Volume Four, Issue 4
EDITORIAL
Lucinda M. Vardey
THE MEANING AND PRACTICE OF SACRIFICE
John Dalla Costa
EUCHARISTIC LOVE: SACRIFICE UNTO FRIENDSHIP
Mary Madeline Todd O.P.
THE GREATER LOVE
Four Who Gave Their Lives for Others
LIGHTS IN THE DARKNESS: WOMEN’S GIFTS OF PEACE IN WAR
Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz
STREWING FLOWERS IN THE CLOISTER: ST. THÉRÈSE’S LITTLE SACRIFICES
Lucinda M. Vardey
BOOKS OF INTEREST
Leanna Rose Parekh
During the planning of the Magdala seminars on feminine theology in Rome, church historian Lucetta Scaraffia said that Catholics today have lost the understanding and experience of the sacrificial. It felt as if she had conveyed a real truth. In my childhood when I had a headache or when I failed an exam or my school report was disappointing, I was instructed to “offer it up.” “Offering it up” was meant to share it, not to let one’s personal pain turn inward, but to offer it to God. This certainly didn’t make me feel better but, in hindsight, it taught me that whatever happens provides an opportunity for prayerful connection to the sacrifice of Christ.
Sacrifice as offering can also include “giving” and “giving up.” In expressing our love for God and each other, it can hurt to be always cheerfully generous and kind with our time, attitude or resources. The same is true for applying “the extra mile.” We can only trust that what is unfolding along the way will be transformatory to both giver and receiver.
Sometimes we are called to sacrifice the past, sacrifice old relationships, sacrifice our talents. Once a religious sister shared with me the difficulties of giving up her musical gifts for the betterment of the community. An excellent singer she received complaints, after years of leading her congregation in worship, that she was too loud. Unable to sing any differently, she decided to just move her lips in silence so as not to disturb the others. These daily personal sacrifices cannot be underestimated, because if they are made from the heart in vulnerability in order not to harm others, they hold a power beyond our comprehension. St. Thérèse of Lisieux called her many sacrifices in the convent “strewing flowers,” some of which are noted in this issue.
Oblations are not only “offerings” but they also involve “doing without,” sacrificing personal comforts to be in solidarity with those less fortunate. Some well-known women who lived oblationary lives are Simone Weil, the French philosopher, who chose to work in factories to understand the suffering of others. She also refused to eat more than the food rations imposed by the Nazis on the French nation in the early 1940s. Dorothy Day owned only the bare essentials as she lived with those to whom she offered shelter. Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity go without material comforts including for their prayer (no carpets or seats and pews are found in their chapels) to be in close and loving relationship with the homeless, the sick and those without material means.
However big or small the sacrifices, they are heroic acts. They require not only courage but faith, love and trust in Jesus’ promise. We can recognize these elements at work in those who not only sacrificed safety for the sake of the Gospel, but with the intention of
cooperating in the work of Jesus’ salvation, bore heavy crosses to lighten the burdens and indebtedness of others. This form of sacrifice is termed “expiation.” Hanna-Barbara GerlFalkovitz outlines in her article that expiation is a specific female response to threat and terror. There is a further degree of sacrifice witnessed in the request of Edith Stein (St. Teresia Benedicta of the Cross) to her superior in the Carmelite convent in Echt, Holland. Under the threat of impending imprisonment and death, she gained permission to offer herself “as a sacrifice of propitiation for true peace,” that the evil around her would collapse without a “new world war.” She cited a desire within this vow “that a new order be established.” This kind of sacrifice is an internal one that offers one’s life of suffering to God to atone for others’ injustices. Sister Mary Madeline Todd gives us insight into this type of “living sacrifice” that transcends self “in order to engage human freedom.”
The Magdala presentation entitled “The Greater Love” portrays four heroic individuals who let love overcome fear and laid down their lives for their friends—St. Gianna Molla for her baby, St. Veronica Giuliani for lost souls, Sister Dorothy Stang for the Amazon rainforest and St. Maximilian Kolbe for a fellow prisoner.
This issue begins with an overview by John Dalla Costa on why we have indeed lost the art of sacrifice, and ends with a book review by Leanna Rose Parekh on how to find it again.
