A Spiritual Break

Posted on November 13, 2026November 13, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham

Why Is Prayer So Hard Sometimes?

Everyday Mysticism: Encountering God, or Misfiring, in Ordinary Life

Nov 13, 2026 · Michael J. Cunningham

Why prayer feels hard

Prayer is not mainly hard because of effort. It is hard because of attention. God is already present; what we struggle with is noticing.

The numbers suggest many people feel they are failing at prayer. Daily prayer among U.S. adults fell from 58% in 2007 to 44% in 2023–24 (Pew Research). In a survey of more than 14,000 committed Christians, only 2% were very satisfied with their prayer lives, and distraction was the biggest obstacle they named (Crossway).

Many of those who feel they are failing may already be praying, while folding laundry, sitting with a friend, or catching the light on the hills. They just don’t count it. Everyday mysticism starts here: helping people recognize, name, and respond to the encounters with God that are already happening.

The premise: every encounter is spiritual

Every encounter is spiritual, but not every encounter is prayer. The encounter is God’s offer. Prayer is the offer received and answered.

If prayer is an experience of God, and God is love (1 John 4:8), then every real moment of love, compassion, or empathy is a meeting with God, whether or not we call it prayer. The same holds for the moments we miss. Looking past someone in need is also a spiritual event, just one where we turned away.

So the question isn’t whether God is present in an ordinary moment. The question is whether we noticed, and how we responded.

Sacred Noticing: the practice of the encounter

Sacred Noticing is how everyday mysticism happens in real time: Notice, Pause, Respond. The trace from the encounter is left in the Respond, not in the run-up.

A “yellow light” appears: a small, ordinary moment that invites us in. We can miss it, react to it, or notice it.
We make room. The Pause is receptivity and permission, not suppression: room for God to move before we act.
The encounter crosses from inside us into the world. We respond with kindness, justice, even love.

Noticing and pausing are necessary, but they stay inside us. The response leaves our spiritual footprint. Francis was not remembered for what he felt when he saw the leper. He was remembered for getting off his horse.

The three outcomes of an encounter

Every encounter can end in one of three ways: Alignment, Dialogue, or Misalignment. Alignment means our response lines up with what God is offering in the moment: “thy will be done,” lived out in small things. God is always speaking, so the question is: how’s the conversation going?

Outcome	What happens	In the footprint	The question
Alignment	The encounter is noticed, received, and answered with love. It becomes prayer, whether or not we call it that.	A mark of love or caring left on someone else	Did it land?
Dialogue	The encounter is still open: a question, a discomfort, a nudge. Neither Alignment nor Misalignment yet.	Still being written	Is it still speaking?
Misalignment	The encounter is missed or turned from: distraction, defensiveness, haste, or sometimes a plain “no.” Still spiritual, but not prayer.	A mark of absence or harm	Did I miss it?

“Misalignment” names what happens most often. Usually it is not a refusal, just a moment when our attention or our response drifted out of line with what God might have been offering. A misalignment is not the end of the relationship. It can be set right, though sometimes, not easily.

Matthew 25 holds both ends: “you did it to me” and “you did not do it to me” are both encounters with Christ. Only one is prayer.

Crossing the bridge again

The outcome is not always settled in the moment. A Misalignment or an open Dialogue can come into Alignment later, when we go back across the bridge.

The argument we regret, brought back in an evening review or in silence, can turn into sorrow, understanding, or a different response next time. What began as non-prayer becomes prayer. That is where grace works: we give the response, but God isn’t limited to our first one.

So Sacred Noticing has two jobs. In real time, it helps us respond in Alignment more often. Looking back, it helps us bring Misalignment and Dialogue into Alignment after the fact. This is healing, not just forgiveness: the spiritual trace of our footprint is changed, not just excused.

Roots in the tradition

Everyday mysticism is not new. Sacred Noticing gives an old intuition a practical shape.

Augustine: our hearts are restless until they rest in God. The longing is never the problem; we lack a way to read it.
Francis and Bonaventure: creation is full of God’s footprints. The Canticle of the Creatures is a noticing practice set to song. In his Testament, Francis says what seemed bitter turned sweet only after he acted.
Ignatius: finding God in all things, and the Examen as a daily look back.
De Caussade: the sacrament of the present moment.
Evagrius: nepsis, watchfulness, as the patristic name for the Notice.
Keating: the fruits of contemplative prayer show up in daily life, not in the prayer period. Silence trains the eye that notices; noticing carries the silence into the street.

Living it: two simple practices

In the moment. When a yellow light appears, Notice and Pause, then ask one question before you Respond: What is this moment asking of me?

At day’s end. Recall two or three encounters from the day. For each, ask:

Did it land? (Alignment) Give thanks.
Is it still speaking? (Dialogue) Stay with it. What is the next step?
Did I miss it? (Misalignment) Bring it back without judgment. What would a different response look like, and is there still time to make it?

An everyday mystic isn’t someone who feels God more often. It’s someone who notices, pauses, and responds more often, and keeps going back across the bridge.

Reflection derived from The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint.

