Novena to Saint Edith Stein 2026
Welcome to our annual Novena to Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein. Across these nine days, Saint Edith Stein leads us into the spiritual desert of Carmel, where darkness, dryness, and emptiness purify the soul and draw it toward union with God. Each day, we will reflect on a phrase from her writings, paired with a scripture reference and a brief quote from The Collected Works of Edith Stein. Our closing novena prayer is found at the bottom of this page. Let’s confidently entrust ourselves to Saint Teresa Benedicta’s intercession that through her intercession we may seek God, the supreme truth.
Pray each day with Saint Teresa Benedicta
Day One
Go forth into the desert
Elijah the Tishbite, of Tishbe in Gilead said to Ahab, “As Yahweh lives, the God of Israel whom I serve, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years except at my order.” The word of Yahweh came to him, “Go away from here, go eastward, and hide yourself in the Wadi Cherith which lies east of Jordan. You can drink from the stream, and I have ordered the ravens to bring you food there.” He did as Yahweh had said; he went and stayed in the Wadi Cherith which lies east of Jordan. The ravens brought him bread in the morning and meat in the evening, and he quenched his thirst at the stream (1 Kings 17:1–6).
In Carmel—under the mitigated Rule as well—the remembrance of the Prophet Elijah, the “Leader and Father of Carmelites” lived on. The Institutio Primorum Monachorum set the prophet before the eyes of the young religious as a model of the contemplative life. This prophet whom God commanded to go forth into the desert, to conceal himself by the brook Carith across from the Jordan, to drink the water of the brook and to be nourished by the food which God would send him, is to be the model of all who withdraw into solitude renouncing sin and all sensory pleasures, indeed all earthly things.
Saint Edith Stein
The Science of the Cross, ch. 1
Novena Prayer ↓
Day Two
The doctrine of the darkest path
Lord God, you are my Savior.
I have been praying to you day and night.
Please pay attention to my prayers.
Listen to my prayers for mercy.
My soul has had enough of this pain!
I am ready to die (Psalm 88:1–3).
The darkest path is the most secure. This doctrine from The Dark Night is stressed with great emphasis in spiritual direction:
“Since your soul finds herself in this darkness and void of spiritual poverty, you believe you are lacking everything, and that everyone has abandoned you. Of course, that is no wonder since you even think God has forsaken you. However, nothing is missing. . . . Whoever seeks God and nothing else is not wandering in darkness no matter how dark and poor you think you are. Whoever does not walk in presumption and does not follow her own tastes whether in what concerns God or creatures, and does not insist on her own will, whether internally or externally, will not stumble now. . . . Let us live on earth like pilgrims and the poor, like the banished and orphans, in dryness, without a way, and without anything else, but always in hope” (Cf. Letter 19 from St. John of the Cross to Doña Juana de Pedraza).
Saint Edith Stein
The Science of the Cross, ch. 22
Novena Prayer ↓
Day Three
In dryness and emptiness
O God, you are my God, for you I long;
for you my soul is thirsting.
My body pines for you
like a dry, weary land without water.
So I gaze on you in the sanctuary
to see your strength and your glory (Psalm 63:1–2).
In the beginning, this being inflamed in love is not commonly perceived. The soul feels rather only dryness and emptiness, sorrowful fear and concern. And if she does feel any of the love, it is as a painful yearning for God, a smarting wound of love. . . . In dryness and emptiness the soul becomes humble. The earlier arrogance disappears when one no longer finds in oneself anything that would give reason to look down on others; instead, others now appear to one to be more perfect; love and esteem for them awakens in the heart. One is too occupied with one’s own misery to be concerned about others. Through her helplessness the soul also becomes subservient and obedient; she longs for instruction in order to reach the right way. Spiritual avarice is thoroughly healed; when one no longer finds any practice to one’s taste, one becomes very moderate and does whatever one does purely for the sake of God without seeking any satisfaction for the self. And so it goes with all imperfections. All the confusion and unrest disappear with them. Instead, a deep peace and a constant remembrance of God are established. The only care that remains is the concern not to displease God.
