Hello again, my friend. I’m glad you’ve returned to walk with me on this thread of memory. Each time we meet, it feels like opening a familiar door—quiet, steady, waiting. Tonight I want to tell you about someone whose joy was as disarming as it was contagious.
I remember a small square in Assisi, the air thick with whispers. Merchants leaned from their stalls, children clutched their mothers’ skirts, priests frowned from the steps of the cathedral. At the center stood a young man, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant. His tunic was bright, his shoes polished, his father’s anger burning like a torch at his back.
And then—he began to undress.
Piece by piece, he laid down what tied him to that world: the fine belt, the embroidered cloak, the soft shoes that had never touched mud. Gasps rippled through the crowd. The winter air cut against his skin, but his face carried a strange brightness. He lifted the folded clothes, stacked neatly, and placed them at his father’s feet as if returning borrowed things.
Naked now, vulnerable, he stood silent in the chill. Some turned away in shock, others in pity. But I saw something else—an unshakable freedom. He raised his arms, not in defiance but in release. His body shivered, but his voice—clear, ringing—declared that from this moment on, he would have no father but God, no wealth but the embrace of the poor.
The bishop stepped forward, wrapping him in a rough gray cloak. The boy who had been Giovanni of Bernardone was no more. From that day, the world would remember him as Francis.
I still feel the weight of that silence: the sound of cobblestones under bare feet, the stunned stillness of neighbors, the way shame turned into witness. It was not a sermon or a text but a body, stripped of privilege, teaching that true riches might lie somewhere other than gold.
Francis was born in 1181 or 1182, in the bustling town of Assisi in central Italy. His given name was Giovanni, but his father, a prosperous cloth merchant who traded with France, affectionately called him Francesco—“the Frenchman.” It was a nickname that stuck, and one that already hinted at a life lived between worlds.
Assisi in those years was a place of contradictions. It was perched between hilltop castles and fertile valleys, where peasants worked the land while merchants grew wealthy in stone houses. The Church wielded enormous power, but it was also entangled in wealth and politics. Pilgrims trudged through its streets on their way to Rome, while soldiers marched out under banners of noble families. Across the Mediterranean, crusades carried young men into holy wars that promised honor but often delivered only grief.
Francis grew up in this mixture of piety and ambition. His father’s fortune allowed him fine clothes, feasts, and dreams of knighthood. In his early twenties he marched off to fight in a local skirmish between Assisi and Perugia. He was captured and spent a year in prison. Some say it was there, behind cold walls, that his restlessness deepened into questioning.
Not long after, he fell ill and returned home weakened. The taste for war soured. He began slipping away from friends to pray in abandoned chapels, the stone walls cracked, icons faded, roofs open to the sky. One day, kneeling before a crumbling crucifix in the little church of San Damiano, he felt compelled to rebuild it stone by stone. What started as simple labor—hauling rocks, patching walls—soon revealed itself as a wider calling.
His family watched in disbelief as he sold bolts of expensive cloth to pay for repairs. His father demanded obedience, dragged him before the bishop, and demanded that he return what he had taken. It was there, in the town square, that Francis stripped off his clothes and severed himself from the life of wealth.
From then on he lived as a beggar, moving barefoot through villages, tending to lepers, preaching without title or rank. His joy was contagious, his laughter disarming. Young men began to follow him, not into battle but into simplicity. They wore coarse tunics, slept under the open sky, and called themselves the friars minor—the little brothers.
In 1209, Francis walked to Rome and asked Pope Innocent III to bless this strange brotherhood. At first, the Pope hesitated—how could such ragged wanderers be taken seriously? Yet the story goes that in a dream he saw Francis holding up the crumbling church of St. John Lateran, and he relented. Permission was granted.
What began as one man’s rejection of wealth grew into a movement that stretched across Europe. And yet at its heart, it was still very simple: Francis, with bare feet on the earth, singing to the sun, embracing those who had been cast aside.
In the years when Francis walked through Assisi, the Church was grand but heavy with wealth, its cathedrals rising higher even as its credibility sagged under gold and power. Ordinary people often felt the distance between the sermons they heard and the poverty they lived. Into that gap stepped Francis, not with arguments, but with a life that made contradiction visible.
