On this Memorial of Saint Clare, the readings invite us to reflect on a life of wholehearted love for God—a love that compels total surrender, trust, and a simplicity that changes the world. Saint Clare of Assisi embodies that spirit with a singular clarity. While many saints serve God with courage, charity, and devotion, Clare is unique for how quietly and yet radically she chose to let go of everything the world prizes, so that she could possess Christ alone. Her path was not one of great public preaching, but of interior fire—a contemplative life so intense that it lit a path for others, including many women who came to her seeking the same freedom she had found.
Clare’s story cannot be told apart from Saint Francis, but that is not to say she is simply an echo of his sanctity. In truth, she is his mirror, his complement, and in many ways, the guardian of his most daring ideal: Lady Poverty. While Francis was the troubadour of Christ, joyfully preaching in the streets, Clare took his vision and rooted it in a monastic form, defending it with fierce clarity when others tried to soften it. She and her sisters at San Damiano lived without possessions, without endowments, trusting wholly in divine providence. This wasn’t recklessness—it was deliberate, Eucharistic poverty. She once said, “Cling to His most sweet Mother, who carried a Son whom the heavens could not contain; and yet she carried Him in the little cloister of her holy womb.” Clare knew what it meant to carry Christ in the hidden cloister of the heart.
In our first reading from Deuteronomy, Moses calls Israel to circumcise their hearts—to love and serve the Lord with all that they are, to stop being stiff-necked. Saint Clare responded to that same call. Her entire life was a circumcision of the heart: a letting go of comfort, status, and control, in order to be completely docile to God’s will. She shows us how God’s commandments are not burdens but a path to freedom. True holiness, as we see in Clare, does not require fame, influence, or heroic action in the public square—it requires the courage to disappear into God’s will and let Him be our only treasure.
Today’s Gospel might seem at first like an odd match. Jesus foretells His Passion—His path of surrender—and Peter is confronted with a practical problem: the temple tax. Jesus’ response, though, is revealing. He reminds Peter that the children of the kingdom are free, yet He still chooses humility and obedience “so as not to offend.” Clare lived that paradox perfectly. She was, spiritually speaking, a daughter of the King—free from all worldly demands—but she chose radical humility, even silence and enclosure, for the sake of the Gospel. Her way of following Christ—crucified, poor, and obedient—is a reminder that we too are called to a freedom that looks like surrender, to a greatness that this world cannot measure.
So what does Saint Clare teach us today? She teaches us that holiness is not about having more—it’s about needing less. She teaches us that the truest joy comes not from asserting ourselves, but from emptying ourselves so that Christ may fill us. She teaches us to trust God completely, not theoretically, but in how we live, give, and love. And she teaches us, like Francis, to rejoice in the Cross—not as a tragedy, but as the gate to joy. May we, like Clare, dare to love Christ with undivided hearts, and may we, too, find in poverty, humility, and love the richness of the Kingdom.
Saint Clare, you who along with your sister religious, were such an encouragement to Saint Francis and the friars, pray for us now, your brothers still making their journey through this world. Amen.
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