My First Book of Poetry
In this life I’ve not travelled much outside North
America. Go deep, an inner voice instructed, and so I let that happen first on
the boundary waters of Minnesota and Ontario, and then in a convent beside the
Red River of the North. In the middle of life I uprooted myself and came to be
transplanted on the Pacific Coast. Later I would make a few short trips to
England and Ireland. I never travelled far from the waters of earth, and water
became a mirror from which soul might reflect.
“Our years are seventy, and eighty if
we are strong,” the Hebrew Scriptures say. And I was in my seventh decade
before I traveled with my new husband, author John R. Sack, to Italy to
celebrate our marriage with a pilgrimage to the holy places of St. Francis and
St. Clare. He had written an historical novel set in the era just after the
death of Francis, a book which had brought the two of us together in what he
calls our wisdom years. And in 2011 we wanted to walk the paths that Francis
walked and to visit the convent of San Damiano in Assisi where Clare had lived.
Although I had connections with women
in Minnesota who followed the Rule of St. Clare and lived lives of enclosure, I
hadn’t entered a Franciscan convent myself. I had, however, considered it as
early as my twelfth birthday. I received a book from the Franciscans of Little
Falls, Minnesota, explaining the Franciscan way of life, but the Sisters in the
town where I lived were not Franciscan, and they were the Sisters I knew,
loved, and joined. Consequently, I was not prepared for what happened to me in
Assisi.
In Assisi I met Chiara—Clare’s name engraved in Italian on the statue
honoring her in the cathedral there. I truly have no way to describe how this
happened. I can describe the places John and I visited, the stories we were
told, the landscapes, caves, and churches—the worn stones on which these people
once walked. Something of them, Francis and (in her Italian language) Chiara, remains
alive there, and it shook me to my core. It burned in my heart. I entered a
cave, touched a stone, knelt in a small chapel, stood on the stone stairs in
San Damiano and something so powerful took hold of me, over and over it took
hold, making even simple breath a whirlwind. “What am I going to do?” I fell
into John’s arms and wept. This thirteenth century woman had grasped my soul
with an intensity too great for me, but she wouldn’t let me go.
Back in
Oregon we dedicated our home to her.
And now,
these poems.
Sometimes I watch her; sometimes she
speaks in her own voice to me. The poems came through me in both third and
first person, but all of them are reflections of Chiara as I bent back towards
her, as I gazed. Her spiritual teacher from childhood was a man from her own
town of Assisi, Francis Bernardone whose imprint on his town, his country, his
church, and the entire world’s history remains. Francis and Chiara of Assisi have
been relevant in every era up to our own. And back in the thirteenth century
the young woman named Chiara left her home to join Francis and his dream of
living exactly as Jesus of Nazareth had lived—an authentic Christianity. And
Chiara loved him, loved both of them—Jesus the Christ and the poor man, Francis
of her own home town.
Both Francis and Chiara lived
extraordinary lives. Both were mystics burning with divine love. This love
united them and it was in this love that they recognized each other. Despite
stories and movies to the contrary, I don’t believe they ever had a sexual
relationship nor desired one. All love of that sort was burned in a divine and
universal fire and transformed into the very love of God, so profoundly that
their love for one another became identical with their love in and for God.
In my journal I wrote: Here's what I know about Clare's yearning. In the
museum below Santa Chiara Cathedral in Assisi is an alb made of lace which she
made for Francis. I can't remember how many years she worked on it. It's like
spider webs, fine, almost falling apart now even behind the glass. Something
about that lace holds a fierce yearning, one she believed she shared with
Francis. Was the union in the simple understanding that someone in this world
experienced a yearning as intensely as did she? Such yearning cannot be
mingled, I think. It is solitary. But just knowing that someone else
experiences such infinity of longing causes love. As though the lace were a
language of the soul to say, “I want to veil the profound darkness in you with
these webs of white lace, something of light, so that you do not succumb to
your desperate aloneness, so that you do not give way to a belief that darkness
is all there is, but that having finally touched the deepest fields of night,
even there you will realize that there is yet More, there is a fullness opening
to you, an endlessness that not only fills you completely, but is what you are.
And it is Light. It is Love.”
Maria Popova writes, “Even the farthest seers
can’t bend their gaze beyond their era’s horizon of possibility, but the
horizon shifts with each incremental revolution as the human mind peers outward
to take in nature, then turns inward to question its own givens. We sieve the
world through the mesh of these certitudes, tautened by nature and culture, but
every once in a while—whether by accident or conscious effort—the wire loosens
and the kernel of a revolution slips through.”
From time to time I wonder if these
mystics, Chiara and Francis, found their way through the mesh of certitude to
glimpse truths beyond their era’s horizon, truths that science only recently
would discover, or that a psychology of self-integration would realize. Chiara, herself proclaimed a saint by the
church she both loved and challenged during her life, was a woman who claimed
her womanhood and the freedom it accorded her. She was the first woman to establish
a religious community of women living according to a structure and rule she
herself designed. Up to then nuns lived according to rules written by men such
as St. Benedict and St. Augustine. The Poor Ladies of San Damiano lived
according to the Rule of Chiara. She petitioned Rome again and again to approve
her plan. And she didn’t die until the Pope finally agreed. Already, though, groups
of “Poor Clares” had come together across Europe. In Bohemia the woman, Agnes
of Prague, a royal woman betrothed to the Emperor Frederick II, chose instead
to follow Chiara and establish a group of Poor Clares in her own country. The
letters between Chiara and Agnes along with the unique Rule and Testament have
formed the basis of study, spiritual enlightenment and women’s rights even to
this present day.
We humans rarely if ever know what we
set in motion simply by living our lives and making what choices we can.
These poems are the product of prayer and contemplation. They are
historical only in the broadest sense. I hope, however, they remain true to the
spirit of Chiara even while their details are mostly images derived from my own
imagination. (from the Introduction)
You can purchase this book by ordering it from your local bookstore or by going directly to Chiara Reflections
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