A rich man's son strips naked
Francis of Assisi renounces his inheritance
Pietro di Bernardone is a wealthy cloth merchant in Assisi, and his son Francesco has been an embarrassment and an expense. Francesco fought in a skirmish with the neighboring city of Perugia, was captured and imprisoned for a year, returned home ill, had a vision of Christ, began giving away his father's merchandise to the poor, stripped lead from a church roof to sell for repairs, and has generally been making a spectacle of himself.
Pietro hauls his son before the bishop of Assisi to force a legal renunciation of any claim on the family inheritance. He wants his money back. He wants his son to stop.
The bishop tells Francesco he must return his father's money.
The early Franciscan biographies — written by men who knew people who were there — record the moment with specificity: Francesco reaches up, removes his clothes, folds them neatly, places them with the money on the ground before his father, and says: Until now I have called you my father. From now on I can say: Our Father who art in heaven.
He walks out of the bishop's courtyard naked. Someone gives him a peasant's rough tunic. He draws a cross on it with chalk and puts it on.
He is twenty-four years old. The next forty-four years will follow from this moment with a consistency that is almost unnerving: total poverty, radical simplicity, absolute dependence on God's provision, and a joy so infectious and so inexplicable that it will draw thousands to follow him.
The man who gave back his father's clothes will be buried in a borrowed habit.
“Until now I have called you my father. From now on I can say only: Our Father, who art in heaven.”
— Francis of Assisi, to his father Pietro, 1206 AD
“So therefore whoever of you who doesn't renounce all that he has, he can't be my disciple.”
Francis took the renunciation literally, publicly, and permanently. He did it in front of witnesses, without hedging, without a safety net.
The nakedness is not theatrical. It is complete. There is nothing left to fall back on. The calculation he makes in that courtyard is the simplest possible: if God is real and Jesus is Lord, then the things I have been holding onto are not foundations — they are weights.
Most of us negotiate a partial version of this. We release some things and hold others. We follow at a distance that preserves our options.
Francis walked out naked.
This is not a universal call to literal poverty. It is a universal call to ask, honestly, what you are holding onto that you are calling security but is actually preventing you from following.
What would your version of folding the clothes look like?