“The life of St. Clare and of the Poor Clares is a life which is consumed in Christ and for Christ in prayer and action, which are but two interconnecting channels communicating Christ in poverty and in charity.  ….  It may help to note something not yet mentioned: that the Franciscan “devotions” to the mystery of Bethlehem, Calvary and the Eucharist are for Clare not so much a “devotion”—unless one takes the word in its full etymological sense—they are a “communion,” something different.  That is, in making herself “one” with Christ, Clare relives in him, with him, his whole mystery, in birth and in death.  She does not stop at the externals.  She does not dedicate herself merely to cultivating some particular aspects of Christ's life, such as giving continual homage to the Child placed in the manger or to the majesty of a God raised up on a cross.  Instead, that Child, Christ, who is placed in the manger is the same as he who is carried in the womb—as she writes to Agnes—and who is given birth by acting according to the Gospel, as St. Francis puts it in the letter quoted. Likewise, the pitiful body of Clare in her illness is the same body that hangs from the cross and enters with him, in him, into the eternal Pasch, transformed “into the image of the Divine One himself.” – Sister Chiara Augusta Lainati, O.S.C., Poor Clare scholar