Damiano’s priest, had been structurally damaged in the 1997 earthquake and is closed to visitors. So is the ground-floor refectory where the Poor Ladies ate their meager meals in silence, listening to the Bible. Clearly visible through the open door, however, are the smoke-blackened walls and frescoes, the jumbled stone floor, and the sisters’ original dark, heavy wood tables and benches. The scene is so authentic that we fully expect to see Clare take her place under the wooden cross that marked the abbess’s place. Further enhancing the medieval mood is the sound of psalms being sung quite beautifully by a group of German pilgrims at San Damiano’s entrance.
Father Antonio has to leave us in the courtyard to hurry back to his post, and we thank him profusely for his time. “Please take these as a gift,” he says, thrusting several prayer and history cards of San Damiano into our hands. “God bless you.”
I am happy to linger in front of the refectory, with all its memories of Clare. What an extraordinary woman she was. Though her legend may very well have been exaggerated, she was a person of steadfast determination and dedication. When she heard of the martyrdom of five Franciscan friars in Morocco in 1220, she chafed at being unable to go to the Muslim country herself to emulate their sacrifice. She stood up to Popes and cardinals, looked after her sisters, and not only embraced what I would consider a horrible cloistered life but shared her passion for it with other Poor Clares.
“What you do, may you always do and never abandon,” she wrote to Agnes of Prague, whom she addressed as the “daughter of the King of Kings,” in 1235. “But with swift pace, light step and unswerving feet, so that even your steps stir up no dust, go forward securely, joyfully and swiftly, on the path of prudent happiness.”
Clare was also very human. Mindful perhaps of her own extreme penance, which would advance her ill health and leave her an invalid for almost thirty years, she cautioned Agnes in a later letter about the rules for fasting and abstinence. “But our flesh is not bronze nor is our strength that of stone,” she wrote in 1238. “No, we are frail and inclined to every bodily weakness! I beg you, therefore, dearly beloved, to refrain wisely and prudently from an indiscreet and impossible austerity in the fasting that I know you have undertaken. And I beg you . . . to offer to the Lord your reasonable service and your sacrifice always seasoned with salt.”
I am reluctant to leave San Damiano. Though its historical emphasis is on Francis and the replica of the talking cross that hangs over the altar in the convent’s old, smoke-blackened church, the soul of San Damiano is Clare. In 2003 there were twenty thousand members of the Poor Clares worldwide, either cloistered as she was or working with the needy in their communities. The Poor Clares have a multitude of websites, including www.poorclares.org for the sisters in Canton, Ohio, where they still live by her hard-fought Rule.
But there wouldn’t, of course, have been a Clare at all without Francis. It was his stunning influence and ascetic way of life that had influenced her and so many others in the Middle Ages. I struggle to comprehend how one man could cause so many to give away all their earthly possessions to the poor, often over the furious objections of their would-have-been heirs, and enter, with joy, into lives of abject deprivation. But thousands did.
I wander into the little church at San Damiano that had started the whole sequence of events and study the replica of the original cross. It is huge, some six feet high and four feet wide, and painted on cloth in bright, cheerful colors. The Christ is not the traditional Christ in agony, with blood dripping from the crown of thorns on his head and the wounds in his hands, feet, and side, but a peaceful Christ, whose wounds don’t seem to hurt. The San Damiano Christ is not dead but alive. His
Father Antonio has to leave us in the courtyard to hurry back to his post, and we thank him profusely for his time. “Please take these as a gift,” he says, thrusting several prayer and history cards of San Damiano into our hands. “God bless you.”
I am happy to linger in front of the refectory, with all its memories of Clare. What an extraordinary woman she was. Though her legend may very well have been exaggerated, she was a person of steadfast determination and dedication. When she heard of the martyrdom of five Franciscan friars in Morocco in 1220, she chafed at being unable to go to the Muslim country herself to emulate their sacrifice. She stood up to Popes and cardinals, looked after her sisters, and not only embraced what I would consider a horrible cloistered life but shared her passion for it with other Poor Clares.
“What you do, may you always do and never abandon,” she wrote to Agnes of Prague, whom she addressed as the “daughter of the King of Kings,” in 1235. “But with swift pace, light step and unswerving feet, so that even your steps stir up no dust, go forward securely, joyfully and swiftly, on the path of prudent happiness.”
Clare was also very human. Mindful perhaps of her own extreme penance, which would advance her ill health and leave her an invalid for almost thirty years, she cautioned Agnes in a later letter about the rules for fasting and abstinence. “But our flesh is not bronze nor is our strength that of stone,” she wrote in 1238. “No, we are frail and inclined to every bodily weakness! I beg you, therefore, dearly beloved, to refrain wisely and prudently from an indiscreet and impossible austerity in the fasting that I know you have undertaken. And I beg you . . . to offer to the Lord your reasonable service and your sacrifice always seasoned with salt.”
I am reluctant to leave San Damiano. Though its historical emphasis is on Francis and the replica of the talking cross that hangs over the altar in the convent’s old, smoke-blackened church, the soul of San Damiano is Clare. In 2003 there were twenty thousand members of the Poor Clares worldwide, either cloistered as she was or working with the needy in their communities. The Poor Clares have a multitude of websites, including www.poorclares.org for the sisters in Canton, Ohio, where they still live by her hard-fought Rule.
But there wouldn’t, of course, have been a Clare at all without Francis. It was his stunning influence and ascetic way of life that had influenced her and so many others in the Middle Ages. I struggle to comprehend how one man could cause so many to give away all their earthly possessions to the poor, often over the furious objections of their would-have-been heirs, and enter, with joy, into lives of abject deprivation. But thousands did.
I wander into the little church at San Damiano that had started the whole sequence of events and study the replica of the original cross. It is huge, some six feet high and four feet wide, and painted on cloth in bright, cheerful colors. The Christ is not the traditional Christ in agony, with blood dripping from the crown of thorns on his head and the wounds in his hands, feet, and side, but a peaceful Christ, whose wounds don’t seem to hurt. The San Damiano Christ is not dead but alive. His
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