Francis, Clare and the Big Fat Wet Nipple

Last month I spent 8 days on retreat in Assisi with 10 other progressive clergywomen, visiting many places associated with St. Clare and St. Francis.  Here’s my second weekly reflection on that time, and on what saints might mean to us today.

Chiara Offreducio, (we know her as St. Clare) was the oldest daughter of a rich noble family in 13^th century Assisi.  Her father the Count had built his house right next door to the prominent local church where Clare had been baptized and where her family worshipped regularly, the Church of San Rufino.  Clare’s family expected her to be a good faithful Christian, and to marry well and produce more good faithful Christians.

But two visions of fecund nursing breasts changed everything for Clare.   Every day out her window she saw this sculpture on her church’s façade of Jesus’ mother Mary nursing the baby Jesus.  This was no modest disguised nursing mother, but a bold big fat wet nipple, feeding God himself. 

Then some years later in life Clare had a profound vision of breasts.  Her family and friends, soon after her death, were asked to testify why she should be canonized as a saint. They recounted that Clare had told them of a vision she had had in which her friend St. Francis had actually nursed her from his breasts and it was “sweet and delightful….so clear and gold it was like a mirror.” 

I’m curious today to wonder about these two nursing visions and what effect they had on Clare’s decision to reject her family’s expectations of her and to follow God’s call to a very different life.  To leave behind one set of usual expectations for a woman about nursing new life, and to take on another. 

Like all women of her time and place, Clare was quite restricted about when and where she could go out; it was hard to meet others.  But she was able to look out the window of her house. That view helped her decide to reject her family’s expectations of her and choose instead her unusual religious calling, 40 years of cloistered life as abbess of a women’s religious community.

Out that window she saw not only Mary’s breasts, but she also saw and heard a notorious strange local guy, Francesco di Bernardone (we call him St. Francis.)  He was from the slightly lower merchant class, and for years he had been preaching all over the place, in town and in the countryside.  Many days he spoke right out her window, in the church piazza, calling people to leave behind, as he had done, the trappings of money and prestige, to reject family, and follow God, whom he called our one Father.  Francis was 15 years older than Clare, and of a different class, but she could easily run into him in that piazza, and in the San Rufino, church, where he too had been baptized.  Clare quickly hungered after his type of faithful life. 

On a fateful Palm Sunday night in 1212 she ran away from home, something many a teenager has done to reject her parents.  But Chiara never came back.  She ran to Francis at a monastery two miles down the hill from town.  There he accepted her as his first woman follower, cut off her hair as a sign of her dedication to monastic life, and helped her establish the first Franciscan woman’s religious community and the first women’s community ever in which a woman, Clare, wrote the community rule.  Clare’s family pursued her that night, tried to drag her out of the church and take her back home.

But nevertheless, she persisted.

There is so much to say about Clare.  For today, just this question: how was she able to escape the conventions and expectations of her family and instead chose a life of devotion to God away from home and comfort?  

Clare’s house overlooking St. Rufino piazza and sculpture of nursing MaryOn my visit to Assisi I was struck by how close that piazza in front of the church was to her house right next door.   Perhaps that daily vision of Mary and her nipple, and that frequent preaching by this crazy unusual young man Francis inspired and empowered Clare to choose a very different life.

Clare never nursed a baby at her own breast.  But for 40 years she was a nurturing mother of many women, forming a community of first a dozen, then hundreds of local women, including eventually her own sister and mother, and then tens of thousands of women world-wide even before she died, to follow God in their life and devotion. 

As I travelled around Umbria last month I kept seeing sculptures and paintings of Mary with a big boob jutting out from her dress, the baby Jesus clinging to that nipple.  In my culture we women are scorned and sometimes even arrested for nursing our babies in public.  But in this medieval culture Mary as nursing mom was a symbol and sign that God and the church were actually nourishing and nurturing.  And that religious leaders, even men, like Francis, could be praised for nursing love and compassion from their own breasts.

Within months of Clare’s death the church quickly began collecting testimonies of her life and faith, in support of an effort to declare her a saint, to canonize her.  It’s a historian’s and faithful person’s boon that we have contemporary accounts from Clare’s friends and family about what kind of person she was and the life she led.  In these accounts is the story of her nursing at the breast of her beloved friend and inspiration, Francis. 

“Lady Clare also related how once, in a vision, it seemed to her she brought a bowl of hot water to Saint Francis along with a towel for drying his hands. She was climbing a very high stairway, but was going very quickly, almost as though she were going on level ground.When she reached Saint Francis, the saint bared his breast and said to the Lady Clare: “Come, take, and drink.” After she had sucked from it, the saint admonished her to imbibe once again. After she did so what she had tasted was so sweet and delightful she in no way could describe it. After she had imbibed, that nipple or opening of the breast from which the milk comes remained between the lips of blessed Clare. After she took what remained in her mouth in her hands, it seemed to her it was gold so clear and bright that everything was seen in it as in a mirror.”

Some nursing reflections on Clare and this vision:

• Clare was a beloved leader, called Mother of her community.  She nurtured them as a mother nurtures her infants.  Mary inspired that vision of mammary leadership.  What does it mean to nurse a community?
• Until Clare ran away to follow him, Francis had only male followers.  Then Clare called together and led a profound women’s community of followers.  Certainly she had heard read Paul’s words that “In Christ there is neither male nor female.”  Did those words open her up to receive a vision of Francis nursing her, not the opposite?
• What are we to make of the strange juxtaposition, indeed contradiction about exposure and covering?  Religious women had to cover themselves up completely, hiding from society in cloisters.  And yet the most beloved woman, Mary, boldly exposed her naked breast for all to see.
• Much has been written of the medieval vision of Mary the nurturer as a symbol of the church, as opposed to images of male, hierarchical, doctrine enforcers.  Francis and Clare’s community were pretty open, tolerant, forgiving – was that because every day they saw Mary and her big fat wet nipple?
• Francis as mother, nurturing and nursing.  Jesus compared himself once to a mother hen trying to gather and protect his young chicks.  But we rarely image even these two cool metrosexual guys as nurturing mothers.  Can we find this image anywhere in today’s church? 

OK, some milky food for thought and prayer!!!

More next week on these two remarkable saints.  Probably something about how saints are curious, peculiar, different from the rest of us.  Or are they?  Who are your saints?

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter