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 with the many hours spent creating corporals and altar linens using needle and thread, she made a plan for her design. Her threads were the various strands of regulation and admonition, imitation of other exemplars, and the hard-won wisdom of her sisters. Each of these threads had its own color, its own heft and weight, its own role to play in creating her design. She would center the most important words of all, Francis’s dictates, in the most vivid colors.
These would be encased within a carefully tailored web of words of darker threads that manifested obedience to pontiff and church. For that reverence was also at the heart of the Franciscan way and the threads of somber color conveyed the solemn obligation. Small hints of color and original stitchery would reflect the unique San Damiano spirit, the evidence of women’s ways of walking in Jesus’s footprints. 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.
—from the book Light of Assisi: The Story of Saint Clare
by Margaret Carney, OSF
