St. Clare of Assisi: Light From the Cloister by Bret Thoman

Author:Bret Thoman [Thoman, Bret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TAN Books
Published: 2017-07-25T05:00:00+00:00

10

JUST ONE PRIVILEGE

For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.

SONG OF SOLOMON 2:11–12

ONCE they passed through the gate of San Damiano, Francis showed Clare and her sister around. There, she felt a deep peace and a profound joy. In the silence and stillness of the little church and cloister, she felt holiness envelope her in love and security. For there in that little space were no privileges except one: poverty.

Clare sensed that this was the ideal place for her to follow in the footsteps of the lesser Christ—the first and truest minor. She knew immediately that it fully exemplified the charism that Francis, and now she, sought so wholeheartedly to follow.

For Francis, poverty was the primary charism he had received from the Lord, and it underpinned everything else he did. For Clare, it would be no different: the bedrock of her new life had to be built with poverty at its foundation. There, she would fully and radically embrace poverty; it would be the heart of her life.89

First, the location of San Damiano was ideal. It was well outside the city walls of Assisi. The town walls for the people in Francis’s and Clare’s day did more than just protect the city from invaders: they delineated the boundaries of identity and belonging. Within the walls were so many districts and neighborhoods that, despite the civil war fought just a few years earlier, were still separated by class and status.

But around San Damiano, instead, were the marginalized and the poor: the sick, the thieves, and the lepers. And this is where Clare, too, would live—with the outcast. By living outside the walls, Clare would be outside the social context of Assisi as well as the city’s politics and social practices. And she would be free of it. Like Francis, Clare, too, would live poor among the poor. In this, not only would she have solidarity with them, she would become like them.

Further exemplifying poverty to Clare was San Damiano’s function. In addition to serving the local farmers and poor people, it was also used as a place of refuge for pilgrims—known as Romeos—passing through the Spoleto Valley on their way to or from Rome, as it was located just off the old road known as the Via Antiqua.90 And it was busy, as the old road was an important and well-traveled thoroughfare connecting Perugia and Foligno. Further, just beyond Perugia to the west ran the important medieval road, the Sienese Via Francigena, that conjoined Rome with France, whereas to the east of Assisi—through Foligno—ran the ancient Roman road, the Via Flaminia, that conjoined Rome with the Adriatic Sea.

Clare thought for a moment about the pilgrims who passed through San Damiano. She, too, would live like them: poor and dependent on Providence. She, too, would like to live as a “pilgrim and stranger,” like the prophets of old who had no earthly country of their own, but belonged only to a heavenly one.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.