When St. Clare of Assisi
confided to St. Agnes of Prague the secret of her prayer life,
little did she know that she was giving the entire Franciscan family
an enduring pattern of prayer and
a challenging program of life. Behold Him! Consider Him! Contemplate
Him, desiring to imitate Him!
This is how Clare "learned" Christ from St. Francis — and
this is how the Seraphic parents desire all their followers
to learn and
follow the Son of God who has become for us the
Way
TESTAMENT OF ST. CLARE Having beheld
Christ in His mysteries with the eyes of faith, we are invited to
Consider Him. The Latin root of the word "consider" gives the key to
this next step in the Clarian/Franciscan program. Consider a means
literally "with the stars."
We are to look to Christ in the same way
as sailors look at the stars in order to keep their ships on course
through the night. Francis and Clare studied, at length and
intently, the Great Star who is Christ, ordering their life's course
by the light of the virtues which shone forth from Him. In this
series we shall join our Seraphic parents in their "Star-Gazing" and
discover, as they did,
a veritable alphabet of virtues.
The evangelical alphabet of St.
Francis and St. Clare begins with two "High A" virtues:
APPROACHABILITY and
ATTENTIVENESS. Even a cursory reading of the
Gospels reveals to us how eminently APPROACHABLE Jesus was. His
teaching was imbued with authority. The power which came out of Him
inspired awe and admiration. And yet, the Son of God was the most
approachable of the sons of men. From the disciples at dawn to
Nicodemus at night, and every time in between, Jesus was always
gracious, welcoming, APPROACHABLE. Cripples and tax collectors, the
sick seeking healing and mothers seeking a blessing for their bales
were never turned away, sometimes to the dismay of those closest to
Him who, hard pressed by the crowds, had time neither to eat nor
rest. This APPROACHABILITY deeply impressed the Saints of Assisi. It
was something they put into practice, daily and nightly.
St. Clare even specified in her
Testament that the abbess should be so kind and courteous that [the
Sisters] can confidently make known their needs and trustingly have
recourse to her at any hour as it will seem to them profitable to
do. Perhaps she was remembering that famous night when a young
friar, unaccustomed to the rigors of fasting, woke St. Francis up
with the pitiful cry, "I am starving!" and received, not a
reprimand, but a fraternal midnight snack. Our Seraphic parents were
also impressed by Jesus' ATTENTIVENESS to human need. Jesus was
moved with pity for the bedraggled crowd. After raising the daughter
of Jairus from the dead, He admonished the astounded parents to give
their little girl something to eat. Dying on the Cross, He made
provision for His widowed Mother by entrusting her to St. John. And
so we find St. Francis, attentive to the needs of the robbers, the
beggars, the lepers who crossed his path. St. Clare was always on
the watch for the needs of her Sisters — in the cold of night, in
the vulnerability of sickness, in times of weariness and temptation.
We learn from our Lord and from the
Saints of Assisi that life presents us with myriad opportunities to
cultivate what some might consider the "little virtues"
of APPROACHABILITY and
ATTENTIVENESS. In reality, both call for large
measures of self-denial and self-sacrifice and both reap the large
reward of becoming a little more like our infinitely approachable
and attentive God.
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