The Year of the Vocation of St Clare
A Reflection
The Eighth Centenary Logo
At the centre of the logo is a pearl. The Kingdom of heaven, to which we all have a vocation, is symbolized by a pearl, which, the Lord tells us, takes all we have and are to buy.
The pearl is surrounded by four doorways: the Door of the Dead by which St Clare left her former life and family, the door of the Portiuncula which she passed through to receive new life, the door of San Damiano where she spent the remaining years of her life and the door to Eternal Life.The gift of Mercy
Live & give Life
The message which we have chosen for the year is: Live and give Life. Clare was not chosen for herself alone, but to adore God and to intercede for the Church and the world. We, her Sisters, live for others. As J.R.R.Tolkien has Frodo say, at the end of The Lord of the Rings, ‘When things are in danger, someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.’ The falling church of San Damiano where St Francis places St Clare is a thing ‘in danger’ that symbolizes the whole Church. But anything we might give or give up so as to repair it, is minute in comparison with what the Lord gives us: a hundredfold here below and in heaven, eternal life - if not without persecutions.
Called by name
Jesus called Clare to follow him. In Latin to call is ‘vocare’. The Lord calls each one of us, by name; we all have a ‘vocation’ to live in him.
To us, the Lord says, ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who on finding one pearl of great value went and sold all he had and bought it.’ (Mt.13:45-46). The pearl of the kingdom is of unlimited value, yes - but it costs not less than everything! Clare sold what she had and gave it to the poor.
We receive a gift of unlimited value in baptism. To be baptized, to be in Christ, comes to us as a gift, and, like all God’s gifts, we have no way of giving anything commensurate to him in return. What he asks us to do is give what we would give him to our brothers and sisters. Love one another as I have loved you (John 13:34), sell what you have and give it to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me (Mt 19:21). Jesus chose the image of a pearl for the kingdom of Heaven.
Pearls
What is a pearl? Interestingly, it is a minute piece of grit, a tiny irritation that rolls around trying the patience of an oyster. The oyster is like the Church: not always impressive from the outside, but inside she is full of radiance and colour.
The grit inside the oyster gradually picks up the radiance of the inner shell and is slowly absorbed into the pearl and disappears. Not all pearls are perfect, that is, perfectly spherical - some are very odd shapes, but they all shine with the nacre of the parent oyster. We are not all saints who will be canonized, but our Mother, the church has given us all her shine.
Clare is a pearl. Many poets and theologians, like the Franciscan, Alexander of Hales and the author of the medieval mystical poem ‘The Pearl’, have equated pearls with innocence and virginity. Not merely in the superficial, physical sense but with regard to the inner spiritual core of a person’s being; the simple intactness of who a person is; in the place where one encounters God.
Clare invites us to live from our integrity in God. The love of the Lord does not take anything away from our life. He gives us love, freedom and ever widening horizons into the kingdom. Clare says of Christ, ‘When you have loved Him, you shall be chaste; when you have touched Him, you shall become pure; when you have accepted Him, you shall be a virgin.’ Virginity is a person’s future in God.
Doorways
To pass through an open door is to invite change into your life. To re-phrase the well known words of Blessed John Henry Newman: to love is to change, to love well is to change often, proceeding, as St Paul indicates, from glory to glory.
Wales, where we live, retains more of its prehistoric aspect than any other part of Britain, short of Stonehenge. Prehistoric stone circles can be found at Bryn Cader Faner, Carn Llechart, St Non’s Head and Moel Ty Uchaf amongst others, but stone quoits or Dolmen - two or three enormous stone uprights topped by a third monolith to form an apparent door going into seemingly nowhere, are strewn around all over the Principality. Some like St Illtud’s ‘Bedd’ were converted into hermitages for early Celtic monks, but they are far older and do not seem originally to have been either buildings, tombs or altars. Yet huge effort must have gone into erecting them.
C. S. Lewis is fond of presenting such symbolic doorways in his stories. At the end of ‘Prince Caspian’ the children and others pass through a space like a door frame to return to their own world. In ‘The Last Battle’ the stable door, viewed from the new heaven and earth, is simply a door without a building of any sort; but at the end when it is opened, all creation passes through it.
Clare’s passage through life is marked by four such doors.
The First Door
the Door of the Dead
Clare cannot leave home on the night of Palm Sunday, 1212, by walking through the portal of her family domain on the new Cathedral Square in Assisi, without question, nor can she slip through discretely without compromising, Ioanni de Ventura the Man at Arms on the door who, oddly, was one of the witnesses at her canonization. So, taking with her Dona Bona, a widowed relative, who also witnessed at the process of her canonization, Clare went to the cellar and with a strength she did not know she had, according to the author of her first life, hauled away by main force, the stones and timbers barring the “other door”. This may have been the so-called Door of the Dead which, in Assisi and elsewhere, existed in the houses of those too superstitious to have the deceased leave by the main gate. Clare’s house was the fortified stronghold of seven knights and if this door was not guarded, the household must have considered it sufficiently impregnable to resist attack - at least from the outside! This grim struggle with immovable objects, in the darkness of an underground place is a parable of God’s grace. God gives us the strength to fulfil the call he has given us.
Clare steps out of the dark into the light of the stars and the three-quarter Paschal moon. For her, living God’s call begins in Holy Week, but all her life she will see the Lord’s agony, his crucifixion and death, not in terms of suffering, but in terms of love. She has begun her pilgrimage through the Paschal Mystery into the Clare-clear light of Easter, on her way to the door of the Kingdom of heaven.
