Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength (Dt 6:4-5).

Today, Friday, Aug. 8, the Church celebrates the memorial of St. Dominic de Guzmán (1170-1221).

Dominic was a Spanish priest who founded the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) totally dedicated to preaching for the salvation of souls. He was convinced of the value of contemplative prayer, a spiritual discipline focused on resting in God’s presence, often involving silence and a letting go of distracting thoughts. Contemplative prayer invites us to open our hearts and minds to God, seeking a deeper, more intimate relationship with Him.

St. Dominic’s followers testified that his nights were spent in contemplation of God’s Word, his days in the preaching of that Word. They said that Dominic spoke only “to God or about God.” St. Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican friar, described the Dominican charism as “contemplating and handing on to others what has been contemplated.”

The Gospel reading for today’s liturgy (Mt 16:24-28) describes what is expected of Jesus’ disciples:

Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what can one give in exchange for his life?(Mt 16:24-26)

Self-denial, the Way of the Cross, is the foundational principle of Christian life. If we wish to follow Jesus, we must be prepared to suffer and die as he did. No earthly treasures, no amount of fame or worldly glory, can satisfy the hungry hearts of women and men who truly seek God. St. Dominic was keenly aware of the necessity of self-denial in order to live the Word that he preached.

A modern saint who also gave witness to this principle of self-denial as fundamental to Christian spirituality was St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) whose memorial we will celebrate tomorrow, Saturday, Aug. 9.

Edith Stein was born to a Jewish family in Breslau, Germany (today part of Poland), in 1891. At 14, she became an atheist, but her sincere search for truth and wisdom as a scholar of philosophy led her to the threshold of the Catholic Church. We can only imagine the challenges she faced as a Jewish woman, who excelled in her philosophical studies, even as she struggled personally to seek and find God.

The Gospel reading for tomorrow (Mt 17:14-20) speaks to the kind of faith that Edith Stein was seeking:

Because of your ­little faith. Amen, I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you. (Mt 17:20)

Faith gives us access to the kind of spiritual power that moves mountains. When we allow our faith to guide us, and when we surrender our egos to Divine Providence, amazing things can happen. God’s love will do for us things that we could never do by ourselves.

After reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Ávila, Edith Stein exclaimed: “This is the truth!” Ten years later, she entered the Carmelite order and was given the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Contemplation is, of course, a charism of the Carmelites, so the former Edith Stein added to her search for God a commitment to contemplative prayer. She learned to practice the spiritual disciplines that helped to transform her intellectual knowledge into the wisdom of the heart. In the process, she learned to live the ancient Jewish prayer, the Shema, which called her to love the Lord, her God, with all her heart, and with all her soul, and with all her strength.

Sister Teresa Benedicta was seized by the Nazis on August 2, 1942, and died at the Auschwitz concentration camp seven days later. Her love for Jesus was consummated by her own participation in the Cross of Christ. As a result, she is venerated as a “martyr for love.”

What do the 13th-century preacher, St. Dominic de Guzmán, and the 20th-century Carmelite nun, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, have in common? Both denied themselves, took up their crosses, and followed Jesus, the Word of God Incarnate.

As missionary disciples, and Pilgrims of Hope, we all are invited to contemplate the Mystery of God’s love for us and then to hand on to others the truth that we have contemplated. †