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Posted on November 7, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham · 1 Comment

The Room

There is a room most of us have sat in.

The chair is slightly too small. The questions come a little too fast. The person across from you has a folder she doesn’t need to open, because she has already read what’s inside.

I know this room.

I’ve sat in it more than once, and I’ve left it more than once feeling that something went wrong. Not with what I said, but with something underneath what I said. Something the other person received that I didn’t consciously send.

That is the footprint problem. And it doesn’t announce itself. It just closes doors.

* * *

Martin had eleven years at Meridian Partners. He was good at his work. He knew it. And when the questions came, the hard ones designed to find the seam in your story, he answered them accurately.

Every word he said was true.

And yet.

“You were let go after eleven years,” the interviewer said. “That’s a long tenure to end the way yours did.”

He straightened. “I left with my integrity intact.”

“Your former manager says you became an obstacle in the room.”

“He had been in his role four months. He didn’t understand what he was walking into.”

“You were passed over for the Director role. A less experienced person got it.”

“That decision was political.”

“A former colleague described you as difficult to read. Slow to trust.”

“Some people confuse boundaries with coldness.”

All of it true. All of it armor.

She closed the folder. He rode down thirteen floors watching his own reflection in the elevator doors. He had told the truth in there. Every word of it.

The door was still closed.

* * *

A month later, sitting with a friend who had known him for twenty years and did not flatter him, something shifted. Not dramatically. The way a window tilts open and the air in a room changes before anyone says a word.

He walked into another room. A different firm, a different interviewer, a man named James Weller. Same chair. Same folder. Same questions.

“You were let go after eleven years.”

This time, something in him noticed the defensiveness rising. Noticed it, and didn’t immediately act on it. A small thing. Almost invisible. But in that small gap, something else became possible.

“It was a hard ending,” he said. “I was protecting something I believed in, past the point where holding on was useful.”

“Your former manager says you became an obstacle.”

“I was, at times. I raised concerns in ways that served my ego more than the concern itself. I learned to tell the difference, later than I should have.”

“You were passed over for the Director role. A less experienced person got it.”

“Yes. And I told myself for a long time that it was political. Some of that was true. But the other true thing, the one I didn’t want to look at, is that I had stopped growing in ways they could see.”

“Difficult to read. Slow to trust.”

“That’s fair. I believed for a long time that competence was enough. That results would speak for themselves. They don’t. The work doesn’t happen apart from the people doing it. I understood that in my head. I didn’t live it. I’m living it differently now. I can’t prove that to you in this room.”

A pause.

“I can only tell you it’s true.”

James Weller set down his pen.

“I’d like to schedule a second conversation,” he said.

* * *

What changed?

Not the facts. The facts were the same both times.

What changed was the quality of what Martin carried into the room. And that quality, whatever we name it, was readable. Not because James Weller was especially perceptive, but because we are all, constantly, reading each other’s atmosphere before we’ve processed a single word. That is what our spiritual footprint is.

Not what we intend. Not what we say. What we actually emanate: the detectable shadow of the inner life we’ve been living when no one was watching.

Martin didn’t apply a technique in that second room. He brought something he had been cultivating quietly, over weeks, in the ordinary moments of his life. Compassion, for himself first, which made room for everyone else. Authenticity, not performance, but the willingness to be seen as he actually was. Truthfulness, the kind that includes the unflattering parts, because those parts are also true. Humility, not weakness, not collapse, but the release of the need to be understood correctly.

He brought a different interior.

The interview room noticed. It always does.

You don’t get to choose whether you leave a footprint. You only get to choose, slowly, imperfectly, over a long time, what you are cultivating when no one is watching.

That cultivation is the practice.

That practice is everything.

Reflection derived from The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint

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Posted on October 30, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham

All Shall Be Well: Julian, Francis, and Sacred Noticing

On my last trip to England I sat in Julian’s cell in Norwich. It’s a small room, quiet and plain. I expected to feel the narrowness of her enclosure. Instead, I felt spaciousness, the way a small window can frame an entire sky.

Julian is best remembered for one line from her book showings: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” We often hear it as gentle comfort. But she wrote it in a century of plague, war, and a fractured Church. Her “all shall be well” is not a promise that nothing bad will happen. It is a statement about who holds what happens.

That is where her path and mine meet.

My formation is Franciscan. With Duns Scotus, I believe the Incarnation was never Plan B, a repair after the Fall. Christ was always the point. Creation was made through love and for love, and every created thing carries the trace of its Maker. Francis sang this to Brother Sun and Sister Water. The Celtic Christians named it in their thin places, where the veil between heaven and earth wears almost through.

Julian comes to the same truth by another door. She is shown something “the quantity of a hazelnut” lying in her palm and asks what it is. The answer: it is all that is made, and it lasts because God loves it. Here is a mystic noticing one ordinary thing and finding all of creation held inside it. That is Sacred Noticing.

We differ however, and the difference is a gift. Julian went inward and stayed put; Francis went outward and kept walking. Her visions came in one grace-filled illness. The noticing I practice is for traffic, kitchens, and hard conversations. Yet we share the same trust: the presence we seek is not somewhere far off. It is already here, already holding.