Saint Edith Stein
The Science of the Cross, ch. 3
Novena Prayer ↓
Day Four
Her aim was the “desert” of Carmel
There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee. The mother of Jesus was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited. When they ran out of wine, since the wine provided for the wedding was all finished, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ Jesus said, ‘Woman why turn to me? My hour has not come yet.’ His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ There were six stone water jars standing there, meant for the ablutions that are customary among the Jews: each could hold twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to the servants, ‘Fill the jars with water,’ and they filled them to the brim. ‘Draw some out now,’ he told them, ‘and take it to the steward.’ They did this; the steward tasted the water, and it had turned into wine. Having no idea where it came from—only the servants who had drawn the water knew—the steward called the bridegroom and said, ‘People generally serve the best wine first, and keep the cheaper sort till the guests have had plenty to drink, but you have kept the best wine till now’ (John 2:1–10).
A delicate face of angelic purity and spirituality, big, soft, and deeply penetrating eyes that have knowledge of the supernatural world as well as of their natural home—this is Dorothea Quoniam, who in Carmel received the name of Marie-Aimée de Jésus. This name tells the secret of her life: “loved by Jesus” with an overwhelming, jealous love that laid total claim to her from her very first day…. She had already known when she moved to her ‘Nazareth’ that her aim was the ‘desert’ of Carmel. But she had to await the Lord’s hour.
Saint Edith Stein
A Chosen Vessel of Divine Wisdom
Novena Prayer ↓
Day Five
God is
Kingdoms of the earth, sing to God, praise the Lord
who rides on the heavens, the ancient heavens.
He thunders his voice, his mighty voice.
Come, acknowledge the power of God.
His glory is on Israel; his might is in the skies.
God is to be feared in his holy place.
He is the Lord, Israel’s God.
He gives strength and power to his people.
Blessed be God! (Psalm 68:32–35).
How foolish now this doubt appears to me!
If God’s call sounds within a soul,
When he leads it to our house’s door
And to knock hard—why should we not open
The door wide, our arms and our heart?
If he shows the way, then he also knows
That it is not a wrong track where people suddenly get lost;
No spurious way that ends in desert sands.
That step by step the road will be revealed, I firmly believe.
And in fact what is certain?
Where is “certain fate”? Yes, we see—
And it’s good that we are so confronted—
How around us structures are becoming ruins
That seemed to us to have been raised for eternity.
One thing alone is certain: that God is
And that his hand holds us in being.
Then even if around us the whole world falls to wrack and ruin,
We are not ruined if we hold ourselves to him.
Saint Edith Stein
I Am Always in Your Midst
Novena Prayer ↓
Day Six
Dryness, distaste, and trial
Then Jesus called the crowd and his disciples to him. “If any of you want to come with me,” he told them, “you must forget yourself, carry your cross, and follow me. For if you want to save your own life, you will lose it; but if you lose your life for me and for the gospel, you will save it. Do you gain anything if you win the whole world but lose your life? Of course not! There is nothing you can give to regain your life. If you are ashamed of me and of my teaching in this godless and wicked day, then the Son of Man will be ashamed of you when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:34–38).
We have considered by what ways John [St. John of the Cross] penetrated the message of the cross. The following sections wish to show how this message was incorporated into the doctrine and life of the saint. To do so, it is necessary to set the content of the message before our eyes—for the time being, in a brief outline. We set it down here exactly as we find it expressed by the master of the science of the cross: “Oh, who can make this counsel of our Savior on self-denial understandable, practicable, and attractive! . . . Annihilation of all sweetness in God . . . dryness, distaste, and trial. . . . the pure spiritual cross and the nakedness of Christ’s poverty of spirit. . . . A genuine spirit seeks rather the distasteful in God than the delectable, leans more toward suffering than toward consolation, more toward going without everything for God than toward possession, and toward dryness and affliction than toward sweet consolation, for it knows that in this consists the following of Christ and self-denial, while the other is nothing further than seeking oneself in God . . . Seeking God in God [sic] means. . . for love of Christ, to choose all that is distasteful whether in God or in the world.”
Saint Edith Stein
The Science of the Cross, ch. 1
Novena Prayer ↓
Day Seven
Oppression and dryness
O Lord, my heart is not proud
nor haughty my eyes.
I have not gone after things too great
nor marvels beyond me.
