Today is a great feast for us Franciscans, our Holy Mother St. Clair, the counterpart
to St. Francis, the image, or what was called the icon of Our Lady, St. Clair was.
And she entered, she started her order at the age of 18 years old, and started this
great order of the poor Clairs on a solid foundation of poverty and love for Christ
and contempt for the things of this world because she was from a wealthy family.
She was pretty and she...
She had several suitors for marriage, and yet she, after she heard the words of St.
Francis in the Cathedral of Assisi during Lent, she reflected long and hard on his words
about the contempt for the world and how the world's passing pleasures are not to be set
our hearts on how we should live for the love of Jesus Christ and set our focus on him and
to have...
a real contempt, a real contempt for the things of this world that can lead us astray
and can lead us into sin and draw us away from the love of Jesus Christ.
These words that really struck the hearts of St. Clair at that particular day in the
Cathedral, and she heard him preach several times after that, and then she conferred with
St. Francis about what she should do with her life because she was drawn to follow a
similar path as St. Clair.
She was drawn to follow St. Francis, but she knew that she couldn't leave home with the
permission of her father, so St. Francis arranged things with her that she should come secretly
on the night of Palm Sunday during that Lent to go to little Porziuncula, St. Mary of the
Angels, and there St. Francis cut her hair off.
She went with her...
an elderly relative, and St. Francis was there with some of his friars with lighted candles
at night, and cut her hair off and gave her a penitential garb and a cord to wear, and
she took off her expensive clothing that she had worn for the Mass of Palm Sunday, and
she adopted that life of poverty.
She was put in a Benedictine convent for the time being until her relatives calmed down
and let her do what she wanted to do, and then St. Francis found a convent of San Damiano
where she could stay with her sister St. Agnes who joined her some weeks later, and many
other noble women joined St. Clair and put aside their worldly concerns.
This became the San Domenico Frye.
And That's It!
to live a life of love for Jesus and to live a life of seclusion in the cloister
and a real abject poverty which she embraced
and she received permission from the Holy Father to embrace a life of poverty
which was not only individual but also communitary.
So even the community didn't have any property.
This is something that almost no female convent would adopt,
this kind of communitary poverty.
Later on, the poor Clares did mitigate that,
but St. Clair received that privilege from the Holy Father herself
that the convent in San Damiano would have that kind of radical poverty
in common as well as individual.
So she really, really embraced this love for poverty
and she really was an image of this lady poverty that St. Francis was always preaching
and how he loved lady poverty because Jesus embraced it, Our Lady embraced it,
and she was a real image and icon of Our Lady who was really the queen of poverty,
the queen of living out that virtue of detachment,
total detachment from the things of this world
which are corrupt.
which draw our hearts away from Jesus and love of God,
which lead us into sin and lead us to live a life of a wasted life
where we set our hearts on riches and wealth
and living for the things of this world
which are really rubbish as the first reading we read today was to St. Paul.
This is all rubbish in the light of the love of Jesus Christ.
And she was a real example of that,
contempt for the world.
And we need to develop that contempt for the things of this world
that's take us away from God,
that make us waste our time
and waste our resources,
waste our efforts
for the things of this world which are passing
and which do not bear fruit for eternal life in many cases
unless we are using the things of this world for the love of God
and to serve him
and to do his will but not to set our hearts on the things of this world in themselves
but to realize the the danger and the harm that setting our hearts on worldly things can do
so we should live a life of simplicity detachment from the things of this world and this is what
saint claire really underlined in her her her life of of renouncing the riches and wealth that
she could have had and the worldly things she could have had in embracing a life of union with
jesus christ in contemplative in the contemplative life that she she lived and she also suffered
there because she spent 30 years in illness bedridden for 30 years practically her whole
religious life and she offered it up all for conversion of souls and to unite herself closer
and closer to jesus christ and it was
at the end of her life
her life on her deathbed, that Our Lady appeared to her with a whole line of virgins, came
to greet her and to take her to heaven. But before she did, Our Lady bent down to put
her face close to St. Clair. And the sister that saw this saw that both their faces looked
exactly the same, because St. Clair had really imaged the life of Our Lady. She had really
reached that perfection of imitation of Our Lady, and her poverty, her love for Jesus
Christ, her total union with God. And so let us follow her example, let us capture that
contempt for the world, but in a positive way, that love and union for Jesus and detachment
from the things of this world, and to really look at the things of this world with a certain
contempt.
Because it is corruptible, not satisfying to our hearts, and that we were made for the
things of heaven, eternal things which last forever and are far greater joy to us.
And so let us follow her example, that Our Lady bent down to put her face close to St. Clair
with a whole line of virgins, came to greet her with a whole line of contempt. And so let
us follow her example, that Our Lady bent down to put her face close to St. Clair with
her total union with God. And so let us follow her example, that Our Lady bent down to put her
face close to St. Clair with a whole line of contempt. And so let us follow her example,
that Our Lady bent down to put her face close to St. Clair with a whole line of contempt.
And so let us follow her example, that Our Lady bent down to put her face close to St. Clair with
her total union with God. And so let us follow her example, that Our Lady bent down to put her face close