St. Clare of Assisi
  Our Guide to the Garden of Prayer

Prayer is like a secret garden,
made up of silence and rest and inwardness.
                                        -  Jean Vanier

PART  FIVE

       What was the content of her prayer of petition?  Those who envision the Lady Clare as an other-worldly mystic far removed from the details of ordinary human existence will be surprised to discover that her prayers of petition were very much like those of the rest of humanity.  When her community lacked material sustenance, she prayed for bread.  When her Sisters were ill, she prayed for healing.  When she was perplexed, she prayed for guidance.  When human weakness or lack of charity brought tension or discord or discouragement into her community, she prayed for enlightenment and peace.  When we share in God's saving love, we understand that every need can become the object of petition.  (CATECHISM 2633)

          But St. Clare's prayer of petition did not remain enclosed in its own small circle of cloister.  True prayer of petition never narrows.  Rather, it expands the heart, enlarges one's spiritual vision and enables the soul to embrace the needs, sorrows and hopes of all people.  Transformation of the praying heart is the first response to our petition.  (CATECHISM 2739)

         The heart thus transformed is able to enter deeply into the great field of intercessory prayer.  Indeed, intercession is the full-flowering of the prayer of petition, in which we pass from a merely human mode of asking into the infinite expanse of the prayer of Christ who lives forever to make intercession for us.  (Heb. 7:25)  Intercession is a prayer of petition which leads us to pray as Jesus did.  (CATECHISM 2634)   Intercession also leads us into the mysterious prayer of the Holy Spirit who Himself intercedes for us...  and intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.  (Romans 8:26-27)

          Here we find ourselves at the very heart of the enclosed contemplative vocation.  St. Clare understood that God's gift to her was a call to offer her prayer, her life, her suffering as a living sacrifice to Him on behalf of all the souls redeemed by Christ.  She invited her daughters, called to be models and mirrors for those living in he world (Testament of St. Clare), to accept faithfully and generously their call to intercessory prayer.  Thus she counseled the future St. Agnes of Prague, I hold you to be a co-worker of God Himself and a support to the weak and wavering members of His glorious Body.  (3rd Letter of St. Clare to St. Agnes of Prague)

           One with Christ Jesus in His redemptive work and in His intercessory prayer, there was no concern, suffering, anguish or discouragement which did not find an echo in the heart of (this) prayerful woman.  (Pope John Paul II)  Thus we find the Seraphic Mother interceding for the Church and its prelates, for the Friars and their mission, for her city and the war-ravaged lands of her time, for sinners, the afflicted, the persecuted, the sick and the suffering.  The intercession of Christians recognizes no boundaries.  (CATECHISM 2636)  It is to this universal prayer that Clare of Assisi invites every Christian, confident that when we ask, we shall indeed receive.