At the end of her life, St. Clare shared a
beautiful summary of her spiritual life with St. Agnes of Prague.
After extolling the sublime dignity of
spiritual marriage with Christ, the Seraphic Mother declares:
Happy is she to whom it is given to
cling with
all her heart to Him whose Love inflames our love.
As the rest of the letter unfolds,
it is obvious that Clare is writing from personal experience, that she knows
what it is to have the fire of God’s Love inflame her love.
From
Genesis to Revelation, the Scriptures repeatedly use fire as a symbol of
divinity and an image of God’s relationship with man.
A flaming torch ratified God’s covenant
with Abraham; the apostle John saw seven torches of fire surrounding God’s
heavenly throne.
It could even be said that Jesus’
redemptive mission was conceived and concealed in fire:
I have
come to cast fire upon the earth.
And the Letter to the Hebrews
proclaims:
Our God is
a consuming fire.
God’s
way of working in the soul has also been described in terms of fire.
Kindle in
our hearts the fire of Your love,
is a
prayer the Church frequently directs to the Holy Spirit.
We know what is meant when someone is said
to be
on fire with the love of God.
While every saint has an intimate
connection with the divine Fire, Francis and Clare of Assisi were so utterly
transformed by divine Love that they were known, even in their own time, as
the Seraphic
saints.
The
seraphim are the highest rank of angels in the heavenly court.
They are, so to speak, the angelic
“firebrands,” eternally consumed by love for God and forever singing before
His throne:
Holy! Holy! Holy!
The
Assisian saints so mirrored these pure, burning creatures in their love for
God that to this very day we still honor them with that title: the Seraphic
St. Francis, our Seraphic Mother Clare.
His
Love inflames our love!
St. Clare
would be quick to explain that this mystery of love and fire does not begin
with us, but with God.
HE is the Fiery Love which enkindles,
enlightens, transforms, consoles, consumes, delights, deifies.
It is not
we
who kindle this love within our hearts; rather, under the impetus of grace,
we open our hearts to receive this divine Fire, we surrender to it, we allow
it to transform and transfigure us.
Prayer
offered St. Clare a privileged place for encountering the burning Love who
is our God.
She especially recommends contemplating
the
ineffable charity with which Christ willed to suffer on the tree of the
Cross
so that we may
ever more
strongly be set afire with love.
Such
an encounter can be likened to entrance into a furnace.
The ancient chroniclers used just that
image to describe the Lady Clare when she emerged from
the blessed
furnace of prayer.
For when she returned with joy from holy
prayer, she brought from the altar of the Lord burning words that also
inflamed the hearts of her Sisters.
His
Love inflames our love!
proclaims
the Mother and Foundress who urged her spiritual progeny to
love one
another with the love of Christ and to
show forth by their actions the love they had in their hearts.
To allow
His Love
to
inflame our
love is the work of a lifetime. Yet
it is also the work of this very moment -- an opening to God’s grace, an
awareness of His love, an acceptance of His holy way of working in and
through the fire of Love, until
His Love
inflames our love
and God Himself
begins to love in us.