The Second Door
the door of the Portiuncula
The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us. Though those who worship the Father must worship him in Spirit and truth, Christianity is the religion of people and places. Christ really became man. In a real place. In Bethlehem. He really died on Calvary. He really rose from the Sepulchre. Our life is a pilgrimage on which, as St Clare says, ‘The Son of God has become our way.’ He is the Door - as he said himself and he is the Way.
On Clare’s pilgrimage, the Portiuncula is a place like Bethlehem. It is a place to be born. It saw the birth of the fraternity of the Family of the Lesser Brothers. It saw the emergence into light of the real person Clare was to become. It is the Little Portion of the Mother of God, who, in the mystery of God’s choice, took the Franciscan family into her maternal womb. For Mary is, as Francis called her in his Salutation, the Virgin made Church.
Nowhere is Mary more conspicuously the Virgin made Church than in the Portiuncula. One of Pope Benedict’s first gestures was to give the Assisi Basilicas a Cardinal Legate like the four great basilicas in Rome, because as he wrote in Moto Propio, Totius orbis, the whole world regards them with special consideration. Before the doorway of the Portiuncula, Blessed John Paul II was the first to gather the world’s religions in a dialogue of peace
This is the place to which Clare came as the seed of a little plant, and from which she departed a great tree in whom the birds of heaven could take refuge. It is the place of her Annunciation and her fiat.
The Third Door
The door of San Damiano
St Clare spent forty one years in San Damiano. She passed through its door as one entering into the life of Jesus. She lived reflected, as her letters say, in the mirror of his birth in poverty, his public ministry, and his death and glorification. His life was reflected in her life of holy poverty and highest unity.
His love was reflected in hers. She prayed and protected her city against the Saracen mercenaries of Vitale d’Aversa. She adored God - and at his request, discerned Francis’ vocation for him when he needed to decide whether he was to be a solitary hermit or a missionary preacher. She healed the sick of body or spirit who came to her. Of her, Pope Gregory IX wrote: ‘You are my one hope on earth.’ And after Francis died she was ‘Our Mother, Sister Clare’, to his faithful brothers, who thus inscribed the breviary made for her. She rebuilt the Church by her life, obeying Christ’s command from the cross of San Damiano, and she fulfilled his prophecy which he made before he had a single brother: 'Here will come to dwell (again) holy women by whose life the Church will be rebuilt.' And it was from San Damiano that Jesus opened for Clare the door into heaven.
The Fourth Door
The Door of Heaven
‘After this I looked,’ St John wrote, ‘and there in Heaven, a door stood open. (Rev.4:1) Heaven must have looked something like earth to the dying Clare. Spectacular in seven dimensions and with a stupendous cast, but the community were still singing ‘day and night without ceasing’, as she and her sisters had done on earth. Seeing this she exclaimed, ‘Vade secura, go forth safely, for you have a good escort. Go for he who created you has made you holy he has sent you his Holy Spirit and has protected you as a mother does her child. He has loved you with a very tender love. Blessed are you O Lord who has created me’
She turned to Sister Amata, who was seated by her bed, and murmured, “Do you see the King of Glory whom I see?”
In her, for all of us, the Spirit and the Bride said, “Come.”
There is no light in the city for the Lamb is its light. The weight of his glory is reflected in the mirror of the saints. This is where Clare’s ‘Yes’ leads. It is an invitation to all of us.
A flame of fire
In our beginning is our ending:
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
and the fire and the rose are one. (TS. Elliot, Four Quartets)
Behind the pearl and the symbolic doorways is a streak of flame, symbolic of the Burning Bush.
Moses was looking after his father-in-law’s sheep, he was fulfilling his obligations to every day life in the wilderness - and we all live in a wilderness. ‘The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of the bush’ (Ex. 3:1-6)
Moses beheld the bush and took hold of the mysterious reality that the bush was always burning but never consumed. The Lord waited for him to behold the bush and to hold on to the concept before he called him by name. Moses as a name, Scripture tells us, means ‘drawn out of’ - he had been drawn out of the river Nile, but the name of the river was not added to his name and we can say with certainty that before all he was drawn out of God’s heart. Moses beholds and holds and he lets himself be enfolded by God’s call - his ‘vocation’. He answers ‘here I am’, hinayni, in Hebrew; ‘yes’, in other words. He discovers he is on holy ground and like Clare he takes off his sandals.
One of the marks of Poor Clare life is going barefoot, for the whole world is holy ground. For Clare as for Benedict XVI ‘the cross is the Burning Bush’ (Jesus of Nazareth I) In her second letter to St Agnes of Prague, Clare invites us to turn to the Lord and to gaze upon Him, consider Him, contemplate Him. As the original Latin formed a rhyming tag; videre, intuere, contemplare we chose to translate it as behold, hold and enfold. If Francis’ steps to the kingdom of heaven were to listen, behold and enfold, Clare moved toward God by seeing; she spent her life beholding, holding and enfolding the icon of the Crucified and Risen Christ that is the cross of San Damiano to whose voice Francis had listened when God had mandated him to rebuild the Church.
The burning bush is before us; the Lord is with us always and in every place. Clare beholds God’s burning mystery in her life and she invites us to do the same.