the dignity of a hidden world

Reading about Edith Stein in Patricia Hampl's, "I Could Tell You Stories" (note the gorgeous phrase about her love of Latin language: "[she spoke in Latin whenever] her passion quickened at the edge of the inexpressible"), I am struck by these passages:

"... her 'conviction that I was destined for something great'. Such greatness should not be confused with mere ambition, for ambition revolves endlessly, and finally hopelessly, around the individual's sense of stardom... The urge towards greatness, on the other hand, is oddly aligned with humility. The purpose is not the fulfillment of a self, or its aggrandizement, but the deft insertion of the self into an overwhelming design... It always carries as well a charge of relation, of service... Ultimately, a life seeking greatness is about the loss of the self in the service of a more complete reality. It is a disappearing act."

She's described as not for 'evangelism', though she was a Jew who converted to Catholicism and became a nun, yet was killed as a Jew in the Holocaust. She seemed to understand the sacredness of God's communication with each person, well acquainted with mystery: "... the dignity of her 'hidden world'... her strangely instinctive solitude... the mystery of her conversion... what she knew each person must find alone, in the locked tabernacle of the self."

Currently listening: The Village By: James Newton Howard