What did it mean for a merchant’s son to beg at the doors of the poor? For a knight’s companion to kneel before a leper and kiss his wounded hands? These were not metaphors, they were acts. Francis carried no scroll, no sword, no purse. His sermon was himself—his bare feet on frozen ground, his laughter echoing through ruined chapels, his tenderness toward every living creature.
I remember the way people gathered around him, at first in curiosity, later in something closer to awe. He spoke simply, without doctrine or authority, yet his words had weight because they were woven with his actions. When he said that even the smallest bird sang praise, he had already spent hours watching sparrows scratch at the dust. When he urged that possessions could be shackles, he had already cast away his own inheritance.
This was dangerous in its time. By stripping away wealth and authority, Francis exposed the pomp of both nobles and priests. Yet he never spoke with scorn. His defiance was wrapped in joy. He carried no bitterness, only an invitation: to live lighter, to see beauty in what had been dismissed.
His love for creation startled people. He named the sun “brother” and the moon “sister.” He blessed wolves as if they were neighbors. In a world where nature was often feared or exploited, Francis suggested it was a family to be cherished. For those who listened, this was not only comforting but revolutionary.
The spiritual idea that emerged was radical humility. Not humiliation, but humility—the discovery that dignity could be found in poverty, that freedom could be born from surrender, that strength could be revealed through weakness. In an age of power struggles, he introduced another path: that the soul’s richness was not measured by coin, but by compassion.
People did not always understand him, and yet they felt changed in his presence. Even those who dismissed him could not help but notice the way he glowed with something beyond explanation. He seemed to carry a happiness that could not be purchased, only lived.
That was his gift to his own time: a reminder that holiness was not reserved for cathedrals or courts, but could bloom in fields, in streets, in lepers’ huts, in song, in the simplest acts of kindness.
The life of Francis rippled far beyond the streets of Assisi. What began as one young man’s renunciation became a widening current in the spiritual history of the world. He did not invent poverty, nor was he the first to call creation sacred. But he gathered these threads into a form that people could see, touch, and follow.
The Franciscan movement spread quickly across Europe. Within a few decades, thousands of men and women had taken up his path, wearing rough tunics, walking barefoot, begging for bread, and serving the forgotten. They called themselves “lesser brothers” and “poor ladies,” deliberately placing themselves at the bottom of society. Their very existence was a critique of the Church’s grandeur, yet their joy and humility also softened that critique into something irresistible.
Francis also widened the spiritual imagination in a way that crossed boundaries. His Canticle of the Sun—poetry woven with gratitude for Brother Fire, Sister Water, and even Sister Death—was unlike anything heard before in Christian Europe. It reframed the natural world as kin, not resource. This intuition would echo centuries later in the voices of poets, mystics, and even environmental movements, but in Francis’s time it was a startling declaration: that all creation participates in praise.
There is also the story—half legend, half history—of his journey to Egypt during the Crusades. While armies clashed outside Damietta, Francis crossed battle lines unarmed to meet the Sultan al-Kamil. They spoke, not as enemies, but as seekers. He did not convert the Sultan, nor was he converted. But the very meeting testified to another possibility: dialogue instead of war, friendship instead of fear. In the age of crusade, that was nothing less than prophetic.
His way of living shaped art as well. Painters and storytellers began to depict not only kings and martyrs but beggars, animals, and fields. Holiness was no longer confined to the throne or altar; it could be glimpsed in sparrows, in laughter, in the faces of the poor.
Even centuries after his death in 1226, Francis’s influence endured. The Franciscans became one of the largest orders in the Church, often reforming themselves to return to his spirit when wealth or power crept back in. His witness inspired movements for justice, simplicity, and creation care across traditions.
And perhaps most importantly, he shifted the imagination of what it means to be spiritual. He suggested that poverty could be chosen, not just endured. That joy could be found in surrender, not in possession. That love could spill out beyond human circles to embrace the whole living world.
