Can suffering become love?
- Kelly Deutsch
- Oct 29
- 3 min read
Edith Stein’s mystical answer
How do we keep our hearts open when the world is breaking?
Few saints wrestled with that question more deeply than Edith Stein.
It’s an unlikely story, to say the least: an atheist raised in a devout Jewish family becomes one of Europe’s first female philosophers… and ends her life as a Carmelite mystic in Auschwitz.
Yet behind those contrasts lies a single, luminous thread: a longing for truth that led Edith ever deeper into the mystery of love.
“My longing for truth,” she once wrote, “was a single prayer.”
That prayer became the axis of her life—spanning philosophy, faith, and finally, a radical empathy that united her with the suffering of the world.
Within the Carmelite tradition, Edith discovered a God who was not distant or abstract, but intimately present within the soul. In contemplative silence, she encountered divine union—the place where all separations dissolve, and love becomes the deepest truth of things.
She was profoundly shaped by the mystics Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. Teresa showed her that God could be known through friendship; John revealed that even the darkest nights can lead to light. When Edith read Teresa’s autobiography, she stayed up all night reading it. At dawn, she declared, “This is the truth.” She immediately made her decision to convert to Catholicism.
But truth, for Edith, was never sterile or detached. It was costly.
She had seen suffering up close as a nurse during World War I, and as the Nazi shadow fell across Europe, it returned in devastating form. Forced to resign from her teaching post because she was Jewish, she took the loss as an invitation—to surrender more fully to love. She entered the Carmelite convent, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
For Edith, the cross was not a symbol of punishment, but of participation: to “suffer with” was to share in God’s own compassionate heart. “Through the power of the cross,” she told her sisters, “you can be present wherever there is pain, carried there by your compassionate love.”
That was the heart of her mysticism—suffering transformed into love; empathy transfigured into solidarity.
Even as the world darkened, Edith carried that light. In her final months, she wrote The Science of the Cross, a meditation not only on the mystery of suffering and divine union, but also on the profound call to empathic love. Through empathy, she wrote, we can enter into another’s suffering and transform it into connection and care.
When the SS came to arrest her in 1942, they found her unfinished manuscript on her desk, her last testament to the enduring power of compassion.
“Even in the contemplative life,” she once wrote, “one may not sever the connection with the world. The deeper one is drawn into God, the more one must go out of oneself—to carry the divine life into it.”
That was Edith’s calling: not escape from suffering, but communion within it.Not withdrawal from the world, but radical presence to it.
Her life whispers still: Even in the darkest night, love is not extinguished.
Suffering is unavoidable. But, as Edith shows us, it can become the place where compassion is born.
Join us for a live masterclass on Edith Stein and the Mysticism of Empathy, taught by Carmelite friar and storyteller Fr. Matthew Blake, as we explore how Edith’s wisdom can help us live with courage, tenderness, and open hearts in our own troubled times.
Comments