Clare’s love song came out of her own sufferings. Although this serious and mysterious ailment often kept her bedridden, she nevertheless continued to minister faithfully to the needs of her sisters; she was the first woman to write a Rule of Life for vowed religious that was approved by the pope, and she sought approval from four successive popes for the perpetual privilege of perfect poverty for her order.
St. Clare’s canticle, then, is not a sentimental love song, though it was filled with feeling. Hers was a tough love that brought her joy because her lover was Christ, whose own tough love was the elegy of his own passion, death, and resurrection. And Clare herself was to the very end the personification of the poverty of Christ, who emptied himself, as St. Paul says, becoming a slave, obedient to the very end (see Philippians 2:7). The poverty that Christ embraced in becoming human St. Francis dubbed Lady Poverty—the only one, as Dante says, who ascended the cross with Jesus. Clare lived this image of gospel poverty in her own time and place. In many ways, she was the Lady Poverty whom Christ himself had embraced.
—from the book God’s Love Song: The Vision of Francis and Clare
by Murray Bodo, OFM, and Susan Saint Sing
