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Summary
- Clara is not in the Bible. It is Latin clarus, clear or bright — the root of clarity, declare and clarion.
- Clare of Assisi left home at about eighteen, at night. When her family came to take her back she held the altar cloth and uncovered her shorn head, and they left without her.
- She spent forty-one years in one building arguing with successive popes for the right to own nothing — not individually, which was normal, but collectively, which was not.
- She wrote her own rule, the first known written by a woman for women. It was approved two days before she died in 1253.
- 1 Corinthians 13:12 compares present knowledge to a bronze mirror: a real image and not a sharp one. We see genuinely and imperfectly at once.
Bibliography (Click to show)
Sources: Behind the Name entry for Clara (Latin clarus); standard accounts of Clare of Assisi for her departure from home, the long dispute over the privilege of poverty, her authorship of a rule for women and its approval in 1253. Scripture quotations from the NIV via BibleGateway (Matthew 5:14; 1 Corinthians 2:1; 13:12; 14:9), with the King James phrasing of 13:12 noted. Ancient mirrors of polished bronze are the background to that verse and are standard in commentary.
