Courage, boldness, innovation, compassion, humility, endurance; these are the mighty qualities of Clare of Assisi. She called herself the little plant of Francis. While Francis and the friar minors traveled the world, living among the poor, Clare and her sisters became the guardians of sacred place.

Clare's Benediction

You do not go to a place of safety.

There is no safety.

The earth will reclaim your sorry bones

with jubilation even in the palace of wealth

or in the forest of hiding,

Fear and suffering are everywhere.

Greet them with bold benediction.

Like Clare, obedient to her dream,

gather what you have of sun and earth.

Lift up that broken bread in the windy field.

I tell you, warriors of death fell

on their knees in praise.

The wild grasses danced.

Holy Madness

Francis met Lady Poverty through the gifting of the anonymous leper. Clare met gospel simplicity and truth upon hearing and seeing Francis. At age eighteen she abandoned the way of life prescribed for a young wealthy woman of her time and culture. She gave away her wealth, left her safety behind and fled in the night to meet the friars.

Francis accepted her into their way by cutting her hair and giving her the coarse garments the friars wore. Francis then brought her to a Benedictine convent where she was an impoverished serving maid to the wealthy nuns. Clare was left alone there to defend herself from her angry family, who tried by force to bring her home. She defied them clinging literally to the altar itself. The friars prepared San Damiano as a home for her and the others who would follow; and there were many.

This boldness would accompany Clare long after Francis was dead. She would face down armies in battle, Popes and Bishops, and the preconceived notions of her day. She would become the first woman to write an approved rule for community, a community rooted in `the privilege of poverty'.

Clare fought for and obtained from Rome the strange Privilege of Poverty, which she felt to be the hidden heart of community. She redefined poverty as an economic relationship to the world, in which we work to give away and in turn receive from the mercy and generosity of others in order to live. Here work is clearly a choice of communion with others. Living becomes a radical affirmation of interdependence on the other; the generosity of an all embracing divinely charged co-arising universe. This is no avowal of a grinding down poverty that diminishes the human person. Like the celebration of the give away in the great Native American potlatches or the banquet of Wisdom in the Hebrew Testament it is a radical assertion of lavish mutual sharing, the great feast of life.

Clare acted in boldness and commitment to the life of penance, a life rooted not in the conditioning of her world, but in a radical rooting in the great unseen source. This was exemplified for her in the life of Jesus and Francis, a life of doing it another way apart from the cultural mores of time and place. Like Francis she left the illusions of safety to risk the life of simplicity and holy freedom. She is such a challenge!

My soul waits for the Lord,

more than watchmen for the morning.

More than watchmen for the morning,

my soul waits for the Lord.

I have no haughty looks; I am not proud.

I do not occupy myself with great matters,

or with things that are too hard for me,

but I still my soul and make it quite,

like a child upon its mother's breast;

my soul is quiet within me.

Waiting for the holy presence is a quality of being both in action and non action. Clare guided her community throughout the day in the prayer of the hours, in the work of gardening and baking, in tending the sick; what was there that was not prayer? Where was God not, if he could be found in the tiniest morsel of bread? These women shared the compassionate life together and with the poor around them.

Clare adjusted to the way of the enclosure, a common form of expression for women religious in the thirteenth century. She could have chosen hermitage or the life of a solitary but instead she chose community. One could feel today, seeing through a modern lens, that this enclosed community might be cut off from life. But these sisters experienced a relationship with their valley below Assisi and with Assisi itself that reminds us of the ancient goddess temples, unceasingly in prayer for harmonious balance and protection of the country and city from which they sprang. The city of Assisi experienced this concretely in Clare's active intervention of two invasions, her active role in creating family alliances with other cities, the community healing prayers for the city's protection and for individuals, the community sharing with the poor. In the great round, the people of the city left food and seeds for the sisters. The very land, garden, space around San Damiano was tended and tilled with love. These many sisters of Clare shared with Francis the experience of union with all beings. They offer us a bold benediction today to risk our security in the collective illusions of separation; to boldly seek union with God, ourselves and one another.