Lucinda M. Vardey Editor
John Dalla Costa
John Dalla Costa is an ethicist, theologian and author of five books. For more on his background please visit our website.
It is often assumed that the duty to work imposed in the Bible was caused by humanity’s sinful disobedience to God. In fact, the charge to create with diligence, care and labour was part of the blessing that God spoke to humans immediately upon their creation. For being “in the image of God” those blessed “male and female” creatures would have capacities similar to
their Creator’s for love, imagination, and to toil for others (Cf. Genesis 1:27-28). All of this effort became much more burdensome after the first couple’s disobedience, not only as punishment, but more so because their surrender to the temptation from self-interest, and for self-sufficiency, had broken the bond of trust with God. There are always consequences from the coveting or hoarding for one’s self what are gifts from God or from deceiving, stealing, or harming others for one’s own advantage or comfort. As the couple in the Garden of Eden learned, it is futile to try to hide from our infractions because the wounds inflicted on others damage our own souls, particularly in the
harmful estrangement from God (see the Adam & Eve issue of With One Accord).
It is important that we not deify sacrifice, which has, over time, meant justifying the suffering of others. Nor, however, is the sacrificial dimension of life to be undervalued. Sacrifice with its suffering is surprisingly rooted in blessing. The essentials of human life — love, beauty, belonging and community— cannot be realized, or be made fruitful, without some embrace of sacrifice.
Jesus epitomizes the blessing of sacrifice. Through his kenotic incarnation—his complete and utter self-offering—he modelled both the nature of God as love, and the fulfillment of human dignity from the hunger to receive and share that love. The salvation Jesus wrought on the cross did not eliminate sacrifice. Rather, he restored its original sense of participating with God in loving work of forming relationship and serving creation. This is one reason why Jesus insisted that his “yoke is easy” and his “burden is light” (Cf. Matt 11:30). By his grace, and with Jesus’ ongoing sacramental presence, all such essential and unavoidable toil would now be immersed in the original blessing of collaborating to build the reign of God.
By definition, undertaking sacrifice means becoming vulnerable for the sake of others, or a cause larger than the self. As it happens, this vulnerability is the nexus for both meaning and joy. St. Francis de Sales expressed this poignantly, writing, ”Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength. For what Christ asks of us is often difficult, but the more one loves, the easier it becomes.”1 Hence the blessing of the Beatitudes; hence the blessing of the self-sacrifices need to comfort those in mourning, to satisfy the demands of justice, and to break the mutually-destructive logic of war to make true peace.
Several decades ago, sociologists declared that ‘sacrificial culture is dead.’ It is not that people had stopped recognizing the pain caused by violence, inequality, social exclusions or environmental degradation. Rather, as Polish/British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman explained, it is that the “manifestations of devotion to that ‘something’ (or someone) other than oneself, however sincere, ardent and intense, stop short of self-sacrifice.”2 Indeed, a core premise of our pervasive consumer culture is that any and all sacrifice can be avoided
or easily resolved, promising that we can ‘have our cake and eat it too.’ With convenience therefore supplanting conscience, the bonds in society—and within its institutions, including the Church— become frayed as individuals opt for the self-satisfying illusion of a “painless morality.”3 Pope Francis has recognized the dangers from this wholesale evading or vilifying of sacrifice. He writes that “The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase; in the meantime all those lives stunted for a lack of opportunity seem as mere spectacle.”4
The stunting is all around us, and often, within us. Focused on careers, we sacrifice time for art, play, or for family. Scintillated by the ceaseless stimulation of social MEdia, we sacrifice the very reflection needed to fathom understanding from events, or fashion any meaning from facts. Searching out the ultimate convenience at the lowest prices demanded by self-interest, we become removed from those who toil, sometimes at below minimum wage, to pick our fruits or deliver our packages. All this running away from the sacrificial has paradoxically increased suffering, as people succumb to exhaustion and loneliness, living in fear within an impersonal and violent society.
