The radical among us
The feast of Saint Clare of Assisi is August 11.
Chief among Francis' followers was a woman who was a leader in her own right. The young noblewoman Chiara Di Offreduccio, Clare, was an intelligent, educated, and pious person. Her own family castle had been sacked during the social upheavals in Assisi. She was well-bred, well-to-do, and meant for the better things in life. When she heard Francis preach, however, she knew that his call to radical poverty was hers as well.
To follow her own special call in life, she took steps unprecedented for women of the time. She rejected her family. After Francis' death, she contested with the men of the Franciscan movement in order to maintain the kind of sacramental and theological contact with the male branch that she felt was necessary to the ongoing spiritual development of a group of cloistered women. She refused special treatment as a woman. She wanted to live the Franciscan life without being subjected to mitigating circumstances. She refused as well the kind of economic "protection" in the form of dowries and property that the church mandated that being a woman required in order to institutionalize the life of penance and total renunciation to which they were committed. She struggled with the pope and his assumptions about what women could and couldn't do in order to get the constitutions she wanted for the women's communities. She threw herself on the providence of God and the sense of obligation to others that cloistered orders without means of support bring to a society, by refusing the right for the the order to own anything whatsoever, legacies, endowments, or property.
Clare was the one, in other words, who really proved that what Francis talked about was doable for people in general, even pampered upper-class ones.
In the end, Francis and Clare brought five things to the world that shocked all of Europe into a new consciousness and that call to us yet today. They brought a call to peace; a consciousness of the poor; a sign that it is possible to be happy without things; a radical reading of the Gospel of Christ that depoliticizes the meaning of conversion; and a new sense of the feminine.
The call for peace was a constant. The archdeacon of Spalato wrote of Francis, "The exclusive aim of all his utterances was to dissolve hatreds and restore peace."
A consciousness of the poor in a society that had long since made them invisible was an essential. Francis and Clare, the wealthy ones who became voluntarily what others had never had the opportunity to choose, put poverty in a new light. Perhaps, the sight of "nice" people in bad situations says to us that maybe, just maybe, the poor are not destined by God to be poor. Perhaps poverty is not the sign of the inept. Perhaps poverty is not a mark of lack of character. Perhaps poverty is a sinful residue of a sinful system that blames the victim for its victimage. Perhaps poverty is something about which we all have a responsibility.
The radical among us make us look again at the nature and function of religion and what it does to us and what we do to it. It is so easy to use religion as a way to escape it. It is so much easier to go to church than it is to live the Gospel. In Francis and Clare we see religion for what it is––not as a social nicety, not as a cultural condition of life, not as a political tool for the control of the masses. In Francis and Clare religion stands as a stark reminder of the raw and radical call of the Gospel.
The new sense of the feminine willed to the world by Francis and Clare lies in the image of Clare's clear strength and Francis' commanding gentleness. In these two the world gets a bewitching glimpse of mighty powerlessness.
The legacy of two intrepidly simple people who would not accept life as it was because it could be so much better is as much a gift to the twenty first century as it was to the thirteenth.
––from A Passion for Life: Fragments of the Face of God, by Joan Chittister
