Hello, my friend. It's good to be back with you.
Last time, we sat together with Monica --- do you remember? All those years of prayer for a son who couldn't hear her yet. I think about her more than I let on.
Today I want to tell you about someone else. Someone I knew differently --- not from a distance, the way I sometimes watch history unfold, but up close. She let me get close. Not many did.
I should warn you now --- I love this one. I don't say that about every story I bring you. But this woman, if you'd met her, you'd understand why I still think of her as a friend, all these centuries later.
Come with me. There's a place in Italy I want to show you first, before I tell you who she was.
Come with me to Assisi. Not the Assisi of pilgrims and postcards --- though it's that too, now --- but a small stone building on the hillside below the town, called San Damiano.
It's quiet here. The kind of quiet that isn't empty --- it's full of something, pressing gently against your ears. Tourists move through in soft shoes, speaking in whispers they don't remember deciding to use. The stone underfoot has been worn smooth by eight hundred years of bare feet and sandals and, sometimes, no shoes at all. I like to stand in the little courtyard here, where the light falls the same way it always has, and let myself remember.
And I do remember. I was here.
I remember the sound first --- shears, cutting through hair that had never once been cut. Then the weight of it, falling. Dark and heavy, hitting the floor like something final, because it was. I remember a young woman kneeling very still while it happened, not flinching, as though she'd been waiting her whole short life for someone to do exactly this to her. And then the veil, plain and rough, settling over a head that had never been so bare, or so free.
She wasn't anyone's daughter anymore, in that moment. Not anyone's bride, either --- not the one her family had already started imagining. She belonged to something else now, something she'd chosen with her own two hands, and no one in that chapel could take it back from her, though several would try.
Funny thing --- if you look up her paintings later, and I hope you will, you'll find the show notes have a link to her page, pictures and all --- you'll notice something odd. Almost every artist gives her back that long hair. Flowing, soft, exactly as it was before the shears. As if history couldn't quite bring itself to paint the moment she became herself, and preferred to remember her the way she used to look instead.
But I remember it the way it happened.
Let me take you back to the beginning, before any of that --- back to a girl in a wealthy house in Assisi, who wanted, more than anything, something no one around her could quite understand.
I knew this house before I knew her name. A palace, really, tucked into Assisi's stone streets --- her father Favarone was a count, wealthy enough that the family kept a castle up on the slope of Subasio too, for when the town grew too warm or too crowded. Old Roman blood, they said. The kind of family that expected things to go a certain way.
Her mother, Ortolana, was different from most noblewomen I'd watched in houses like that one. Devout in a way that unsettled people --- she'd gone on pilgrimage to Rome, to Compostela, even all the way to the Holy Land, at a time when most women of her station never left the valley they were born in. I think Clare got her hunger from her mother, even if neither of them called it that. Ortolana taught her daughters to pray before she taught them much else, and I remember watching young Clare --- solemn little thing, always listening harder than the other children in the room --- take it in like water finding the lowest ground.
There were sisters too. Beatrix, and a younger one named Catarina, who you'll come to know later by another name entirely. I liked that house, in its way. It was full of women who noticed things.
But a house like that has plans for its daughters, and Clare's parents had one. When she was twelve, they began arranging her marriage --- a good match, a wealthy young man, everything a family like hers was supposed to want. Twelve years old, and already the shape of her whole future was being decided in rooms she wasn't invited into.
She said no. Not loudly --- she was never loud --- but firmly enough that it held. She would wait, she told them, until she was eighteen. I don't know exactly where a twelve-year-old finds the nerve for that, arguing with her own father over her own life, but she found it, and it worked, and I remember thinking: this one is going to surprise everyone.
Then Francis came to San Giorgio.
He wasn't anyone important yet --- just a strange, joyful young man from a merchant family, preaching about poverty as if it were a gift instead of a shame. I watched Clare listen to him the way she used to listen to her mother's prayers. Something in her recognized something in him.
She went to find him after. Asked him, plainly, how to live the way the Gospel asked --- not admire it from a pew, but live it. And Francis, who recognized what he was looking at, helped her plan the only escape available to a young noblewoman with a wedding already looming: she would leave in secret, and never come back.
Palm Sunday, 1212. Night. Her aunt Bianca beside her, and one more companion, slipping out through a door her father didn't know how to guard against, because he didn't know it needed guarding. Down through the dark to the little chapel of the Porziuncula, where Francis was waiting.
I was there. I watched her kneel.
