
who could forget themselves by contemplating the Passion of Christ
had the power, through mystic prayer, to overcome the worst of evils.
Sister Teresa Benedict wrote: “A knowledge of the cross (scientia
crucis) comes only to those who have thoroughly experienced the
cross. I was convinced of this from the first moment and have always
said deep in my heart, Ave, Crux, spes unica! (Hail the Cross, our
one hope!).”
In 1940 Germany invaded the Netherlands. On 15 September
1941 the occupying powers forced Sister Teresa Benedict to wear
the yellow Star of David bearing the inscription “Jew”
and to report regularly to Gestapo headquarters. Sister Teresa Benedict
never greeted Gestapo officers with the required “Heil Hitler!”
On one occasion she felt compelled to make it absolutely clear on
which side of the barricade she stood in the war between God and
Satan. She greeted a passing Gestapo officer with the words, “Praised
be Jesus Christ.” Dumbfounded, the officer merely lowered
his head. During her stay in Echt, Sister Teresa Benedict wrote
the last and most valuable work of her life — The Science of
the Cross, It was a brilliant study of the theology St. John of
the Cross.
On 26 June 1942, the Dutch bishops published a pastoral letter
protesting the deportation of the Jews and the expulsion of Jewish
children from Catholic schools — the only schools they could
attend. The Nazi authorities demanded that the letter be withdrawn.
Unlike the Protestant pastors, not only did the Catholic bishops
not withdraw the letter, but they also instructed that the threatening
telegram, which they had received from the occupation authorities,
be read from every pulpit in the country. In retaliation, on Sunday,
2 August 1942, the Nazis arrested all Catholics of Jewish extraction
throughout the Netherlands. Among those arrested were Edith Stein
and her sister Rosa. Before being transported to Auschwitz, they
were kept in a transit camp in Holland where Sister Teresa Benedict
consoled and supported her fellow inmates. Fully aware that death
awaited her, she nevertheless continued to radiate a cheerful spirit.
On 7 August 1942 a transport of cattle cars with Edith
and her sister Rosa packed inside departed for Auschwitz. The journey
took two days. Sister Teresa Benedict wore her Carmelite habit to
the very end. All evidence points to the fact that upon her arrival
at Auschwitz, she was immediately directed to the gas chambers,
gassed to death, and her body burned in the crematorium.
Today, the site of Edith Stein’s martyrdom is marked
by a metal plaque bearing the following sentence from her writings,
“Love will be our eternal life.” The rest of the citation
reads thus: “It is here and now that we must attain to [love]
as best as we possibly can. Jesus became man to be the way for us.
What then must we do? We must empty ourselves of all our strength
… direct our minds to God in a simple gaze, and yield our
will to the will of God in love. This is easily said, but all the
efforts of a lifetime could not possibly achieve this, if God did
not do the most important thing. We must trust, however, that He
will not deny us His grace, if we faithfully do ‘that little
something’ which we are capable of; and ‘that little
something,’ taken in absolute terms, is of capital importance
to us.”
Thus, on 9 August 1942, ended the earthly life of Edith
Stein, former atheist turned Carmelite nun, one of the most outstanding
minds of the twentieth century, philosopher, scholar, and saint.
She has since become not only a powerful inspiration to all seekers
after the truth, but also a symbol of reconciliation between Catholics
and Jews. Beatified in Cologne on 1 May 1987, she was canonized
in Rome by Pope John Paul II on 11 October 1998. A year later she
was declared patroness of Europe.
Saint Edith Stein serves as a luminous signpost for all
of us who, seeking the truth, embark on the daily road of faith.
Her witness of conversion and her writings hold special validity
today. Let us listen to what she has to say: “There is no
need for us to spend our lives proving the legitimacy of religious
experience. We are, however, required to declare ourselves ‘for’
or ‘against’ God. That is what we must do — to decide,
and without receiving any guarantee in return. This is the great
risk of faith. The path leads from believing to seeing, not the
reverse. Those who are too proud to squeeze through the narrow gate
are left outside. However, those who do make it through to the other
side come, even in this life, to see with ever increasing clarity
and experience the truth of the maxim: credo et intelligam –
I believe and I shall understand. To my mind, there is little to
be gained here through experiences shaped and constructed by the
imagination. Christ did not leave us as orphans. He sent us His
Spirit to lead us to the full truth (cf. John 16, 13). He founded
His Church guided by His Spirit and gave us His vicar on earth through
whom the Holy Spirit speaks to us. It is also in the Church that
He united all believers and desired them to be responsible for each
other. Thus we are not alone; and when at times we lose confidence
in our judgement and even our prayers, there comes to our rescue
a strength flowing from our obedience to the Church and faith in
the intercession of others” (The Mind of Edith Stein, pp.
99-100).
May the example of St. Edith Stein strengthen our resolve
to walk in the way of faith without compromise, to so discipline
ourselves that we treat daily prayer, regular confession and participation
in the Eucharist as our supreme privilege and duty, and the Gospel
as the only path to happiness in heaven. Let us express this resolve
in the words of St. Edith Stein’s prayer:
Lord, I beg You, give me everything that leads me toward You.
Take from me everything, Lord,
that can lead me away from You.
Take also my very self
and accept all of me as Yours.
Fr. M. Piotrowski SChr
The article was published with the permission from "Love One Another!"
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