Truly I have set my soul
in silence and peace.
A weaned child on its mother’s breast,
even so is my soul.
O Israel, hope in the Lord
both now and forever (Psalm 131).
The active entrance of the soul into the dark night is only possible for her because God’s grace anticipates her, draws her, and supports her along the entire way. But for beginners this anticipatory and enabling grace does not as yet have the character of the dark night. Rather, God treats them the way a tender mother treats her tiny children—carrying them in her arms and feeding them with sweet milk: in all their spiritual exercises—in prayer, meditation, and mortifications—they receive abundant joy and consolation. This joy then motivates them to devote themselves to spiritual exercises. They are unaware of the imperfections that lie therein and how many faults they commit in their practice of virtue. “After beginners have exercised themselves for a time in the way of virtue and have persevered in meditation and prayer and through the delight and satisfaction they experience in this have become detached from worldly things and have gained some spiritual strength in God, which helps them to restrain their appetites for creatures, and for God’s sake are able to suffer a little oppression and dryness without yearning to return to those better times when they experienced more pleasurable satisfaction and gratification…”
Saint Edith Stein
The Science of the Cross, ch. 1
Novena Prayer ↓
Day Eight
Purgative dryness
Violent thunder gave warning of the punishment that was coming on those sinners. They suffered a well-deserved punishment for their great wickedness. No nation had ever hated strangers so bitterly. Other people had been known to refuse welcome to strangers who came to them, but these people made slaves of those who were their guests and who had shown them kindness. Every nation will be punished if it does not welcome foreigners, but these people, who had earlier welcomed the foreigners with happy celebrations and treated them as equals, later made them suffer cruelly. These people were also struck with blindness, like the men of Sodom who came to the door of that righteous man Lot. They found themselves in total darkness, as each one groped around to find his own door (Wisdom 19:13–17).
A case of purgative dryness of the dark night can be discerned by three signs:
- That the soul finds no delight in creatures.
- That “the soul turns to God solicitously and with painful care, and thinks it is not serving God but turning back because it is aware of this distaste for the things of God.”
- One recognizes purgative dryness in that “the soul is powerless in spite of all its efforts to meditate and make use of the imagination, the interior sense, . . . God no longer communicates himself through the senses as he did before, by means of the discursive analysis and synthesis of ideas, but has now begun to communicate himself through pure spirit by an act of simple contemplation for which neither the exterior nor the interior senses of the sensory human being have any capacity.”
Saint Edith Stein
The Science of the Cross, ch. 1
Novena Prayer ↓
Day Nine
An immense, unbounded desert
Therefore, I will now allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.
From there I will give her her vineyards,
and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she shall respond as in the days of her youth,
as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt (Hosea 2:14–15).
Dark contemplation is the secret ladder: secret as is mystical theology that is communicated and infused into the soul through love. The mystical wisdom is therefore also called secret because it has the characteristic of hiding the soul within itself. . . . Occasionally, it so engulfs the soul in its secret abyss that she has the keen awareness of being brought into a place far removed from every creature. She accordingly feels that she has been led into a remarkably deep and vast wilderness unattainable by any human being, into an immense, unbounded desert. And this, for her, is the more delightful, pleasant, and lovely, the deeper, vaster, and more solitary it is.
Saint Edith Stein
The Science of the Cross, ch. 12
Novena Prayer ↓
Novena Prayer
Lord, God of our fathers,
you brought Saint Teresa Benedicta
to the fullness of the science of the cross
at the hour of her martyrdom.
Fill us with that same knowledge;
and, through her intercession,
allow us always to seek after you, the supreme truth,
and to remain faithful until death
to the covenant of love ratified in the blood of your Son
for the salvation of all men and women.
Grant this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
God, forever and ever.
Stein, E 2002, The Science of the Cross, The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Book 6, translated from the German by Koeppel, J, ICS Publications, Washington D.C.
Stein, E 2014, The Hidden Life: hagiographic essays, meditations, spiritual texts, Stein, W (trans.), ICS Publications, Washington DC.
Don’t become discouraged and give up prayer, says St. John of the Cross. We offer varying novenas to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, as well as novenas to St. Joseph, St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin, St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, and St. Edith Stein.
Let us unite in prayer
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