What the current fixation with self-interest misses is that human beings are constituted for sacrifice, not because we are condemned or incomplete, but because the human heart is “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14-16) for the self-offering of love. Sacrifice is the gift by which we intentionally hold back our interests or undertake some anguish to serve what others need. In his book New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton wrote that, “The real secret of sacrifice is not destruction but growth. It is not that we should lose ourselves in annihilations, but that we should find ourselves by giving ourselves” (p. 45)
Every facet of discipleship is, in itself, a sacrifice because it involves turning over the self, and emptying out self-interest, so that “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). This renewal of sacrificial discipleship is at the heart of the 2025 Jubilee of Hope. Rejecting the false hopes from society’s ideologies or consumption, Pope Francis has framed authentic hope as the condition of inclusive possibilities that are facilitated by shared sacrifices. He is calling for all Christians to engage in concrete actions of compassion; to work to undo systemic injustices; to accompany the poor in face-to-face solidarity, and to exercise mercy in the harsh reality of today’s indifference. All of these involve significant personal and collective sacrifice. Sacrificing for hope portends a double blessing. As St. Teresa of Avila wrote, “The soul that is united to Him in suffering finds that her greatest joys come through those sufferings. For it is in bearing them for the love of Christ that we are drawn closest to Him.”5
Mary Madeline Todd O.P. is a Dominican Sister of the Congregation of Saint Cecilia, who has spent over three decades joyfully living consecrated life and sharing the teaching ministry of Christ, serving students in elementary school through college. After completing a master’s degree in theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, she was blessed to study in Rome, earning her doctorate in Sacred Theology at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas. Her area of specialization is the theology of woman in the writings of Saint John Paul II, a field that has opened her to the graced mission of helping women discover and embrace their unique dignity and vocation. Sister Mary Madeline speaks and writes on spiritual and moral theology and currently teaches theology at Aquinas College in Nashville, where she finds joy in helping the next generation discover the liberating freedom of who they are in Christ.
Mary Madeline Todd, O.P.
We intuitively know that if someone claims to love us, that claim includes willingness to sacrifice for our good. If someone says, “I love you as my dear friend,” but that person never gives time, companionship, or compassion, the words seem untrue.
St. John Paul II often wrote of the need for transcending self in order to engage human freedom fully, as well as to experience the liberating joy of love. This transcendence of self challenges the prevailing cultural presupposition that we are most free when we avoid any sacrifice. But if sacrifice is, as Louis Veuillot claims, “the great joy of love,” then willingness to suffer for the sake of love is not a negation but rather one of the most sublime engagements of our freedom.
On the night before Jesus died, he gathered with his closest friends to entrust himself to them in a mysterious but tangible way. He spoke words made poignant not only by his very being, but also by the immanence of his death: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”
(Jn 15:13). His pouring out of himself on the cross embodied the perfect sacrificial love which every offering of the Eucharist makes present—the gift of his abiding presence in Eucharistic friendship.
The word sacrifice is derived from two Latin words sacer and facere, words meaning literally to make holy or to set apart for the supernatural. The celebration of the Eucharist has been called, among many names, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Christ’s sacrifice is what draws us into his holiness and his eternal praise of the Father.
The Fourth Eucharistic Prayer of The Roman Missal highlights the Eucharist as a sacrifice, pointing not only to the past event of Christ’s perfect sacrifice to the Father, but also to the ongoing sacrifice of love by which we share in Christ’s gift of self. After recalling the events of the Paschal Mystery, the prayer addresses the Father: “We offer you his Body and Blood, the sacrifice acceptable to you which brings salvation to the whole world…grant in your loving kindness to all
who partake of this one Bread and one Chalice that, gathered into one body by the Holy Spirit, they may truly become a living sacrifice in Christ to the praise of your glory” (emphasis added). This beautiful prayer links Christ’s total outpouring of sacrificial love on the Cross to the present sacrifice of the Mass. It further intercedes that all participating in the Mass “become a living sacrifice” to the praise of God’s glory.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in speaking of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, includes a rich theology of the unity of Christ’s sacrifice and ours: “In the Eucharist the sacrifice of Christ becomes also the sacrifice of the members of his Body. The lives of the faithful, their praise, sufferings, prayer, and work, are united with those of Christ and with his total offering, and so acquire a new value. Christ’s sacrifice present on the altar makes it possible for all generations of Christians to be united with his offering” (No. 1368).
