The Second Order of the Poor Clares increased as quickly as the First Order of the Friars Minor. Almost at once other women came from Assisi to join the two sisters, one of the first being Bianca Guelfucci, and after the death of Clare’s father the Lady Ortolana and her daughter Beatrice came too; and so five ladies of that noble family were together in the order. Agnes remained with Clare at San Damiano for seven years and then, as other houses of the Poor Clares were springing up all over Italy and needed women who were already experienced in the life of prayer and poverty to guide them, she was sent, at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three, to be abbess of the convent of Monticelli near Florence. She lived there for more than thirty years, and through all those years she never saw her adored Clare. The parting must have been anguish to the two sisters, but when they took their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience they had known and accepted the suffering that obedience might bring. When Clare was dying Agnes was allowed to come to her and the two were together again, and the next parting was short, for Agnes outlived Clare by only three months and was buried near her sister. In the convent and church of Santa Chiara at Assisi two precious relics are preserved. One is the casket containing the curling fair hair that Francis cut off when Clare knelt before the altar of Santa Maria degli Angeli on the night of Palm Sunday, and the other is the skull of Agnes. It is very small, suggesting that Agnes was a little creature, and that those thirty years of being an abbess without Clare to help her stand for one of the unknown heroisms of this world.
2
OF ALL THE FRANCISCAN HOLY PLACES San Damiano is the least changed. A great church now encloses the Portiuncula and the little church of Santa Maria degli Angeli cowers down inside it, as though terrified by all the grandeur piled on top, but San Damiano still stands under the open sky, simple, humble, and holy as it always was. You can still see, almost unchanged, the chapel where Clare and her sisters knelt in adoring love before the crucifix that spoke to Francis, and the worn stone staircase outside the chapel door leading to the sisters’ dormitory, stairs where Clare went up and down for over forty years, and the refectory where they ate their simple meals. Celano says of San Damiano, “This is that happy and holy place,” and here, more than anywhere, the pilgrim of today can feel near to the man and woman whose holiness still so enlightens the earth, can reach back through the centuries and make some contact with them. Here it is not hard to imagine the life of the sisters as it was so steadfastly lived right through the years until the death of Clare. It was modeled as closely as possible upon that of the brothers, except that the Second Order was an enclosed order and the sisters might not leave the precincts of their convent. With them, as with the brothers, prayer came first, the saying of the offices and the hidden costly discipline of contemplative prayer, and intercession, that supported their labors for the sick. As they could not leave San Damiano they could not nurse the lepers as the brothers did but other sick people were brought to them at San Damiano to be cared for. They mended the clothes of their sick, patched the habits of the brothers and spun the thread for the altar cloths and corporals which they made for the brothers to distribute among the poor churches of the district. They worked hard within their enclosure, nursing, spinning, weaving, sewing, cooking, and cleaning, and looking after their vegetable garden. When the food produced by their garden was not enough the brothers went questing for them, and they ate at the table of the Lord with the same joy and thankfulness that Francis had felt when he sat down with his first platter of scraps of food and found it was a sacrament.
Yet in all this it is probable that there was an element of tragedy for Clare. She had not wanted to be an enclosed nun. She had great strength of character, high courage, and a love of adventure, and she had wanted to do as the brothers did and carry the love of Christ to the dark places of the earth, to the poor and the wicked in their squalor and misery, to the prisoners, the lepers and the heathen. She was a woman who would have found herself understood by Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale, but she was born before her time, in which the choice was between marriage or enclosure, and her longing to serve Christ adventurously seems not to have been understood even by Francis. But she was utterly obedient to Francis from the beginning to the end, accepting the rule he had devised for her as the will of God himself and finding her peace in the perfection of obedience. Only once was there an outbreak of passionate longing that shows how hard to bear, at times, the frustration must have been. When she heard of the heroic death of the Franciscan missionaries in Morocco she cried out that she must go out there and be a martyr too, and Francis had hard work to restrain her from breaking her enclosure and setting out at once, as Teresa of Avila had done as a little girl.
