“One Word” Reflections
What is it like being a Poor Clare? What does it mean to be a cloistered contemplative nun in this time in history in Rockford, Illinois? We asked our Sisters to use one word or phrase that captures what being a Poor Clare means to her. We invite you to read below their reflections – as diverse and varied as each Sister herself. If you are discerning a religious vocation, we pray our Lord will speak to your heart, that you may know and courageously respond to His plan of love for your life!
Freedom
Is it possible to find freedom within 14 acres of land enclosed behind brick walls and cloister
bars? To embrace the entire world without ever venturing beyond a small Midwestern city? To find joy and daily delight in constant penance and prayer, living with the same 24 Sisters day after day? My answer is a hearty, joy-filled, resounding YES!
Our cloister and vow of enclosure do not close our hearts but expand them to embrace the whole world through our life of prayer and sacrifice for souls. Our lives are “hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3) so that we may be totally dedicated to Him, offering ourselves in love each day to Love Incarnate.
Before entering the monastery, I was constantly torn by competing desires and longing for what I could not grasp. As a Poor Clare, I've discovered that true freedom is found not in self-seeking but in the courageous surrender of one's whole being to God. Every day, Jesus calls me to give myself away in love through acts of humble service, prayer, and manual labor. To be poor, chaste, obedient and enclosed is not to limit my life but to free my whole heart to love Him totally, outrageously, joyously!
~A Poor Clare Novitiate Sister
Totality
The call to total self-giving manifested itself gradually throughout my life. Early on, it was
something indefinite and undefinable, and I did not recognize it as an existential longing that only God could fill. Yet when it became clear to me at 19 that God was inviting me to a total self-donation and bestowing on me the gift of a radical vocation to leave everything for love of Him, it was unmistakable. Only the vocation to totality would assuage the deepest longing of my soul, and I responded: “This is what God made me for!”
Over the years, as I have lived the Poor Clare life of complete surrender, the call to totality has only deepened and opened up a further understanding of the uncompromising self-donation according to the way St. Clare traced out for us who call her Mother.
Self-forgetfulness, cruciform love, and abandonment to Providence are all dimensions of this totality. My life as a Poor Clare is transforming me to respond more and more to our Mother St. Clare's exhortation: “Love Him totally who gave himself totally for love of you.”
~A Poor Clare nun who keeps trying!
Love
What inspired my vocation is a quotation from John 15:13: “No one has greater love than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends.”
~A Poor Clare nun for 60 years
Surrender
What is the most audacious prayer you can imagine? What is the boldest request you could make of our Lord Jesus, one that would forever change your perspective, your heart, your very life?
“Do with me as You will.”
This is what I have prayed daily since becoming a Poor Clare nun. I was first inspired by a prayer composed by St. Charles de Foucauld, a hermit in Algeria who is the spiritual father of the Little Brothers and Sisters of Jesus and who died a martyr in 1916. To me, his prayer of surrender perfectly expresses the total self-offering that I desire to make to our Lord through our vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and enclosure.
Father, I abandon myself into Your hands. Do with me as You will. For whatever You do, I thank You. I am ready for all; I accept all. Let only Your will be done in me.
Do with me as You will. Yes, Lord, wake me up from a sound sleep at 12:30 AM to pray for souls. Not just once or twice a month, but 365 days a year!
Do with me as You will. Yes, Lord, give me manual labor: sweeping, scrubbing, weeding, raking, lifting. Give me sunshine and sweat, sleet and snow. Let me know the aches and pains of muscles working for Your glory. Yes, Lord!
Do with me as You will. Yes, Lord, give me dry bread on Fridays and sweet buttered toast on Sundays. Make my heart burst to overflowing with gratitude for the kindness of benefactors who provide us our daily bread. Yes, Lord!
Do with me as You will. Give me old Sisters, young Sisters, middle-aged Sisters who love to
sing Your praises, who forgive my every fault and cheer me on when I lack courage. Give me the love of adoring You together in the Blessed Sacrament as the city sleeps and humanity cries out with longing for Your saving love. Yes, Lord!
Do with me as You will because I am Yours and You have made me to love, serve, and worship You. You have loved me first, Lord, and I desire only to pour out my life for You and all my brothers and sisters every blessed day that You give me.
Yes, LORD!
~A Poor Clare Novitiate Sister
Transformation
“Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, so that you may judge what is God's will, what is good, pleasing and perfect” (Rom. 12:2). This passage from St. Paul not only encapsulates the whole of the spiritual life, but also describes, for me, the core of my Poor Clare journey.
When we are invested in the habit of the Order of Penance, we are exhorted to put off the “old man” and put on the new. We readily abandon conformity to the world in order to put on the mind of Christ, whose daily bread was to do the will of the Father. This is the perfection we seek: the will of the Father. It is the way St. Francis, St. Clare, and St. Colette show us. Inevitably, the result is a complete transformation. It takes place over years; nevertheless, there is a gradual conformity to Christ. To live the Poor Clare life is to live the mystery of the Transfiguration.
