Daily Reading for August 11 • Clare, Abbess of Assisi, 1253
St. Francis himself passed through a period of despair lasting two years. One of his biographers, Father Isidore O’Brien, attributed this to the fear that his rule of poverty would be modified, to his disillusionment over the gross behaviour of many of the Crusaders, and to his increasing physical blindness. Yet clearly there was something deeply wrong in himself. He withdrew from the world, he who had asked to be the instrument of God’s peace. He visited no more the convent of the Poor Clares, lest it should be a source of scandal. It was Clare herself who used all her holiness and skill to restore him to himself. She appealed to him to visit them and not forsake them. The visit was a failure. He did not preach to them as was his custom. Instead, he sprinkled ashes upon his head and recited the psalm, Miserere mei, Deus. Then he left them.
Clare would not accept defeat. In Father O’Brien’s significant words, she saw that “Francis needed human help to draw him out of himself.” She next asked to be allowed to dine with the brothers at Porziuncola, and so great was her insistence that Francis could not deny her. The story of her visit is then told in The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi:
“When Clare arrived at the Portiuncula, she went into the chapel of St. Mary of the Angels, and devoutly saluted the Virgin Mary, before whose altar her hair had been cut off when she received the veil. Meanwhile Francis set out the meal on the bare ground, as was his custom. Then he and one of the brothers, and Clare and the sister who had accompanied her, sat down together, surrounded by the rest of the brothers, sitting humbly round them. When the first dish was served, Francis began to speak of God so sweetly, so sublimely, and in a manner so wonderful, that the grace of God fell upon them all, and all were rapt in Christ. Now the people of Assisi and Bettona saw St. Mary of the Angels as it were on fire, with the convent and the woods adjoining. The people of Assisi hastened with great speed to put out the fire, but on arriving they saw no fire, only Francis and Clare and all their companions sitting around their humble meal on the ground. Then they knew that what they had seen was a celestial fire.”
From Instrument of Thy Peace by Alan Paton (New York: The Seabury Press, 1968).