She obeyed, turning back again to her own private venture of heroic prayer. For if she had to be an enclosed nun, hers was no ordinary enclosure. Like Angela of Foligno a little later she set to work to strip herself of every smallest comfort, even those things which most people consider necessities, that she might take poverty to her heart as entirely as Francis had done and be set free to have nothing but Christ and be nothing but the thrall of Christ. Her bed was a pallet and her pillow a piece of wood. But she slept little, for like Francis she had trained herself to be as abstemious over sleep as over food. When compline, the last office for the day, had been said, and the sisters had gone to bed, she stayed on alone in the chapel, kneeling before the crucifix and praying the crucis officium, the prayers in honor of the cross of Christ which Francis had arranged and taught her. When she left the chapel she would go softly, like a mother to her nursery, to the dormitory where her nuns lay sleeping to see if all was well with them, and if the night was chilly she would spread an extra covering over the delicate ones that they might not catch cold. Though she held them to their strict discipline, she had for them the same exquisite tenderness that Francis had for the brothers, and all her maternity was poured out upon them. It was she who woke them in the morning, lit the lamps, and rang the bell for early mass.
As her holiness grew so did the power of her prayer. Mysteriously, as the years passed, her light shone out, and without anyone but God knowing quite how it was happening she became a great power in the world. Her prayers were asked for, her advice sought, not only by her beloved poor but by queens, popes, and cardinals; for it was one of the paradoxes of the Franciscan movement that although vowed to poverty and pledged to the service of the poor and suffering, it took the rich by storm. Perhaps it laid such siege to their hearts because Francis, and his sons and daughters taught by him, saw no difference between the rich and the poor. “A man’s worth,” said Francis, “is what he is in the sight of God and no more.” But if he thought no better of a man because he had a fine castle and fine clothes, neither did he, like so many reformers, think the less. He wooed the rich for Christ with exactly the same gentle love as he wooed the outcasts, and they responded as readily. So with Clare. She turned from nursing her sick to answer the letters of Queen Agnes of Bohemia and Queen Elizabeth of Hungary, and sometimes it was a poor beggar who came knocking at her door, and sometimes it was the pope, and all alike were the children of her love and prayers. The great Cardinal Ugolino wrote to her with humble love: “Although I have always felt myself to be a poor sinful man, now that I have become acquainted with the pre-eminence of your merits, and with my own eyes have seen the austerity of your religion, now, I say, I know for sure that I am not in a state to die: I am so weighed down by the burden of guilt and have offended so grievously against the Lord of the whole earth, that I can never hope to be gathered to the company of the elect unless by your prayers and tears you obtain for me forgiveness of my sins.” The strength that her prayers were to Francis he knew, perhaps, but no one else could know.
Her loyalty to him was unshakable. At no time, either during his lifetime or after his death, when changes that were contrary to his wish and will were taking place in the First Order, would she allow any lessening of the austerity of the rule of the Second Orde
r. Francis had laid down evangelical poverty as its foundation stone, and she would have no other. Four popes in succession begged her, now that the times were changing, to accept a little property, but she would never give in. Pope Innocent IV managed to stand out against her determination for some while but though she was ill and dying she beat him in the end. Her reply to an offer to release her from her vow of poverty was, “Holy Father, free me from my sins, but not from following our Lord Christ.” Two days before she died she received and kissed a parchment bearing the pope’s signature and securing for the Poor Clares of San Damiano the right to live to the end as Francis would have wished.
Clare lived for twenty-four years after the death of Francis, and for much of this time she was ill, for she too had worn out her body with austerities. She was ill when the army of the emperor once more came down upon them, laying waste the valley of Spoleto and besieging Assisi, and Saracen archers surrounded San Damiano. The nuns, terrified, ran to Clare, but though she was so ill she was not alarmed. She had herself carried to the door of the convent that she might be the first to bear the brunt of what might come, and she sent some of the sisters to the chapel to fetch the silver and ivory ciborium that held the Host. Then kneeling before the Host she prayed aloud. “Doth it please thee, O my God, to deliver the defenseless children whom I have nourished with my love into the hands of these beasts? Protect them, good Lord, I beseech thee, whom I at this hour am not able to protect.” And when she had prayed she heard the Voice say to her, “I will always be your guardian,” and she got up from her knees confident and unafraid, to comfort her nuns. The Saracens changed their minds about breaking into San Damiano and took themselves off elsewhere.