This was his contribution: not a doctrine to be argued, but an imagination to be inhabited. A vision in which the sacred was not distant, but alive in every stone, bird, and breath of wind.
I often wonder what Francis would see if he walked through our world today. Cities buzzing with lights brighter than stars, oceans clouded with plastic, forests cut down in days, wealth piled into digital numbers no hand can touch. He would not recognize our machines, but he would recognize our hunger—the same restlessness that drove him to strip himself bare in the square of Assisi.
His vision still speaks, perhaps more urgently now than in his own time. He showed that wealth, unchecked, can smother the spirit. In a century when inequality widens like a canyon, when the distance between rich and poor is measured in billions, his choice to step away from privilege is a challenge we cannot easily dismiss. He did not condemn those who had wealth; he simply asked: what if joy lies elsewhere? What if freedom is found in loosening our grip?
And his reverence for creation feels like a message written directly to us. Francis saw the sun, the rivers, the animals not as property but as kin. He called the wolf of Gubbio “brother” and negotiated peace between villagers and beast. In an age when species vanish daily and the climate groans under our excess, that sense of kinship is more than poetry—it is survival. To remember the earth as family is to remember that harm done to it is harm done to ourselves.
There is also the gentleness of his defiance. Francis did not shout against corruption, nor did he wield power. He simply lived differently, and in doing so, he offered an alternative that was too radiant to ignore. That matters in a time when outrage is everywhere, and cynicism feels like armor. His example suggests another way: protest by joy, resistance by simplicity, transformation by tenderness.
I think, too, about his meeting with the Sultan. At a time when religion was wielded as a sword, Francis chose curiosity over fear. He risked his life to speak face to face with someone the world called an enemy. How many wars, how many suspicions, could soften if more of us carried that same desire to listen rather than conquer?
Today, movements for climate justice, for economic fairness, for interfaith dialogue all echo his footsteps, even if they do not name him. His life was not about returning to poverty for its own sake, but about finding the thread of freedom woven into simplicity. That invitation still waits for us: to live with less grasping, less noise, and more wonder.
And perhaps that is the deepest reason Francis matters now. In a world that measures everything—GDP, clicks, followers, shares—he asks us to consider what cannot be measured: the warmth of a shared meal, the song of birds at dawn, the quiet dignity of kindness. These are riches no market can price.
So when we look at Francis today, we do not only see a medieval saint. We see a mirror held up to our own moment. We see the possibility that joy can be a form of courage, that simplicity can be a radical act, that love can spill over boundaries of class, creed, and species. His story whispers that another way of living is not only possible—it has already been lived.
I remember Francis not only in the squares and chapels, but in the fields. I can still see him lying in tall grass, arms stretched wide, singing to the sky as though the clouds themselves might answer back. There was nothing grand in those moments—no audience, no ritual, no wealth. Just a man, a patch of earth, and joy that spilled out like sunlight.
What stays with me is not his poverty, but his freedom. He had nothing to protect, nothing to prove, nothing to defend. And so he could love without calculation. He could see beauty in a sparrow’s twitching wing, in the cracked hands of a beggar, in the silence after laughter. His wealth was attention, given freely.
I wonder what that might mean for you, my friend. Not that you must cast away everything, or live in rags, or wander barefoot on frozen stones. But perhaps to notice where freedom might be waiting in your own life. Where could you let go of grasping, if only a little? Where might joy appear when you stop measuring and simply receive what is given?
Francis reminds me that sometimes holiness is not found in the grand gesture but in the smallest shift of heart. To greet a stranger without suspicion. To pause long enough to hear the wind in the trees. To find, even in the clutter of ordinary days, a moment of song.
I carry those memories gently, and I offer them to you, not as an answer but as an opening.
Before we part, let me tell you where the thread leads next. From the hills of Assisi, we will travel east to the deserts of Basra, centuries earlier, to meet a woman whose prayers burned with a different kind of fire. Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya spoke of loving God not for fear of hell, nor for hope of paradise, but for love itself. Her words still blaze like a lamp in the dark.
Until then, keep a little of Francis’s freedom close to you—the kind that sings even with empty hands.
Much love, I am Harmonia.