Self-offering to become a living sacrifice of praise, grounded in and sustained by the grace of Jesus, is embodied in a unique way in the life and self-gift of St. Edith Stein. Born in 1891 on the Feast of Atonement, one of the most sacred days of sacrifice in Judaism (Cf. Leviticus 16), her life was marked by sacrifice from its beginning. From the early death of her father to the later estrangement from her mother brought by her Christian conversion, she learned that love comes at a cost. Although Edith walked a long journey of discovery toward God and herself in God from Judaism to atheism to Catholicism, she had a deeply empathetic spirit that attuned her to the value of sacrificial love.
After the onset of World War I, when Edith was at the height of her academic years of study, she witnessed the sacrificial call to her fellow students to serve in the military. She felt impelled to register as a nurse, putting her studies on hold, to enter into self-giving service of others. While nursing, she made concrete acts of sacrificial love. Despite wartime rationing that made access to delicacies scarce, she gave a dying soldier suffering from pleurisy, who was unable to digest most food, the Lindt chocolates she
had received as a personal gift. She reflected in her autobiography that he “accepted these when I offered them and enjoyed them too…Probably this had given him confidence in me,”1 thus noting that sacrifice can bear the seed of interpersonal communion.
Edith lived by natural goodness the wisdom she would later see in a Christological light through her study of the writings of St. Teresa of Avila, who wrote of the value of even the humblest of sacrifices. St. Teresa, whose autobiography would be instrumental in Edith’s embracing of the Catholic faith, understood that simple acts of love gain infinite value when united to Christ’s offering of himself. She exhorted her sisters in the cloister: “…during the little while this life lasts… let us offer the Lord interiorly and exteriorly the sacrifice we can. His Majesty will join it with that which He offered on the cross to the Father for us. Thus even though our works are small they will have the value our love for Him would have merited had they been great.”2
If Edith was naturally aware of the necessity of sacrifice to live lovingly, she became even more so when she was baptized and then followed God’s call to the Carmelite cloister. The religious name she received—Sr. Teresia Benedicta of the Cross—highlighted sacrificial love and Eucharistic worship. From the cross of Christ flows every benediction, especially the blessing of Christ himself sustaining our capacity to give by his grace within us.
Edith not only wrote on the science of the cross, but she also lived this theology of sacrificial love. When her own safety and security were threatened by remaining in a German cloister, she transferred to a Carmelite convent in Holland. In the period leading up to World War II, she requested her Superior, in a letter written on Passion Sunday March 26th, 1939, to allow her to offer herself on that very day “to the heart of Jesus as a sacrifice of propitiation for true peace, that the dominion of the Antichrist may collapse, if possible, without a new world war, and that a new order may be established.”3 Her request was granted her. When it became obvious that even Jewish converts were at risk, she, along with her sister Rosa, who served as the convent’s portress, applied for permission to move to Switzerland. They were accepted by two Carmelite convents, but the Gestapo arrived while they awaited visas. Neighbours who came to the convent reported that the last words they heard Edith speak before the Gestapo took Edith and Rosa to the camps were, “Come Rosa. We’re going for our people.”4 In her final letter to
her Superior, written from the Westerbork Barracks, Edith asked for basic items such as woollen stockings and blankets for herself and for Rosa. She requested the next volume of her breviary, adding a note that “so far I have been able to pray gloriously.”5
Edith’s sacrificial life was not an end in itself, but rather a means to communion with the One who gave all for us. As she wrote in The Science of the Cross, “So the bridal union of the soul with God is the goal for which she was created, purchased through the cross, consummated on the cross and sealed for all eternity with the cross.”6 Truly, Edith Stein, conformed to Christ crucified, lived a life of sacrificial love. By receiving the Eucharistic Lord and following the path given her, she embraced holiness. As a saint, she intercedes for us to become, through Christ, with him and in him, a living sacrifice to the praise of God’s glory.
Throughout her life, Edith Stein treasured friendship, as her deeds and letters testify. She believed that the sacrificial love of Christ was not only an offering of praise to the Father, but also a gift of friendship to those who receive and adore the Eucharistic Lord. In a letter to a friend, Edith stated that having come from Eucharistic Exposition, she wanted to bring “greetings from our Eucharistic Savior.” She later added, “He is not present for his own sake but for ours…we need his personal nearness.”7 This personal nearness of our Eucharistic Savior is the gift of divine friendship that sustains each of us as we too walk the path of sacrificial love.
Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz is a philosopher and theologian who has published in the fields of cultural anthropology, feminism and gender, philosophy of religion (as well as philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries) and in a branch of philosophy known as phenomenology. Her scholarship includes a special focus on theologian Romano Guardini and Edith Stein (Saint Teresia Benedicta of the Cross). For the last 12 years she has been Head of the Institute for European Philosophy and Religion at Hochschule Benedikt XVI in Heiligenkreuz, Vienna, Austria. Most recently, she was awarded the 2021 Ratzinger Prize for Theology presented by Pope Francis in Rome.
Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz
There were many women during World War II who bore heavy crosses in order to expiate the vices and crimes of Nazi terror. The most well known of German women is undoubtedly Edith Stein, St. Teresia Benedicta of the Cross, who entered Carmel in the year 1933 to fulfill, in her own way, the Pauline thought that there is a vocation to suffer with Christ and cooperate with him in his work of salvation. She had written “All suffering that we bear in union with the Lord is His suffering, fertile for salvation” (Letter 26.12.1932). Two Catholic lay women who survived the war did likewise; social worker Marianne Hapig (1894-1973), and writer Nanda Herbermann (1903-1979).
During the last years of the war, while the city of Berlin was suffering great devastation, Marianne Hapig secretly organized various ways of assisting those imprisoned by the Gestapo and the families of conspirators who had planned to kill Hitler (and were subsequently executed). Offering her life to God as expiation for the “terrible crimes” committed by humans against humans, and for the young men who possessed no pity or compassion, she acted as a go-between, transporting news, food, paper and communion wafers to priests who were incarcerated, and sewing small bags in which the Eucharist could be carried near their breasts as they suffered or were put on trial. One such priest was the Jesuit Alfred Delp, a member of the Catholic resistance to Nazism who was continually tortured. Marianne took care of laundering his blood-drenched clothes and smuggled out his spiritual reflections that are now published worldwide. Alfred Delp was executed on February 2nd 1945 at the age of 38.
Of expiation, Marianne Hapig noted that it was a heavy cross to bear, “But I wanted it like that…” After the war ended she wrote in her diary that “We often had the feeling that we would never be merry and free, never recover from all that lay behind us.” However Alfred
Delp’s reflection on Pentecost consoled her, that “Nobody walks through the fire without being changed.” She wrote: “When one hundred doors are closed behind us, we may then have an idea of the wide realm to which we belong, uttering the name of God upon our lips. The Spirit that gives life will help us climb out of the ruins, not ruined ourselves but with a new vision and renewed courage.”
Nanda Herbermann worked as a secretary for the famous Jesuit Fr. Friedrich Muckermann, who edited the Catholic literary journal Der Gral (The Grail) between 1926 and 1931, and resisted the anti-religious movement of National Socialism from its early days. Regarded as a threat to Nazism, he was forced to move to Holland where he began another anti-Nazi journal, and Nanda stayed on in Germany to continue publication of Der Gral. Suspected of smuggling messages between Fr. Muckermann and Bishop von Galen (later beatified by Pope John Paul II), Nanda was imprisoned in solitary confinement enduring intense interrogation from February to August 1941. “The weeks after Easter,” she wrote, “ became a true passion for me by enduring long and torturous questionings by the Gestapo…I often rose to pray, lying on the floor for a long time. The idea of expiation filled me totally” (Ms 12).
Unable to break her silence, Nanda was sent to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp in northern Germany, where she was assigned to oversee a barracks of 400 prostitutes. She lived in the camp for a year and a half and by her family’s intervention was released in March 1943. In her heart-rendering memoir published after the war (now available in English under the title The Blessed Abyss), she recounts those times of horror, describing the life of a prisoner “this life of hell” and the suffering each had to endure under the Third Reich. She also wrote that, as a German woman, it was unfair to be viewed as being “responsible for the terrible doings in the concentration camps.” She advocates for survivors of the war, to right what was done by Germans to other Germans and to hundreds of thousands of innocent foreigners “in murder and injustice that cries out to heaven,” to assume “this holy duty, the duty of expiation, in the eyes of God and the world.” She states that the world will understand “after our time of expiation,” that no one can identify the whole of the German race as Nazi criminals” (Ms 74f).