Toward the end of her life, when physical activity was over for her, she would lie in her tiny garden sewing, surrounded by her flowers, for this one Franciscan luxury, flowers, was one that she did not deny herself. These first Franciscans, with their wholesome common sense which protected their austerity from the morbidness which crept into the mortifications of so many saints, never turned their backs on anything that spoke to them of God’s love and care and beauty. Birds and flowers, trees, sunlight and water, were not luxuries but the Word of God. Her little garden was only a terrace four paces long, but creepers grew over it and in it she planted lilies, roses, and violets, that they should speak to her of the purity, love, and humility of Christ. Her life of enclosure is described by Celano in words that bring this garden vividly to mind. “Here she found shelter from the storm of the world, and here she remained as long as she lived, shut up as it were in a dungeon for love of Jesus Christ. Here, in a hole in the wall like a most fair dove, she made herself a nest.” From this little place there is a wonderful view. One can see Rivo-Torto, the Portiuncula, the winding roads, the olive groves, and the distant blue mountains. Probably there was not a day of her life that she did not come here and look out toward the dwelling place of Francis, for whether his physical presence was there or not it held his spirit. The nature of the love that this man and woman felt for each other has been a source of worry to some of their biographers, who do not seem to have been content to leave it where they themselves left it, in the hands of God. Francis always spoke of the nuns of San Damiano as “the ladies,” but Clare herself he called Christiana, and there we have it in a nutshell. Everything in the lives of both of them was so subordinate to the love of Christ that it could have no existence apart from him.
Clare died on August the 11th, 1253, the Feast of San Ruffino the patron saint of the cathedral, when she was sixty years old, comforted in her dying not only by Agnes but by three old men who had loved Francis as dearly as she had, Brother Leo, Brother Angelo and Brother Juniper. Celano writes of her death with simplicity and beauty. “It seemed that her agony was to be a long one, and during those last weary days of labor, the faith and devotion of the people increased more and more. Nay, every day, and many times a day, prelates and cardinals came to visit her for all men were thoroughly convinced that this dying woman was in sooth a great saint. And strange to say, although during the last seventeen days of her life she was unable to take any kind of food, the Lord comforted her with such fortitude that all who beheld her were strengthened in the service of Christ.” When she was exhorted to patience “she made answer with a stout heart, ‘From the day when I first knew the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ through his servant Francis no pain has seemed grievous to me, no penance hard, no sickness difficult to bear.’ And when the Lord took pity on her and was knocking, as it were, at the gate, she desired to have the assistance of priests and devout men, and that they should tell her the story of Christ’s passion, and amongst them that came to console her was Brother Juniper, that mighty hurler before the Lord, who used to hurl from his very heart the words of the Lord red-hot. . . . Then she blessed all who had been kind to her, women as well as men, and she blessed, too, all the monasteries of poor ladies, present and to come. The rest – who can tell it without weeping? There were present then two of the holy companions of blessed Francis. One of them, Angelo, with his own eyes streaming with tears, was striving as best he could to comfort the weeping sisters; and as for the other, Leo, he knelt down and kissed the couch on which the dying saint was laid. . . . But blessed Clare was communing thus with her own soul softly: ‘Go forth, Christian soul, go forth without fear, for thou hast a good Guide for thy journey. Go forth without fear, for he that created thee hath sanctified thee, always hath he protected thee, and he loveth thee with the love of a mother.’ And when one of the sisters asked her to whom she was talking: ‘I am talking to mine own soul,’ she said; and truly her glorious Guide was not far off, for presently, turning to one of them, she said, ‘Can you see the King of Glory whom I see?’ . . . Thus was the passing of blessed Clare. . . . Her holy soul went forth and, exulting in its freedom, soared on the wings of gladness to the place which God had prepared for it.”
