On her deathbed, St. Clare of Assisi blessed God

“You, Lord, are blessed for having made me.” St. Clare of Assisi spoke these curious final words. After exploring Clare’s unusual spiri­tual vision for many years, these words continued to confound me. The boldness of this medieval saint suggesting that God blessed himself by having made her, along with the audacity of actually saying so, seemed both extraordinary and beyond the pale. Add to that the seemingly contradictory fact that St. Clare, in the sequence of her days, suffered one loss upon the next as the terms of her life were turned upside down more than once. Yet, at the end of it all, she proclaimed that God had blessed himself by her existence, strained and sorrowful though it was.

My spiritual landscape, as a Protestant, was recalibrated under the watchful care of the saints, and of Clare in particular. This came about through a sad part of my story. My marriage ended after 24 years, and one of the most traumatic aspects of this for me was the role of the church where my husband served as pastor. When I needed the church’s help and asked for it, they did not respond. The end result was that they kept their pastor and I lost my marriage. For a long time after that I left the church, at least in my heart. I thought it was fake. Having been married to a pastor for a very long time, I understood the nuances—and the occasional duplicity—that attends church ministry, and I felt I was justified in drawing that conclusion.

In the aftermath of this trauma, I went on a walking tour in Italy. As I wandered through the town of Assisi, I began to be inexplicably drawn to St. Francis and desired to learn more of him. He told his followers, “We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.” This sentiment captured the mysterious draw I experienced in Assisi. St. Francis—in his Franciscan way—found me at a time when the apparatus of my own faith tradition had collapsed. He usurped my despair, rerouting my faith journey in a way that landed me in the stark, bewildering, sometimes forbidding landscape of the saints who, through their ministrations, have given me a reason to keep living and to keep believing. Clare, who was Francis’s lifelong companion, lent a particularly meaningful element to this struggle.