Tuesday, August 11, 2020     Memorial of Saint Clare       (today’s lectionary)
Eat this book
Eat this book. Love the words with your whole heart and soul and mind. You will absorb their power and be strengthened from head to toe. Come and eat!
I saw a hand stretched out to me.
The Lord unrolled a scroll covered with writing,
All poems and cries of lamentation and wailing and woe!
Eat this scroll, O Son of man
There is no telling what you’ll find in the Bible, if you just look a little. Ezekiel, whose visions and stories and prophecies rival those of madmen in every century, seems not to spare a syllable of what he hears from God.
Son of man, feed your belly and fill your stomach.
And I ate it.
It was sweet as honey in my mouth, and then he said,
Son of man, go now to the house of Israel
And speak my words to them.
In truth I have been as filled as Ezekiel by words from God. Nothing has been more satisfying than stories from the faithful.
My delight, my precious, you are sweeter than honey and the joy of my heart.
I run in the path of your commands
For you have set my heart free.
Francis of Assisi might have been Ezekiel unleashed in the thirteenth century, come back to haunt the merchants and soldiers of his Italian hillside town. Perhaps when Francis walked naked into the town square, and certainly later, the young girl named Chiara (or Clare in English) noticed him. And in time the purity of Francis’ intentions appealed to her far more strongly than those of other suitors.
Take my yoke upon me and learn from me,
For I am meek and humble of heart.
Her beauty shone round about her from childhood, but Francis helped her discover the beauty in her soul. She called herself the “little plant of Francis.” Like Therese of Lisieux, who followed Clare as “the little flower,” she longed desperately for God and served others with abandon.
Unless you turn and become like children,
You will not enter the Kingdom of heaven.
Whoever becomes humble like this child
Is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.
Like Mother Teresa in Calcutta, she founded an order of servant helpers. Like Benedict, she wrote a Rule for the Poor Clares, the first rule written by a woman for women. In it she, like Francis, required the “privilege of poverty.”
OSF (Order of St. Francis) Heart of Mary Medical Center in Urbana invites me like no other hospital. Murals from Bible stories alternate on the halls with pictures of stern nursing nuns wearing white. The holiness of those hundred year old nuns pins my sickness squirming to the floor, and they stomp on it. I am profoundly grateful. I will return for more.
Their angels in heaven always look
Upon the face of their heavenly Father.
In Springfield, Illinois the Chiara Center has welcomed us for a decade. Margaret and I were trained there as spiritual directors. I have sat in silence for hours in the beautiful church built there in 1924. Several years earlier the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis bought 500 acres of land northeast of Springfield to erect St. John’s Tuberculosis Sanitarium. A hundred years later the grounds, the labyrinth, the museum and the church overflow with history and Franciscan hospitality. Clare and Francis are alive and well.
In Frankfort, Illinois the Franciscan’s Portiuncola Center for Prayer offers solitary retreats at their five hermitages alongside a beautiful forested creek, across the street from Aldi and a Steak ’n Shake. Both Chiara and the Portiuncola celebrate God’s presence with creative programs and spiritual direction, day and night, night and day.
It is not the will of your heavenly Father that one of these little ones be lost.
Santa Clara Valley runs southeast from the southern shores of San Francisco Bay. Its newer name is Silicon Valley. I listen late at night, and hear Saints Clara and Francisco running around laughing with joy inside the computer right here on my desk. Fancy that!
           (Ezekiel 2, Psalm 119, Matthew 11, Matthew 18)
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