3
THERE IS A STORY in The Little Flowers of Saint Francis of Francis and Clare together, and though it would seem to be a legend, for we are told that Clare never left the precincts of San Damiano, it nonetheless tells the truth about them both. The story tells how she longed to share a meal with Francis, and when he came to visit the sisters she would beg him that they might eat together, but he would not grant her wish. Then the brothers remonstrated with him for his severity. It was because of his preaching, they said, that Clare had forsaken the world, and could he not let her have her wish in this? So Francis yielded and said he would arrange a little feast for her at the Portiuncula. The day came and Clare with one of her nuns came out from her convent, and was met by the brothers and brought into the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, as they had brought her on the night when she ran away from home, and before the altar where she had made her vows she knelt and prayed. Then, “her salutation to maid Mary given,” she was led to the feast, which was laid on the bare ground. As this was a feast and not a mere meal perhaps there was a salad of herbs, and vegetables from the garden, as well as bread and water, and Francis at the first dish was overwhelmed by the thought of God’s bounty, and began to speak of his love so wonderfully that they were all caught up into prayer. Everything was forgotten except God, they sat there adoring him and the light of heaven streamed out from the wood so brightly that the people of Assisi, looking down from the city, thought the Portiuncula and the trees around it were on fire and ran down the hill to the rescue. They found no fire but only the two saints and their companions sitting around the untouched meal rapt in contemplation of the glory of God.
If the climax of the story was suggested to its writer by the message to Clare’s mother, “You shall bring forth a light whose rays shall enlighten the earth,” no story about Clare and Francis could have a more satisfying ending.
Chapter 9
The Third Order
Seeking thy honor in all things and with all our strength, by spending all the powers and senses of body and soul in the service of thy love and not in anythi
ng else; and that we may love our neighbors even as ourselves, drawing to the best of our power all to thy love.
WRITINGS OF SAINT FRANCIS
WHEN FRANCIS ARRIVED AT Ancona after his unsuccessful attempt to go as a missionary to the infidels, worn and tired after shipwreck and storm and perhaps dispirited by failure, he did not know that the providence of God would use this failure to bring great things to pass. Because he returned to Ancona just when he did, in the spring of 1213, he received the gift of the mountain of Alvernia, and in the divine pattern of things that gift played its great part not only in his own life but also in the creation of the Third Order. He could not know this but he was accustomed to see in the circumstances brought about by any honest attempt to serve God, even if the attempt had seemed to end in disaster, an indication of God’s further will for him. He had failed, and like a little child running after his father had fallen headlong, and now he must pick himself up and set his feet once more in the footsteps of his Lord. So from Ancona he set off at once on a preaching mission and found himself some while later in the foothills of the Apennines, on the borders of Tuscany. Here he heard that at Montefeltro in the mountains there was to be a tournament in celebration of the knighthood of a young kinsman of the Lord of Montefeltro.
A tournament in the mountains in the spring, with the lists set in the meadows full of flowers, the singing of the troubadours at evening in the great castle, the dancing, and all the grace and color of a knightly occasion made an irresistible appeal to Francis. The troubadour he had once longed to be was not dead in him, merely transmuted into the jongleur de Dieu, and he decided at once to take his own light heart and the song in his soul up the mountain to Montefeltro. As he trudged up the steep road toward the castled village on its high rocky ledge he could see the castle itself towering up against the brilliant blue sky with banners flying from the tower and trumpets ringing out their welcome from the walls. All the ways up to the castle were thronged, for this was a great occasion for the countryside. From all the castles that crowned the hilltops of the neighborhood gay cavalcades had ridden forth, the knights in armor followed by their young esquires, each with that little round buckler of a page upon his arm that once Francis himself had carried, the women wearing the tall stiff headdresses and the brilliant gowns with jeweled girdles that were de rigueur upon festive occasions. Perhaps as the lovely ladies swung by in their litters, Francis remembered Clare in the dignity and beauty of her youth, sitting in the cathedral at Assisi listening to his preaching, and his thoughts reached quickly out to her where she was now, praying before the crucifix at San Damiano, dressed in the habit of his order. Or a knight riding past would remind him of his son Angelo, or the fine patrician bearing of some nobleman of his beloved Ruffino, and he prayed for them all. There were humbler folk upon the road too, peddlers, minstrels, and mountebanks, and within the shadow of his hood Francis’s bright eyes sparkled with delight and interest. And also with love. Many must have turned to smile at the little trudging friar in his gray habit, and then as their eyes met his his deep clear voice rang out with, “God give thee his peace.” How he must have longed to gather them all into God’s kingdom, and perhaps even then, though the time was not yet, his thoughts were busy with all those men and women for whom life in the world was God’s will but yet whose hearts were hungry for some sort of discipline upon their lives, some inner dedication that should give purpose and sanctity to what they did, and must do, in the world.