In Assisi, a young man was once brought before the bishop by his own father.
The father was Pietro di Bernardone, a prosperous cloth merchant. The son was Francis, born around 1181, a young man who'd had every comfort the family's money could buy. Something had changed in him. After an experience at the small, crumbling church of San Damiano, he'd sold cloth from his father's stock to help the priest there. His father was angry, and wanted his property back, and the matter came before Guido, the bishop of Assisi.
What happened next is recorded by his early biographers, Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure. Francis renounced his father and his inheritance. Then he took off his clothes, there and then, and handed them back to his father. The bishop stepped forward and covered him with his own cloak.
What happened when St Francis gave everything back?
Standing before the bishop of Assisi, Francis renounced his father's wealth and his inheritance, stripped off his clothes and returned them to his father. The bishop covered him with his own cloak. The rich merchant's son left with nothing he'd been given, and spent the rest of his life as a brother to the poor and to creation.
I want to handle this story with the respect it deserves. Francis is a saint, revered by many millions, and his life belongs first to his faith. What I offer here is a reflection on one moment, from someone who has found in it a picture of something every person faces in a smaller way.
What was he really giving back?
Not only money and clothes.
He was handing back an identity. The merchant's son. The heir. The young man with prospects. The role that his family, his town and his upbringing had prepared for him from birth. The clothes were the most visible part of it, but they weren't the whole of it. In that square, he gave back the self that had been given to him, and stood there as whoever was underneath.
As his biographers tell it, he said that from then on he would call only God his father. However you understand that, the shape of the moment is clear: a person setting down, in public and completely, everything the world had told him he was.
That's the turn in his story. He didn't add a new life on top of the old one. He removed the old one, and something else had room to live.
What did he find on the other side?
A kinship with everything.
Near the end of his life, Francis composed a hymn, the Canticle of the Creatures, not in Latin but in the everyday Umbrian language of the people around him. In it, he speaks of the sun and the moon, of wind and water, fire and earth, as his brothers and sisters.
That's the other side of the story, and it's the part I find most moving.
We often imagine that giving things up leaves us poorer and lonelier. His life suggests the reverse. The more he handed back, the more of the world seemed to become his family. The young man who gave back his inheritance didn't end up with less of a world. He ended up belonging to all of it. He died on 3 October 1226. The man who had handed back everything he owned sang to the sun as family.
What does his renunciation have to do with an ordinary life?
Most of us will never stand naked in a town square, and nobody is suggesting we should. But almost everyone is carrying an identity that was handed to them, and many of us are wearing it like clothes we've forgotten we can take off.
The son who has to succeed where his father didn't. The daughter who has to be the sensible one. The eldest who holds the family together. The one who has to prove, over and over, that they deserve their place. These are inheritances too. Nobody asked for them. They were given, early, and they've been worn so long they feel like skin.
What Francis's moment shows, as I read it, is that inheritances like these can be handed back. Not with anger, not in a dramatic gesture, but with the simple recognition: this was never mine.
Notice, too, that he didn't hand them back in hatred of his father. The story isn't one of rebellion so much as of release. That matters for anyone doing this in their own life. The rules and roles you inherited usually came from people doing their best with what they themselves had inherited. You can give the roles back and still honour the people. Often, giving them back is what finally lets you see those people clearly. It's part of what I mean by unlearning conditioning.
Have I ever had to hand back an identity?
Not in the way Francis did, and I'd never put my life beside his. But I know what it is to lose almost everything and find out what's left.
There was a time I lost my job, then my car, then my house. I was bankrupt, and for a while I thought that was the end of me. It wasn't. In the words I've used ever since, my life changed not because I became someone new, but because I came home to who I was, before the world, and the war, and the failure told me who to be. Today I work when I want, travel when I choose, and have real time with my family. I'm free in just about every sense there is. None of that came from gaining back what I'd lost. It came from what was still there when it had gone.
How can I hand back one thing that was never mine?
This practice is a gift, in the most literal sense, and it takes a week.
Choose one object you own that carries an identity you've outgrown. The suit you keep for a version of yourself you no longer want to be. The trophy from a life you've left. The books you keep so people will think you've read them. Something with a small charge on it.
Give it away this week, to someone who'll use it or to a charity. Before you do, hold it for a moment and say, quietly, what it represented: this was the one who had to impress. This was the version my parents wanted.
Then let it go, and notice how you feel over the next few days. Write down anything that surprises you. Many people expect loss. What they often find is space. It's a very small echo of what happened in the square, and it can loosen something far bigger than the object.
Where does this lead?
To the question underneath every inheritance. Who were you before the world told you who to be?
I wrote a book around that question, called Unbecome. It isn't about Francis, and I'd never claim his life for my work. But it's about the same direction his moment points in: not taking on more, but giving back what was never yours, so that what's underneath can finally live.
If this story has touched something, what it means to unbecome goes further into that direction, and how to find yourself again looks at what's often waiting underneath.
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.