Clare and Francis

  What profit would there be for one to        

 gain the whole world and forfeit his life?

There was no woman on earth that St. Francis loved more than Clare.  Spiritually they were bound as one by the love of poverty and dependence upon God for all things. Clare, for her part, loved only God more than Francis.  She abandoned the world and Francis himself cut her hair and presented her with the habit that she would wear along with many women of like spirituality that would take the same habit and form the order known as The Poor Clares.  Clare would reign as leader of this group who went shoeless and slept on the floor for forty-two years. This manner of living in a convent was quite different than the norm at the time.  Convents admitted two types of nuns into their order at the time, basically those from the upper class who would bring with them huge amounts of money as a dowry and those that could bring very little.  The two classes were treated very differently indeed.  The well-off would spend their time doing womanly, refined things while those from the lower classes did the menial chores of the house.  In the Poor Clares, all were equal, all depended upon God for their very lives.  It came to pass that the Saracens, we would call them Muslims or Moslems, were laying waste to Europe at the time.  They approached the Poor Clare convent and instead of fleeing for their lives, the Poor Clares stayed put and in prayer.  Clare retrieved the Eucharist from the chapel and stood at the gate of the convent and prayed for God to deliver them. She heard a voice saying to her, "I will always protect you."  The Saracens approached but when they saw Clare in the doorway holding the Eucharist, they felt an overpowering sense of fear and dread and fled in terror. 

Clare and Francis were separate societies of women and men who spent their life depending on God for everything.  They lived a life of work and prayer and by their example they showed God's love for the poor.  Today, we flee from poverty, we flee from anything that makes us the least bit uncomfortable.  We work hard to gain the things of this world, a fancy home, and car, rich food, pleasures and good times, and we congratulate ourselves like the rich man whose life was required by God that very night. 

While we may not be ready to do what Clare and Francis did, we can certainly live more simply and not be dazzled by the wonders of this world so much that our vision of what is to come is blinded.  Maybe we should learn to depend on less ourselves and more on Our Father.