The Hidden Life: Essays, Meditations, Spiritual Text (The Collected Works of Edith Stein Book 4) by Edith Stein

Author:Edith Stein [Stein, Edith]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781939272171
Publisher: ICS Publications
Published: 2014-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

II.3. St. Teresa Margaret of the Sacred Heart

On March 19, 1934, Pope Pius XI entered Blessed Teresa Margaret of the Sacred Heart in the register of saints. In Germany, the new saint is virtually unknown outside of our Order. Her life was quiet and hidden. She died on March 7, 1770 at the age of 22, and of this short lifespan, she spent five years in the Carmelite monastery in Florence. She performed no brilliant, attention-getting deeds, nor did her reputation reach the wider world. She was like a lily that, in a quiet vale protected from storms, rises slim and straight and, in the warm light of the sun, unfolds into a wondrous bloom. Her powerful and sweet fragrance charmed everyone who lived around her. Even after her death it did not evaporate, but spread wider and wider, and now it is to fill the entire church of God.

1. Childhood

Teresa Margaret is often compared with St. Aloysius. Like him, she not only died early, but also shared with him angelic purity and severe penance. Her home was Arezzo in Tuscany. Her parents, Ignatius Redi and Camilla Balleti, came from noble families. She was born on July 15, 1747, the eve of the feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel. She was baptized as Anna Maria. From early childhood on, she showed an unusual desire to hear people speak of God. When anyone talked of heavenly things in her presence, she fixed her eyes on the person’s lips with such rapt attention that it had to amaze and move those present. When her confessor later asked her whether, from the moment she had gotten to know God she had also begun to love him, she replied, “But everyone does that, and how could anyone not do so?” This is how self-evident it was to her that one merely needed to know God in order to love him. Another time she said, “Jesus knows that from childhood on I never had any other wish than to please him and to become holy.”

People often observed her even as a six-year-old gazing fixedly up to heaven for a long time as though in deep meditation. From her seventh year on she understood how to “find God in all things,” in stars and flowers, in short, to read in all creatures a challenge to praise the Creator. When she was nine, her devout parents sent her to the Benedictine nuns at the monastery of St. Apollonia in Florence for her education. She at once won the hearts of those in authority as well as her contemporaries by her exemplary zeal and obedience, by her natural lovableness, cheerfulness, and readiness to serve. With childish naïveté, she quite unconsciously expressed her continual union with God. “While we are enjoying ourselves, Jesus is thinking of us,” she called to her playmates in the middle of recess. So it is understandable that people took unusual advantage of her reliability and would often entrust her with watching her companions, without this evoking any dissension.

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