Nanda Herbermann said she could no longer cry or shed tears, that she had no energy to weep. But she kept a tiny flame inside her where she carried all the unspeakable pain and suffering to the feet of Jesus and let it fall there, for his use and for wherever it was needed.
During the last few decades there has been much theological debate about “expiation.” Is it really expedient to load onto oneself other people’s indebtedness in an attempt to lighten their tribulation? Expiation specifically means to offer substitutive penance. According to St. Paul, this is the central motive of Christ’s incarnation. It is an inscrutable thought and we belong to its mystery. Not only are we as sinners expiated, but we can also offer expiation to be more closely united with Christ.
Lucinda M. Vardey
Lucinda M. Vardey is the editor of With One Accord and the author of ten books. For more on her background please visit our website.
Flowers for St. Thérèse of Lisieux were useful metaphors for gaining spiritual insights. She called her soul “a little white flower.” In her autobiography Story of a Soul —composed of 3 manuscripts written at the end of her life in response to the request by her sister, Pauline (Mother Agnes of Jesus)—flowers not only represented littleness but oblationary acts of charity. In a poem she wrote entitled Strewing Flowers, she mentioned that her “little sacrifices” included her greatest sufferings, her sorrows and her joys, which were the flowers she would strew to prove her love of God. The scattering of flowers was her delight “in this valley of tears.” She desired to suffer “for Love’s sake and for Love’s sake even to rejoice, thus I shall strew flowers.”
Thérèse shares how she overcame the temptations to judge others when disliking another sister’s personality or by removing herself from an irritating sister’s company. She asks herself how did Jesus love his disciples “You may be quite sure that their natural qualities did nothing to attract him…they were poor sinners, so ignorant, their thoughts so earthbound; and yet Jesus calls them his friends.” Meditating on John 15:13 (“No one has greater love than
to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”) Thérèse recognizes how imperfect is her love, that she obviously didn’t love her fellow sisters in the convent as God loves them.
“I realize now,” she wrote, “that perfect love means putting up with other people’s shortcomings, feeling no surprise at their weaknesses, finding encouragement even in the slightest evidence of good qualities in them.” She comes to the conclusion that charity also can’t be “locked up in the depths of your heart.”
“You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house” (Matthew 5: 14-16).
Thérèse interprets the lamp as charity and it’s not just for the people she’s fond of but “for everybody in the house without exception.” It’s not just loving your neighbour as yourself she surmises, but loving them as Jesus loves them. In a prayer she shares her insight that if she is to love her sisters in the convent as Jesus loves them, “then that must mean that you yourself go on loving them in and through me.” This inspiration she sees as a means of grace; that only grace enables her to keep Jesus’ commandment and “to welcome it…as proof that your will is to love, in and through me, all the people you tell me to love!” If she acts when “charity bids” she feels that it is Jesus who acts in her, and by doing so she becomes closely united with him which grows by the measure of love she gives to all the sisters “without distinction.”
The road is certainly bumpy for Thérèse because she admits that the devil directs her to continually focus on a sister’s defects. But to remedy this she quickly reminds herself of all the sister’s good qualities and intentions. She claims that it could well be possible that what she considers as the other’s fault could well be a “praiseworthy act.” However, there is one sister in the community who causes her to be in a ceaseless “tug-of-war.” This sister’s behaviour and manner of speech strikes Thérèse as completely unloveable. So she decides to change her attitude towards this nun, accepting that as she is a holy religious God must love her dearly. “Charity isn’t a matter of fine sentiments,” Thérèse explains, ”it means doing things. So I determined to treat this sister as if she were the person I loved best in the world.” Thérèse sets herself on this course of not only prayer but trying to do this sister “a good turn” at every opportunity. “When I felt tempted to take her down with an unkind retort, I would put on my best smile instead and try to change the subject…” This particular nun, Thérèse informs us, is quite unaware of her true feelings about her or why Thérèse acts in the kind way she does towards her. Once she asked Thérèse what it was about her that always made her smile whenever she saw her, and the saint responded that it was the sight of her that made her smile with pleasure. To avoid a lie, Thérèse mentions that she didn’t explain “that the pleasure was entirely spiritual.” She refers to Matthew 5:43 where Jesus says “what credit is it to you to love those who love you, even sinners do the same,” and states that loving a sister you’d prefer to avoid isn’t enough: “you’ve got to prove it.”
