Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. These are instructions for living a life according to Mary Oliver.

Last October, I was part of a young adult delegation to witness the Synod on Synodality in Rome. There were undoubtedly moments and encounters that surprised me, but most notable is my very new and growing relationship with St. Clare of Assisi, whose feast we celebrate today!

Between basilicas and olive trees, I met St. Clare for the first time in an old fresco on the walls of an otherwise empty and seemingly ordinary dining room.

In this image, the Pope sits at one head of the table and St. Clare on the other. There is a row of bishops between them. Behind St. Clare, crouched in the shadows, is a group of Sisters. This fresco depicts the moment that St. Clare blessed the bread, and crosses appeared in each of the loaves before them.

Surely there’s more to the story here, but this single image was enough to immediately capture my spirit. Who was St. Clare and how did she get to this moment?

St. Clare was born the first of three daughters into a wealthy and noble family. At 15 she refused to marry. At 18 she ran away from home to meet with Franciscan friars and in a small chapel left her wealth for a woolen habit. Both her father and her uncle had attempted to dissuade her, with varying levels of force. She remained. At 21, she, reluctantly, became the abbess of the forming order.

The miracle St. Clare is potentially most known for, again includes bread, the Blessed Sacrament. Near the end of her life St. Clare was rather sick and bed ridden. One night, there was an army approaching, prepared to attack. In a panic, her Sisters ran to her room. St. Clare rose, retrieved the monstrance from their chapel, held it out of the window, and appealed to God before the oncoming violence. The army fell back.

These stories of Saint Clare give us such rich context to better understand the ‘bread of life’. Through her hands, the bread was blessed. In her hands, the host saved a whole people. St. Clare’s life is a constant devotion to and a willingness to become for others the bread of life. She makes an incredible companion to break open this week’s readings.

In our first reading, we witness Elijah in the desert ready to give up. “This is enough,” he says. “Take my life, I am no better than my fathers.” This moment highlights Elijah’s desire to be different, to not repeat the harm and sins modeled before him. Yet, he has and so we hear his despair. An Angel responds to him, “get up and eat”. Even in this divine response, there is no mystical promise, no explicit forgiveness of Elijah, nor a vision of what lies before him. These words are a simple command to remain alive and walk into a future unknown.

In our second reading we're reminded to imitate God. This often means, as it did for Elijah, that something must change.

Weaving these readings with the life of St. Clare, we see an example of someone who chose to live in love.  St. Clare is well known for her pious simplicity and sacrifice. While we can admire her rejection of gold and jewels, may we also be inspired by her bravery beyond the material. St. Clare quite literally disrupts the riches and the royalty of her father, and all that was expected of her, in order to serve others. As the oldest daughter, she should have married, and into means.

Yet, she knew God’s call in her. St. Clare remained faithful to who she was created to be. When people tell us who they are, we should believe them!

Likewise, when God reveals to us who we are, we should believe that, too! When we are called on to make sacred sacrifices in order to ‘live in love’ – it is not our very self – our created self- that we are losing. It is the assumptions and projections of who we should be, the expectations and external pressures of others laid onto us by others.

What if, as modeled by St. Clare and lamented by Elijah, the best way to imitate God is to be fully who and how God created us? Even if it is a surprise to ourselves and those around us.

In the Gospel this week when Jesus reveals that He is the bread of life, those around Him even say, “Do we not know your mother and father?” It is as if they are saying, “No, that can’t be. We know you better than you know yourself.”

Again, when people tell us who they are, we could believe them, even when we don’t know what comes next.

In the Psalm and in the Gospel this week, we hear the comforting and familiar refrains: “taste and see”, “I am the bread of life”. During the Eucharistic Prayer, we hear that the Eucharist is fruit of the earth (freely given), and the work of human hands. Clare, Elijah, Jesus, all of us, we have a call freely given by God - to live in love. Every day we are invited to discern, what are the works of our hands?

St. Clare co-created a Franciscan order for women religious, without hierarchical distinction, serving her Sisters until her final days. In her lifetime of becoming and remaining who she was called to be, the works of her hands were miraculous.

What expectations or assumptions are you being called to sacrifice? Sustained by grace freely given in the bread of life, what now are the works of your hands?