Every family has at least one person about whom the relatives quietly say, “We don’t know what happened to him or her.” Usually, this sentence does not mean the person has disappeared. Sometimes he became an artist. Sometimes she married somebody nobody approved of. Sometimes he left the family business. Sometimes she simply stopped doing what everybody had already decided she would do. He moved too far away, became too religious, or not religious enough, or committed the unforgivable crime of making a major life decision without consulting the family committee.
Saint Clare was, in a sense, that person. She came from a wealthy aristocratic family in Assisi, and her future was more or less already arranged: security, social position, marriage, property, respectability. Then, at about eighteen, on Palm Sunday night, Clare secretly left home and went to join Saint Francis and his brothers. Imagine the conversation the next morning. “Where is Clare?” “She left.” “With whom?” “Francis.” “Which Francis? The barefoot one?” “The one who gave away everything and walks around preaching poverty.” At that point, somebody in the family surely said, “Wonderful. Of all the young men in Assisi, she found that one.” And for sure, somebody certainly needed strong coffee that morning. From the family’s point of view, Clare had gone astray.
Jesus speaks about the sheep that wanders away and the shepherd who goes looking for it. We normally assume immediately that the wandering sheep is the foolish, reckless, disobedient one. But perhaps the Gospel also forces another question upon us: Who gets to decide who is lost?
We are surprisingly confident about that. The child who does not choose the career we imagined is “lost.” The relative who thinks differently is “lost.” The parishioner who stopped coming to church is “lost.” The person whose life took an unexpected turn is “lost.” Sometimes our definition of being lost simply means, “You are no longer where I wanted you to be.” Sometimes when we say, “He has lost his way,” what we really mean is, “He is no longer walking on the road I had selected for him.”
Clare walked away from the road everyone had prepared for her and discovered the road God had prepared for her. That does not mean every act of rebellion is a holy vocation. Some sheep really do wander toward cliffs. If a teenager says, “I am following my own path,” parents are still permitted to ask where that path is going and whether it has car insurance. Discernment matters. But the Gospel warns us not to confuse our expectations with God’s will.
In Matthew’s Gospel today, the disciples are discussing greatness, and Jesus places a child among them. Jesus deliberately moves somebody from the margins into the center. God seems to have a remarkable affection for people who do not fit neatly into our charts. That may be why we, families, parishes, and religious communities need this Gospel so badly. Clare’s family saw a young woman abandoning a secure future. History saw something else. The woman who seemed to walk away from everything became one of the great saints of the Church.
The respectable people of Assisi, who probably thought Clare had ruined her life, are mostly forgotten. Clare, who gave up status, money, and public importance, is still remembered eight centuries later. So perhaps the question today is not simply, “Am I lost?” No, it may be more uncomfortable: Whom have I already decided is lost?
Someone in our family may be walking a road we do not yet understand. Someone we have written off may still be very much within the reach of the Shepherd. Someone whose life looks disorganized to us may be in the middle of a grace we cannot yet see. And sometimes the sheep we are worried about has not wandered away from God at all. It has simply wandered away from us. The Shepherd sees farther than we.