The shears came first, and then her hair --- dark, uncut her whole life --- fell to the floor of that small chapel, and something in the room changed with it. She traded her rich gown for a plain robe that had never touched noble skin before. She put on a veil that meant something entirely different from the one her mother might have arranged for a wedding day.
Her family came for her, of course. First with softness --- reminding her what she was giving up, the privileges of a name like hers, everything a marriage could still offer. When that failed, they came with force, meaning to drag her home bodily.
She ran to the altar and held it. And when they reached for her anyway, she threw back her veil to show them the cropped hair underneath --- proof, plain as anything, that whatever they'd come to take back no longer existed. They looked at what she'd already done to herself, and they let her go.
I followed her after that --- not literally, you understand, but the way I follow the people who matter to me. I couldn't have looked away if I'd wanted to.
Francis placed her first with the Benedictine nuns at San Paulo, near Bastia, for safekeeping while the dust settled. I remember worrying for her there --- she seemed so young, still, for everything she'd just done. But worry never suited Clare. Sixteen days later, her sister Catarina showed up at the door, having made her own quiet escape, and took the name Agnes. I laughed out loud when I saw it --- I couldn't help it. Their uncle Monaldo arrived soon after with a group of men, furious, meaning to drag Agnes home the way they'd tried with Clare. I watched him grab at her, shake her, shout in her face, while Clare knelt nearby praying so hard I could feel it from where I stood. And still he left with nothing. Two girls, in one family, both saying no to the same expected life. I don't think Assisi had seen anything quite like it.
They settled eventually at San Damiano --- that same small stone chapel I showed you already, though it was rougher then, freshly repaired by Francis's own hands a few years before. Other women started arriving, drawn to whatever it was Clare and Agnes were building. They became known simply as the Poor Ladies of San Damiano, and I want you to understand what that poverty actually looked like, because it wasn't gentle. They went barefoot. They slept on the bare ground. They ate no meat, kept long silences, gave away anything that came near resembling comfort. I watched women born into soft beds and full tables choose stone floors instead, and mean it.
I'll admit, I didn't fully understand it at first. I'd watched plenty of holy men embrace hardship before, but there was something different in how Clare carried hers --- not as punishment, not as performance, but as a kind of closeness. She and Francis both believed that walking through the world empty-handed brought you nearer to a man who'd done the same. They weren't miserable about it. That's the part that always catches me. I saw joy in that house, real joy, in the middle of all that deprivation.
In 1216, they asked her to become abbess, and I remember her resisting it --- genuinely, not for show. She didn't want the title. She took it because Francis asked her to, and even then she wore it strangely, calling herself mother, or servant, or handmaid --- anything but the word that put her above the other women. I watched her save the hardest, dirtiest chores for herself, over and over, when she had every right by then to hand them off. She was shy giving orders. Genuinely shy. It never stopped surprising me, watching a woman with that much quiet authority flinch a little every time she had to use it.
After Francis died, I watched her carry something heavier. She kept writing --- letters out to abbesses starting their own communities across Europe, especially to a young woman named Agnes of Prague, whom she never met in person but loved fiercely on paper. And she kept fighting, because the Church wanted her order to fold into an existing rule, something safer and already approved, rather than let her keep her poverty exactly as she'd shaped it.
She refused, for years. I watched popes come and go over that argument --- Innocent had approved her privilege, Honorius let it stand, and then Gregory IX took the chair and had real reservations. He worried, I think honestly, about her health, about all those women sleeping on stone floors and calling it a blessing.
I was in the room the day he came to San Damiano himself to settle it. He told her, gently, that he could release her from her vow if her own resolve frightened her --- "if you fear because of your vow, We dispense you from it." I watched her face when he said it. There wasn't a flicker of hesitation in her.
"Holy Father," she said, "never and in no way do I wish to be dispensed from following Christ."
I felt that answer in my chest, and I still do, telling it to you now. A pope, offering her an easier road, and a woman who'd already given up everything once, refusing to give up the one thing she'd fought hardest to keep.
He had no more objections after that. None of them ever really did, not for long, not with her.
I want to tell you what she left behind, because I don't think people always understand how remarkable it was.
In those days, when women or men banded together to live a shared religious life, they didn't just agree to get along and hope for the best. They lived under something called a Rule --- a written set of instructions, almost like a constitution, laying out exactly how the days would go. When to pray, when to work, when to eat and what, how decisions got made, who answered to whom. Every monastery needed one, approved by the Church, before it could exist as anything more than a house full of devout women with no legal standing at all.