~A Poor Clare nun for 30 years
Echoes
Living as though dead
Entombed – I dance along
The threshold being passed
Sing again that song
Your melody that lured me here
To live among the shadows
To curtsey in anonymity
The beat of Your heart
ECHOES
Exchanging everything at once
and costing nothing less
The cold, concealing stone of death
Is lighter with each waltzing step
Banalities and odors!
Harmonies and walls!
Realities and sunset streaks –
glowing in the grave
Corners set and overstepped
To me, life is death
All I gave turns out You kept
Rising like a breath
The paradox is true once more
Turn all tables, You will strive
Inside-out I see it now:
To You, death is life
~A Poor Clare Colettine Novitiate Sister
Truth
One lovely surprise I discovered after entering our monastery is how our life enables us to perceive truth more clearly. Since we are removed, to a certain extent, from the overload of news and stimuli faced by our lay peers, we are able to assess current events in a more tranquil light. This is also because our lifestyle aims at continual conversion, which strips us of our illusions so as to embrace reality in all its radiant splendor...and because we live in the physical presence of Truth Himself, Christ Jesus in His Eucharistic Heart. In addition, our Scripture-saturated environment gradually teaches us to follow the delicate inspirations of the Spirit of Truth, who leads us to discover what information is helpful to facilitate our pivotal mission of intercession, reparation, and adoration. Our holy Mother St. Colette knew this when (in typically medieval hyperbole) she called the cloister the “fortress of truth.”
~A Poor Clare Novitiate Sister
Unity
My calling to the Poor Clare vocation was from “East to West” since I am originally from Asia. Navigating the different languages of my home country and my adopted country has been a difficulty to overcome. Even more challenging is learning the “language of love,” which is the work of a whole lifetime!
Another challenge is that our fallen nature creates so many divisions and tragedies, which demands my own response of more prayer and penance for the conversion of sinners. If more souls are saved, then God our Father can obtain more glory!
This calling is always nurtured and sustained by a clear, strong mission: to witness that there is only one family in the world and only one God the Creator and Father who is kind, supreme, wise, merciful, powerful, faithful, generous, splendid, majestic, and worthy of all our love in return.
To obtain this spirit of “oneness,” nothing is more effective than to go to the fount of Life, Jesus Christ in the Most Blessed Sacrament, Himself a symbol of unity.
I am also so grateful to our Blessed Mother Mary, who heard my Rosary novena prayer as I was discerning my contemplative vocation. I thank God and our Lady, patroness of all vocations, for leading me to become a Poor Clare nun! God the Father, I trust in You! Mary, my Mother, my confidence!
~Sr. Mary Caritas Kwan
Hope
Life as a Poor Clare is a life of hope: hope that I can try again – in prayer, in my relations with my Sisters, in the little things I do. We are all striving, and every moment brings a new chance to love God better.
I want to represent the whole world before God, and here, it is possible. Every action, every little victory where I let Him love me and love through me, has ramifications for the souls I pray for. All is in His hands, and so the whole world is my mission field.
When I come to Him, I bring with me all the souls He has entrusted to my care. Through my work, my prayers, my sacrifice, my love, I am a Sister to the poor, the sick, the lonely, the afraid, the angry, and even those souls who no longer trust or believe in God. When I bring these souls before God, His grace can and does reach them.
Our life is set up so we can be totally His. Living the life, entering into it, fills me with hope because it makes union with God possible. And this union brings more hope, for I know that healing, integration, and wholeness are all possible in the fire of the Sacred Heart, for myself and for those I pray for.
~A Poor Clare Novitiate Sister
Creative Troubadour
“Praise Him with lute and harp / Praise Him with timbrel and dance!” ~Ps. 150
Song and dance have always been a big part of my life. My heart always felt the need to love God and His creation by means of the arts, beauty, and creativity. Jesus never failed to draw me to Himself when He invited me to become a co-creator with Him. That is one of the many reasons why, I believe, He has called me to our Poor Clare vocation.
I have been delightfully surprised at how, as a Poor Clare, I have been able to share the song of the Lord with others. When a Poor Clare sings the praises of God in the liturgy, her love cannot be contained; it is so creative and expansive that it reaches to all corners of the earth. It takes faith to really believe that, but God has profoundly humbled me by showing me in small ways how He has used our poor voices and made them resound.
I will always be someone who delights in God's gift of loving creativity. Before entering the monastery, I saw dance as a means to pull people out of life's sufferings by lifting their eyes to see beauty. That is also what a Poor Clare aspires to do, but her gift lasts a lifetime and beyond. She gives herself entirely to God so that He may find delight in her and use her sacrifices to draw suffering humanity to true creative Love.
As a Poor Clare who aspires to share this deeper gift of self, I have learned, and continue to learn, what it means to suffer for the sake of true love. This has required a certain death to self that I did not imagine when I walked through our doors. But just as pain renders a dancer more grateful and beautiful on the stage, so does pain given over to Christ render the soul all the more resplendent in the eyes of God.
Every day, we are invited to contemplate the beauty of the Paschal Mystery in the Holy Mass. The greatest way to come to understand this is to live it, or as I like to say...to dance it!
~A Poor Clare Novitiate