The shared experience of her sisters was a vessel of the Holy Spirit’s work. Clare saw that the best religious rule comes not from hierarchical directives but from human experience of the Holy Spirit’s power working beyond imagining. Such wisdom was the shared treasure of the sisters who, over the course of years, had learned what constituted a form of life that was stable and realistic. Such a rule guaranteed a life of holiness that was joy-filled and self-sacrifice that was generative. Her rule must be invested with the sisterly convictions that the women of San Damiano shared. Indeed, San Damiano functioned as a centrifuge that was drawing all of these sources into a new amalgam of feminine Franciscan practice.