Sacrifices were not only about Thérèse doing loving things that she didn’t want to do for someone she didn’t like, or who irritated her, she also refused to defend herself if misunderstood, or when a harsh word was directed towards her. When caring for an older, sick nun who would complain about the way Thérèse did most things for her, citing her as “too young,” she admits to feeling great spiritual happiness. While washing laundry, another sister would splash Thérèse’s face with dirty water every time she lifted the handkerchiefs from a ledge. Instead of stepping back and wiping her face (therefore bringing attention to the sister’s actions) Thérèse cultivates “a taste for dirty water” which she humourously refers to as a new kind of “Asperges” (the rite of sprinkling holy water at the beginning of each Mass).
One of the most challenging of sacrifices was the noise that a nun made while grinding a finger against her teeth during evening prayer. It was a “curious little noise” Thérèse writes, “rather like one would make by rubbing two shells together.” Thérèse longed to turn around and give this nun an irritated look, but instead, after trying hard to the point of breaking out
in a sweat to not have the noise interrupt her prayer of quiet, she decided to “put up with it for the love of God, and spare the sister any embarrassment.” She came up with the idea of making the exasperating noise seem like “some delightful music” to which she would listen with intensity and then offer this music to our Lord.
Thérèse claims that all the trials, these “insignificant sacrifices…are like a bitter medicine that mingles its taste with all my happiness.” By strewing these flowers, offering them in love, she finds peace in her soul and concludes that God always “gives exactly what I want; or rather always makes me want exactly what he’s going to give me.” Reaching this level of innocence gained by wisdom, St. Thérèse shows that the path to being the light of love is walked not only by accepting difficult circumstances as they are, but choosing to respond to them as Jesus prescribed. Therein she was to experience the heights of spiritual joy and pleasure as her soul spread its light around the convent in Lisieux, and, after her death, into the whole world.
“I drew so close to Love That I began to understand How great the gain of those Who give themselves wholly to Love: And when I saw this for myself, What was lacking in me gave me pain.”
(Hadewijch of Brabant).
Leanna Rose Parekh
The Lost Art of Sacrifice: a Spiritual Guide for Denying Yourself, Embracing the Cross and Finding Joy by Vicki Burbach is a guide that both inspires and shepherds readers into a deeper relationship with the Lord. In a time of “soft living,” where many Christians have been fed the lie that we can escape suffering and are entitled to material wealth, Burbach encourages us to revisit the crucified Christ and invite Him into our daily sufferings and understand our greater salvation and call to sainthood. Reading this book
felt like being woken up from a deep sleep with a cold, wet cloth: a bit jarring at first, but necessary.
The author—a wife, mother and spiritual writer—walks a fine-line between teaching the wide-eyed convert and stirring the sleepy Catholic. As a convert herself, she writes with the authority of someone who used to have what she calls “Christ without the cross.” She sprinkles in her own experience with sacrifice (not suffering!) as an aspiring runner, swim coach and mother of six. One moment, she’s the authoritative teacher at the front of the class, scolding us with chalk in her hand; the next, a kind stranger at the bus stop, unabashedly sharing snippets of her story.
The most compelling image she instilled in me was in Chapter 2 Surrender Yourself to Freedom where she compares the act of surrender like learning to swim. At first, the water feels like a threat. We respond by flailing, trying to find the perfect way to float. But instead, we sink. But the moment we relax, lie back, breathe and lay our limbs out…we float. Therein lies the first step toward progress, Burbach says. The same is true with the spiritual struggle: we sink if we rely on our own effort and control, but we float when we can trust the Lord’s providence, submit to His will, and find freedom. Practice, (and humility, she writes) is key.
Burbach moved to and fro in teacher mode for a few chapters. And I – having a meltdown thinking I’ve not been sacrificial enough! I just want to sit with the Lord and let him see and comfort me! she hears me and softens around Chapter 13 Love of God: Giving your Time. She speaks of her spiritual awakening at the foot of Eucharistic adoration. So vulnerable and tender was
her story that I stopped reading. ‘Wow,” I thought, “this woman is human after all.”
If you need a flick on the nose, a kick in the pants, a reminder of your humanness, or find yourself restless thinking there’s something missing in your spiritual practice, try this book and have the discipline to go back to basics. The guide is both spiritual and practical in nature.
