Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi by Richard Rohr

Author:Richard Rohr [Rohr, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Mysticism, Spirituality, Religion, Christian Life, Spiritual Growth, Religion & Spirituality
ISBN: 9781616367022
Google: i3oZBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Franciscan Media
Published: 2014-07-28T22:16:07.978970+00:00

A Spirituality for All

Clare protects and offers us a contemplative spirituality for both women and men, for celibates and partnered, for extroverts and introverts (although, I admit, more for introverts), for people with souls and bodies, and even people both Christian and non-Christian. Using our “beyond the birdbath” metaphor, Clare’s kind of wisdom helps us take flight in a very different way. Her life was so uncluttered, with such depth and clarity in choosing and facing human limitation, that she created a lifestyle that made both depth and divine encounter highly possible, emotionally necessary, and normally inevitable. That would summarize my admiration of her and her chosen lifestyle, and why she ends up grounding the whole Franciscan enterprise in truth and in depth.

Sometimes even popes can be poetic, as we hear in the sermon that Alexander IV preached at her canonization in 1255: “Hidden within, she extended herself abroad. Yes, she hid, yet her life has now come to light. Chiara was silent yet her fame is now proclaimed everywhere. She lived in a small cell, and will henceforth be known in the cities of the world.”138 She is one of only a handful of women whose personal writings have come down to us from the first thirteen hundred years of Christianity, even though she was minimally educated. Hers is the first Rule for women that we know of. That is what inner experience and spiritual education can do for the soul and for us.

Ken Wilber, the contemporary Thomas Aquinas on things philosophical and spiritual, sums up Clare’s final experience when he says, “If the doors of perception are cleansed, the entire Cosmos is your lost and found Beloved, the Original Face of primordial Beauty, forever and forever, and endlessly forever. And in the face of that stunning Beauty, you will completely swoon into your own death.”139 And that’s exactly what Clare did!

Her final recorded words seem to indicate this very phenomenon, almost as if she is joyfully watching her own departure and trustfully speaks directly to her own soul in beautiful feminine images: “Go forth now, you have a good escort. The one who created you has provided for you. The one who created you will guard you as a mother does her little child.”140

For Clare, her ending is assured and set in motion by her beginning, as it is, in fact, for all of us (Ephesians 1:4–6). But she knew it, claimed it, and loved it, and thanked God “for letting her live.”141

Now she herself serves as a trustworthy escort for those of us who follow after her.

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