The First Friday in Advent -- J. Heinrich Arnold and Edith Stein
A Reflection on J. Heinrich Arnold & Edith Stein’s From Stable to Cross (pp. 107-08)
These two Christian witnesses – Johann Heinrich Arnold and Edith Stein – so different in some ways, shared a deep commitment to patterning their lives after Christ’s.
When Heinrich Arnold was seven, his parents Eberhard and Emmy Arnold and their five children left a bourgeois life in Berlin for a dilapidated villa in the German village of Sannerz, where they founded the Bruderhof, a Christian community based on Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. As a young man, Arnold refused to serve in Hitler's armed forces and was forced to flee Germany. He studied agriculture in Zurich, and in 1936 married a fellow Bruderhof member. The couple spent the next several decades living in, and founding, Bruderhof communities around the world, including in the United States. From 1962 until his death, Arnold served as elder and pastor of the growing movement, guiding its communities through times of crisis and renewal, and pointing again and again to Jesus Christ.
Edith Stein was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, but as a teenager rebelled against the family’s traditions and became an atheist. As a university student she became attracted to the existentialism of Edmund Husserl, became his assistant, and earned a Ph.D. under his tutelage at the University of Freiberg. However, on vacation in 1921, Stein experienced a conversion through the writings of St. Teresa of Avila and became a Roman Catholic. Later she would join the religious order of the Discalced Carmelites. The Nazis, however, were determined to round up not just practicing Jews, but all “non-Aryan” Christians, and Stein was arrested and sent to Auschwitz where she died with her sister in the gas chambers. Survivors from the camp report that Stein was a compassionate and deeply spiritual companion to all those imprisoned with her.
Both of these remarkable Christians in their short reflections remind us that “the Christian mysteries are an indivisible whole” and that the story of Jesus’ birth cannot be separated from all that follows, much as we might like to stay with him and the holy family in the tenderness of the Nativity scene. We are, however, asked to follow, not to stay put: “the way from Bethlehem leads inevitably to Golgotha, from the crib to the cross.”
Such discipleship is costly, to be sure, but it leads us, in Arnold’s words, toward “the glory of life – the glowing love of God, which is so much greater than our hearts and our lives.”
Johann Heinrich Arnold (1913-1982) was an Elder in the Bruderhof Community, an Anabaptist movement that believes in living in community and sharing goods and resources in common as did some of the earliest Christian communities. Edith Stein (1891-1942) was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Roman Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She died in Auschwitz and is canonized as a martyr in the Roman Catholic Church. (Biographical information in the text is courtesy of Plough Publishing Company.)
These two Christian witnesses – Johann Heinrich Arnold and Edith Stein – so different in some ways, shared a deep commitment to patterning their lives after Christ’s.
When Heinrich Arnold was seven, his parents Eberhard and Emmy Arnold and their five children left a bourgeois life in Berlin for a dilapidated villa in the German village of Sannerz, where they founded the Bruderhof, a Christian community based on Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. As a young man, Arnold refused to serve in Hitler's armed forces and was forced to flee Germany. He studied agriculture in Zurich, and in 1936 married a fellow Bruderhof member. The couple spent the next several decades living in, and founding, Bruderhof communities around the world, including in the United States. From 1962 until his death, Arnold served as elder and pastor of the growing movement, guiding its communities through times of crisis and renewal, and pointing again and again to Jesus Christ.
Edith Stein was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, but as a teenager rebelled against the family’s traditions and became an atheist. As a university student she became attracted to the existentialism of Edmund Husserl, became his assistant, and earned a Ph.D. under his tutelage at the University of Freiberg. However, on vacation in 1921, Stein experienced a conversion through the writings of St. Teresa of Avila and became a Roman Catholic. Later she would join the religious order of the Discalced Carmelites. The Nazis, however, were determined to round up not just practicing Jews, but all “non-Aryan” Christians, and Stein was arrested and sent to Auschwitz where she died with her sister in the gas chambers. Survivors from the camp report that Stein was a compassionate and deeply spiritual companion to all those imprisoned with her.
Both of these remarkable Christians in their short reflections remind us that “the Christian mysteries are an indivisible whole” and that the story of Jesus’ birth cannot be separated from all that follows, much as we might like to stay with him and the holy family in the tenderness of the Nativity scene. We are, however, asked to follow, not to stay put: “the way from Bethlehem leads inevitably to Golgotha, from the crib to the cross.”
Such discipleship is costly, to be sure, but it leads us, in Arnold’s words, toward “the glory of life – the glowing love of God, which is so much greater than our hearts and our lives.”
Johann Heinrich Arnold (1913-1982) was an Elder in the Bruderhof Community, an Anabaptist movement that believes in living in community and sharing goods and resources in common as did some of the earliest Christian communities. Edith Stein (1891-1942) was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Roman Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She died in Auschwitz and is canonized as a martyr in the Roman Catholic Church. (Biographical information in the text is courtesy of Plough Publishing Company.)
Identifying with another's pain....
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