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  SIX

         The prayer of thanksgiving highlights an essential truth about prayer.  Prayer is not a technique, but a relationship.  We do not thank something, we thank SOMEONE, - God, the Giver of all good gifts.  The exquisite courtesy that marked St. Clare's life likewise characterized her prayer.  She was a woman who gave thanks always and everywhere.  Her pursuit of St. Francis' ideal of most high poverty made her understand that all is gift freely given by God to his beloved creatures.  For Clare, poverty is the wealth of the soul which, stripped of its own goods, is open to the spirit of the Lord and His holy way of working, like an empty shell in which God can poor an abundance of His gifts.  (Pope John Paul II)

          I give thanks!  is the refrain that breaks out of Clare's contemplative colloquy with the Lord and spills over into her writings and her conversations with her Sisters.  I give thanks - for my vocation and yours (St. Clare's 2nd Letter to St. Agnes of Prague), for God's protecting grace, for the gift of the Eucharist, for the gift of Sisters, for the witness of Francis, for the beauty of creation, for the call to prayer, for the solicitude of the Church.  Among the other favors we have received and do daily receive from our Benefactor, the Father of mercies, for which we ought to return the more thanks to that glorious Father, outstanding is our vocation, for which all the more, by way of its being more perfect and greater, do we owe the greatest thanks to Him.  (Testament of St. Clare)

          Every event and need can become an offering of thanksgiving.  (CATECHISM 2637)  Here that Lady Clare shows us the full flowering of the prayer of thanksgiving.  For her everything was a reason to give thanks to God.  Thus, as her Sisters testified and he first biographer noted, during twenty-eight years of continual illness, Clare uttered neither murmur nor complaint; holy words and acts of thanksgiving alone came from her lips.  (Legend of St. Clare, 40)

          The prayer of St. Clare, like that of St. Francis, passed quite naturally from thanksgiving to God to praise of God.  Indeed, one can hardly think of the Seraphic saints without thinking of joyful praise of God.  Praise is the form of prayer which recognizes most immediately that God is God.  It lauds God for His own sake and gives Him glory, quite beyond what He does, but simply because HE IS.  It shares in the blessed happiness of the pure of heart who love God in faith before seeing Him in glory.  (CATECHISM 2639)

          For the Seraphic Mother, the world was filled with reasons to praise God:  When the most holy Mother used to send the serving Sisters outside the monastery, she reminded them to praise God when they saw beautiful trees, flowers and bushes; and, likewise, always to praise Him for and in all things when they saw all peoples and creatures.  (Process of Canonization, 14, 8)  Life itself was reason to render God unceasing praise; and death, the final phase of the journey to eternal life, was likewise a privileged place of praise and thanksgiving.  The more strongly she was stung by the barbs of sickness, so much more devoutly did she offer a song of praise to the Lord.  (Notification of the Death of St. Clare)  But the holy virgin turning to herself began to speak softly to her soul:  Go forth without fear...  for He who created you has sanctified you.  He has protected you always as a mother does her little child and loved you with a tender love.  then she added:  May You be blessed, Lord, for having created me!  (Legend of St. Clare, 46)