As Burbach herself states at the top of Chapter 15: “The goal of this book is to ignite in every Christian a desire to serve the Living Flame of Love, which knows no limits, recognizes no boundaries, and holds back nothing for Himself.”
By Vicki Burbach
320 pages
Published by Sophia Institute Press (2021) Available in Paperback and Kindle US $9.49.
O God, our Creator, You, who made us in Your image, give us the grace of inclusion in the heart of Your Church.
R: With one accord, we pray.
Jesus, our Saviour, You, who received the love of women and men, heal what divides us, and bless what unites us.
R: With one accord, we pray.
Holy Spirit, our Comforter, You, who guides this work, provide for us as we hold in hope Your will for the good of all.
R: With one accord, we pray.
Mary, mother of God, pray for us. St. Joseph, stay close to us.
Divine Wisdom, enlighten us.
R: With one accord, we pray.
Amen.
John Dalla Costa—The Meaning and Practice of Sacrifice
1 St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, Part 3, Chapter 23.
2 Zygmunt Bauman, The Art of Life, p. 41-42.
3 Ibid
4 Evangelii Gaudium
5 St. Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, 6.9.3
Mary Madeline Todd, O.P.—Eucharistic Love: Sacrifice unto Friendship
1 Edith Stein, Life in a Jewish Family (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986), p. 344.
2 Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1980), p. 450.
3 Edith Stein, “Letter to Mother Ottilia Thannisch, OCD, Echt, March 26, 1939” in Edith Stein: Self-Portrait in Letters, (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1993), p. 305.
4 Cited in Waltraud Herbstrith, Edith Stein: A Biography (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), p. 180.
5 Edith Stein, “Letter to Mother Ambrosia Antonia Engelmann, OCD, Echt, August 6, 1942” in Edith Stein: SelfPortrait in Letters, (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1993), p. 353.
6 Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002), p. 273.
7 Edith Stein, “Letter to Elly Dursy, Auderath, May 7, 1933” in Edith Stein: Self-Portrait in Letters, (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1993), p. 140-141.
Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz—Lights in the Darkness: Women’s Gifts of Peace in War Marianne Hapig, Tagebuch und Erinnerung. Edition Mooshausen, hg.v. Elisabeth Prégardier, Annweiler 2007, Plöger Medien, 140 S., 26 Photos, ISBN 978-3-89857-225-5.
Nanda Herbermann, Der gesegnete Abgrund: Schutzhäftling Nr. 6582 im Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbrück, Glock & Lutz, Nürnberg/Bamberg/Passau 1946, 42002; The Blessed Abyss, 2000.
Lucinda M. Vardey—Strewing Flowers in the Cloister: St.Thérèse’s Little Sacrifices
Quotes taken from “Thérèse of Lisieux: Autobiography of a Saint” translated by Ronald Knox (London, Fount Books 1977) pages 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 214, 217, 218, 233, 236, 237.
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With One Accord journal is published in English, Italian and French. To access the other language editions please visit our website.
With One Accord signature music for the Magdala interview composed by Dr. John Paul Farahat and performed by Emily VanBerkum and John Paul Farahat.
Images used in this edition:
Cover: “Magdalene with the Smoking Flame” by Georges de La Tour (c.1640).
Page 2 Detail from the above painting.
Page 4 “The Tree of Life” mosaic from the Basilica of San Clemente, Rome.
Page 7 Detail from the “Last Supper” by Juan de Juanes (16th century).
Page 9 Photo at the Hermitage of Montecasale, Sansepolcro, Italy by John Dalla Costa.
This edition
Copyright © 2024 Saint Basil’s Catholic Parish, Toronto, Canada For editorial enquiries, please contact editor@magdalacolloquy.org ISSN 2563-7924
PUBLISHER
Morgan V. Rice CSB.
EDITOR
Lucinda M. Vardey
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Emily VanBerkum
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
Gregory Rupik
PRODUCTION COORDINATOR
Michael Pirri
VIDEO EDITOR
Michael Pirri
CONSULTANT
John Dalla Costa
TRANSLATORS
Elena Buia Rutt (Italian)
Véronique Viellerobe (French)
ADMINISTRATOR
Margaret D’Elia