By Kevin Banet

Eight hundred years ago, in the small town of Assisi, Italy, a young woman named Clare was attracted by the preaching of her fellow townsman, Brother Francis. She wanted what he had. In a little ceremony, Francis received her at a tiny mountain chapel called the Porziuncola, and thus began the Catholic order of Poor Clares.

Clare and her sisters lived a monastic life in San Damiano, a remote and secluded monastery outside the walls of Assisi where they dwelt apart from the world, while holding the world and all its needs close to their hearts.

A Poor Clare will today tell you that a contemplative nun is an incessant seeker of God. She is one whose life’s journey is a long trek within the heart where waits her God. A Christian and cloistered contemplative is one who has joyfully sacrificed everything else so that her one task may be the following of Christ. She is one whose whole life is contingent on Him, her only reference point. Her very atmosphere is His amazing and intense Love. She is a bride and beloved one of this wondrous Spouse of her soul.

Poor Clare monasteries around the world today are seeing a steady flow of women seeking this contemplative way of life — countering a world that is often too busy to think about God. These sisters take the vows of poverty, obedience and chastity. Her poverty proclaims "God is enough, and everything else is not enough." Her obedience is her liberation into the eternal. Her chastity is a flaming expanse of love destined to consume her and light the way for many.

The Poor Clare nun adds a fourth vow to the ordinary vows of religious Sisters — enclosure, which means that she lives within a specifically defined area not open to the public. Her enclosure is a spacious silence where the will of God can sing. She has befriended solitude, waiting, listening, and a certain inevitable experience of aloneness as companions on the way into the center of her being. Overall, her spirituality focuses on the mysteries of Christ’s earthly life, particularly on His birth in the utter poverty of Bethlehem and His self-emptying death on the Cross.