Summary: From the right to being to the gift of being. – The season of claiming the right-to-be, and the radical autonomy in thinking and acting, proper to modernity, are put in contrast with the Franciscan perspective, inspired by the oblative logic of Him Who, without any merit on our part, has called us into being, enhanced by endowing us with intelligence and creativity. Underlining the gratuitous and free nature of the creative act, whereby we have been called from nothingness into being, the Author urges us to slow down, which is to say, to overlay the prerogatives of time – succession, change, discontinuity, irreversibility – by the spatial prerogatives – depth, height, breadth – to contest the present “temporalization” of space, in order to recover and hand on the depth of feeling of the Canticle of the creatures.