Almost always, that Rule had been written by a man. Founders were men. Bishops were men. The Church that approved or rejected a Rule was run entirely by men. A community of women lived, in the deepest legal sense, by rules someone else had made for them.
Clare wrote her own.
I watched her do it --- piecing it together over years, keeping Francis's spirit at the center even after he was gone, insisting again and again on that same absolute poverty she'd fought Gregory IX to keep. She had it examined by Cardinal Rainaldo. She had it placed in front of Pope Innocent IV himself. And somehow, against every expectation of what a woman in her position could author, it was approved.
I was there two days before she died, when the papal bull confirming her Rule finally arrived at San Damiano. She'd spent decades getting to that moment, and I watched her receive the news lying in bed, weak, running out of time, and utterly at peace. She'd done it. The community she built would keep living exactly as she'd shaped it, long after she was gone --- because she'd written the law herself, and made it hold.
Her sisters carried that Rule outward from San Damiano across Europe, house after house, faster than I think even Clare expected. She wrote to Agnes of Prague about it, this strange, tender correspondence between two women shaping the same kind of life an ocean apart, neither one having ever founded anything quite like it before.
She didn't just follow Francis, in the end. She built something of her own, wrote the law it would live by, and made the highest authority in Christendom sign off on it --- not once, but again and again, until it finally stuck.
I don't think I need to tell you what any of this means. You've been listening long enough to know already.
A twelve-year-old girl, told her whole future was already decided by people who loved her but didn't ask her. A woman who spent decades in direct negotiation with three popes, and lost to none of them. A Rule --- a law, in every sense that mattered --- written entirely in her own hand, by a woman, in a century that gave women almost no hand in anything at all.
I've watched a great many people find the one crack in a wall everyone else agreed was solid. Clare found hers at twelve, and never once stopped pressing against it, all the way to the very last hours of her life.
I'll just leave that here with you, the way I found it. Some things don't need me to explain them. They only need to be seen clearly, and left alone.
I want to ask you something before I let you go.
Somewhere in your life, right now, there's probably a wall you've agreed is solid. A path someone handed you a long time ago, so early you don't even remember being handed it --- and you've been walking it because it's the one that was there, not necessarily the one that was yours.
I'm not asking you to run off in the night the way Clare did. Most walls don't need that. But I wonder if you've looked closely at yours lately. Pressed against it, just to see. Sometimes the crack is smaller than you think, and sometimes it's been there the whole time, waiting for someone patient enough to notice it.
Clare was twelve when she found hers. She didn't have a map. She didn't have permission. She just had a sense, quiet but unshakeable, that the life being arranged for her wasn't the only one available --- and she kept testing that sense, year after year, long after it would have been easier to stop.
You don't have to found an order or outlast three popes. I'm only asking you to notice, this week, one place where you've mistaken "the only path" for "the path someone else chose for me." That's all. Just notice it. See what you feel.
I'll be here when you're ready to tell me what you found.
Before I let you go, my friend, one more thing about Clare --- because I can't resist it, and I think you'll enjoy this as much as I did.
Centuries after she died, the Church made her the patron saint of television. I promise I'm not making that up. It goes back to a Christmas night when she was too ill to leave her bed for Mass, and yet she reportedly saw and heard the whole service anyway, as clearly as if she'd been standing in the chapel herself. Someone, a long time later, decided that sounded rather a lot like watching a screen, and made it official.
I find that funny every single time I think about it. A woman who spent her entire life giving up comfort, spectacle, anything the world offered freely --- and now she watches over every glowing screen in every living room on earth. I don't think she'd mind the joke. I think she might even like it.
Now --- I need to tell you something a little different about what comes next, because I don't want you caught off guard.
Usually, when I say goodbye to you, I'm sending you off into the wide gallery of everyone I've ever wanted you to meet --- one story, standing alone, until the next one catches my eye. Next time won't be like that.
Next time, we leave the wide gallery for a while. Seven women are waiting for us --- women whose names you may never have heard, who spent themselves prying open a door so half of humanity could walk through it. We'll meet them one after another, close together, because their story doesn't make sense in fragments --- it only makes sense as a single unbroken pull. One of them will hand something to the next, who hands it to the next, all the way across an ocean and back again, until the very last one doesn't just win a door open --- she walks through it and takes a seat that was never supposed to be hers.
I've walked beside a great many people, my friend, but I've rarely watched an idea move the way this one moved. Come back tomorrow and for the full seven days in a row, if you can. I don't think you'll want to stop once it starts.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.