Saint Clare, Virgin

St. Clare – Sketch by Brie Schulze

Saint Clare is this lesser known companion of Saint Francis whose life in some ways surpasses that Seraphic Doctor.  Saint Francis’ life was love turned outward towards the world through the blessed prism of Lady Poverty.  Saint Clare’s life was the intimate love of the soul alone with its God lived out in a cloistered community of like-minded consecrated women.  Love, by the action of grace, is stretched beyond its human limits both outwardly and inwardly.  And love, if it remains poor without claiming any dues, can be fully transformed by the divine motion of the Holy Spirit.  Saints Francis and Clare were driven to choose lives of radical poverty because the taste of divine love reshaped their entire understanding of what they needed in this world.  They came to understand poverty as the way in which their hearts could drink deeply from the fountain of Love.  “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” read more

Saint Lawrence, Deacon and Martyr

The grace  and consolation of the Christian life is given to those who live and act in faith.  Growth in our spiritual life implies pain in just the same way as our bodies experienced growing pains while they were stretched to accommodate our full physical maturity.  The spiritually mature do not reach maturity without passing through various, successive and painful deaths.  The body stretches painfully to become the place of a soul capable of living out the fullness of it’s human life.  The soul is stretched painfully through the guilt and grief of a life lived according to false notions of fullness.  Suffering is much more important for our spiritual life than the simple punishment for misdeeds – our own or the misdeeds of others.  Christ shows us that suffering is actually the path of holiness which best frees us from our attachment to a life that is beneath our deepest thirst for happiness.  Some spiritual growth can only take place when the love that causes us to cling to the world and its passing pleasures faces its own vanity and anxious drive to indulge. read more

Thursday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time

The new covenant is foretold by the prophet Jeremiah.  We must regularly examine our hearts to see if we are living according to the new covenant, or if we are still stuck in the old.  Make no mistake!  All Christian religiosity and practice is not “new testament” simply because it has the label Christian or is practiced by the Baptised.  The Old Covenant remains a sort of religious default that we fall back on, even as Christians, when we stop living according to the Spirit.  The Old Covenant provides a set of standards, clarity on right and wrong, consequences and punishments reserved for sinners.  If you want to avoid suffering – especially the eternal kind – the Old Covenant tells you what to do and how to behave.  The New Covenant does not cancel any of that truth, but addresses the much more fundamental problem of our existence: we are incapable, on our own, of any real goodness.  The New Covenant addresses the root of our problem, we need to be healed, forgiven, and supported by God’s help.  It is our heart that needs God’s touch because it is wayward and susceptible to all manner of evil suggestion.  If evil gets into our heart, our mind will be unable to straighten things out – even if it perceives the evil as evil.  To pretend or presume that there is no evil in our hearts, or that the evil present there isn’t so bad is precisely the lack of humility and poverty that will keep God’s new covenant of grace from acting. read more