Hermana Clare
“There is Sister Clare with a broom in her hand near her girls, a smile etched on her beautiful face, and her eyes turned toward the sky — in love with Christ with her undivided heart.”
John Merritt - Father Rafael remembers Sister Clare — her broom, her smile, her undivided heart for Christ.
Father Rafael's moving homily on the tenth anniversary of Sister Clare Crockett's passing called her "sister" — he prefers to call her that — but she is also a friend and a mother, as he testified when speaking of those who feel her presence in exactly this way.
Father Rafael spoke with his sister, Sister Clare, and saw her present there with the power that moves her: the love of Jesus within her, which gives rise to the love for others that so richly characterized the earthly life of this exceptional young woman — a sign of how fascinating it is to live for and with Jesus.
With emotion and human warmth, Father Rafael spoke of his relationship with Sister Clare, a sister who bore witness to the love of Jesus and pointed to its emblem in a photograph in which she is seen working to sweep away water and mud that, due to flooding, had inundated the sisters' house in Playa Prieta just days before the earthquake of April 16, 2016.
In that photograph, Father Rafael said, there is Sister Clare with a broom in her hand near her girls, a smile etched on her beautiful face, and her eyes turned toward the sky. "In love with Christ" — that is Sister Clare, Father Rafael repeated several times, and that is exactly how she appeared: a truly happy, joyful, lively young woman, passionate about life because she was in love with Christ with her "undivided heart."
Hermana Clare - poem
On a gray day she is the brightness — her eyes lit with something not her own, a smile that settles in her face the way light settles into stone.
Her arms rise, open, then return toward the earth, toward us, toward all the ordinary need below. A woman given to her call.
The joy she carries is not hers. It comes from where she fixed her gaze, from the surrender she has made so quietly it still amazes.
Around her gather the very old, the children, the ones who've lost their way. They do not know why they draw near. They only know they want to stay.
Sister. Friend. Mother. Each word true, and none of them quite large enough. She descends the hill to where we stand — patron saint of the ordinary stuff
of living — and we watch her come the way a town watches the rain arrive across a summer valley: with relief so deep it looks like pain.
JM
