Claire Dwyer

Mom, Wife, Interior Life — that’s it in a nutshell. Claire’s been devouring books and pouring the words back out again longer than she can remember. It’s where her love of God and the Catholic faith finds its fullest expression. Claire has a certification in Spiritual Theology from the Avila Institute and is currently in the graduate program at St. Vincent Seminary’s Institute of Ministry Formation for Spiritual Direction. She has an undergraduate degree in Theology from Franciscan University of Steubenville, where she serves on the Advisory Board of the Leadership Institute. Her roles as writer, editor, spiritual director, and lifelong student of the interior life all came together in her first book, “This Present Paradise: A Spiritual Journey with St. Elizabeth of the Trinity.” which quickly became a best-seller, due in part to having the honor of being chosen by the Abiding Together Podcast for its 2021 Lenten Book Study. She is also a contributor to Blessed is She’s Lenten devotional, New Wine, which released in January 2023. She is under contract for another book and between that, working full-time for the Avila Foundation as editor of spiritualdirection.com, coaching, teaching, and raising a handful of growing kids, she still manages to find time for a few slowly-savored pages of reading almost every (tired) night. She has a passion for helping women in particular see the beauty and possibility in their own interior lives and their unrepeatable place in the Church and for Catholic writers to be encouraged and formed in their writing journey. She is co-founder and content director of Write These Words and the PraiseWritersCatholic Writing Membership Community. Most importantly, she has been married for 25 years to her husband Delaney and they have six children and one grandchild. Connect and keep in touch with her at ClaireDwyer.com.

Articles By Claire Dwyer

What is Our Response to the Living Word of God?

What is our response to the Word of God? Are we attentive to it? Do we allow ourselves to be moved to praise, repentance, and gratitude? Do we put it on the proper platform in our lives, giving it a place of primacy in our prayer? Claire Dwyer reflects on today’s readings.

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New Every Morning

We get 365 chances this year.  365 fresh starts.  Every morning has been promised its share of mercies – not brushed off, polished up, half-used graces, but the brand-spankin’ new kind.
-Claire Dwyer

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Holy Innocents: First Martyrs and Pro-Life Patron Saints

On the fourth day of Christmas, the Church gives to us a somber memorial which concretizes what could very possibly become, thanks to elves and snowmen, an overly sentimental feast of Christ’s birth. Claire Dwyer reflects on the Feast of the Holy Innocents.

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He Speaks into Our Silence

“The silence of prayer is a surrendering of our own words and the noise surrounding us so that something far fuller can rush in – so that we can be “filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph 3:19).  So that the creative, powerful and eternally self-donating Word, the one Word that matters, the eloquent Word that contains perfectly within it all our poor scattered syllables of truth, can be spoken.  And in speaking, transform us within that silence to be a little bit more like Him.  In speaking, reduce our interior and exterior storms to obedient breezes.”
Claire Dwyer reflects on the necessity of silence in the spiritual life.

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The Secret of Saint Gianna

Meeting each morning as an opportunity for prayer and love – in motherhood, in the workplace, in the many nooks and crannies of the world – that is possible. And it strengthens us for the heroic, the impossible, the possible-only-with God. That is the secret of St. Gianna, Claire Dwyer reveals.

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