A Spirit of Community

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….

As Clare had labored over the years in doing the fine handwork that helped support the monastery, she now set herself the task of a written text… As she had always consulted the sisters on matters that touched the lives of all, she now could invite them to discern with her the precise wording of difficult passages. We can imagine the spirited conversations and debates of those chapters. Thus, she and her sisters embroidered an enclosure of words chosen to protect their vision as surely as their stout outer walls. Little by little the work moved forward. As with Francis, the written record was firmly rooted in a lived experience. For that reason, Clare would not work in splendid isolation. She would offer multiple opportunities for the sisters and her closest advisors to help her shape the final results.

— from the book Light of Assisi: The Story of Saint Clare 
by Margaret Carney, OSF