Julian goes further than most of us dare. She calls sin “behovely,” fitting in some way we cannot yet see, and says our wounds will one day be seen as honors. That speaks to what I call the spiritual footprint, what we have, what we are, and what we leave behind. Our footprint is real, but it does not get the last word. Julian saw that God is headed toward healing, not just pardon. Love, she wrote at the end, was his meaning.

So, this is what I carried home from that little room in Norwich. All shall be well, not because I can see how, but because each time I truly notice something, a hazelnut, a face, a wound, I find it already held.

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Posted on October 27, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham · 1 Comment

“Michael, You Are Such a Fidget”

My mother had a phrase for me. She would say it with a sigh, sometimes with a smile, and occasionally with the particular Irish tone mothers reserve for a child who has just created an imaginary new game from a wooden stick: “Michael, you are such a fidget.”

She was right. I was always on the move. Moving towards the next thing as soon as the last one was finished. Always wanting to know how something worked. To know what the word “omnipresent” meant at six years of age, or to try something no one had asked me to try. If there was a new path, I wanted to walk it. If there was no path, I created one. If there was a better way, I wanted to find and explore it.

The fidget grew up, but never really sat down. Today we have kinder words for him. We might call him an entrepreneur, or a creative, or say he is wired a certain way. Some would hand him a personality type and a number. But none of those labels quite touch the thing itself: a restlessness that keeps compelling us forward, a desire to make something better, to change it, to discover it, even when some quiet part of us already knows we will never quite arrive.

I have come to believe that restlessness is not a flaw to be managed. It may be one of the ways God has been calling us all along.

The Restless Heart

Sixteen centuries ago, Augustine began his Confessions with a sentence that has outlived empires: Our heart is restless until it rests in you.

We usually hear that line as a criticism of restlessness, as if the goal of the spiritual life were to finally stop squirming. But read it again. Augustine is not condemning the restless heart. He is explaining it. The restlessness is a homing instinct. It is the heart’s way of knowing it was made for something larger than anything it has found so far.

The writer Ronald Rolheiser makes a similar point. Every one of us, he says, carries a fire inside: an unquenchable longing, an energy that will not let us settle. Spirituality is not about putting that fire out. It is about what we do with it.

I used to think of the fidget in me as the opposite of the Holy Longing, the inward pull that draws us toward God. One moves outward, the other inward. One builds and tinkers and explores; the other waits in silence. But I no longer think they are opposites. I think they are the same desire, facing in different directions. The question is not whether we are restless. The question is which way our restlessness is pointing.

The Noonday Demon

The desert fathers knew the shadow side of the fidget well. Evagrius, a fourth-century monk, wrote about a temptation he called acedia, the noonday demon. It came in the heat of the day, when the monk sat in his cell. Suddenly the hours seemed endless. He would get up, look out the window, check the sun, wonder whether the brothers in some other monastery had it better. Anything to avoid staying where he was.

That is the fidget as flight. The motion looks like energy, but it is really escape: from silence, from ourselves, from whatever might be waiting for us if we stopped long enough to meet it.

There is a modern version too, and it often looks virtuous. A comedian once built a whole career on the phrase “Git ‘er done.” Most of us have a little of that inside. Call it the robot within: the part of us that keeps producing, fixing, improving, and checking things off, not because love is drawing us but because stopping feels dangerous. The robot can do a great deal of good work. It can even do holy work. It just cannot rest.

I will confess that I know this robot. I have spent part of my life helping people find their way to stillness, leading retreats, teaching prayer, creating space for others to encounter the divine within. And more than once I have caught myself so busy making room for other people’s silence that I left none for my own.

Straining Forward

And yet the tradition does not tell the fidget to stop. It tells him where to go.

St. Paul wrote to the Philippians that he had not yet arrived, but that he was straining forward to what lies ahead. Gregory of Nyssa took that image and built a whole spirituality from it. He called it epektasis: the soul’s endless stretching toward God. Because God is infinite, Gregory said, we never reach the end of God. We never arrive, sit down, and declare ourselves finished. Each discovery opens onto a larger one. The more we find, the more we long for. Perfection is not standing still. It is never ceasing to grow.

That is the fidget made holy. Not the restlessness that flees, but the restlessness that explores. Not the robot, but the pilgrim.

The old Celtic monks had their own version. Some of them set out to sea in small boats called coracles, sometimes without oars, letting the wind carry them wherever God intended. They called it peregrinatio, wandering for the love of God. They were not running away from anything. They were moving toward a place they had not yet seen, trusting that the movement itself was a kind of prayer.

Which Way Is It Pointing?

Looking back on my own life, I can see the fidget at every turn. I spent years in the world of technology, starting a company and mapping how work moves from one hand to another. Then the same restless mind turned toward ministry, toward theology, toward prayer. And somewhere along the way, the fidget became a teacher of centering prayer, the stillest practice I know.

I do not think that was an accident. We often teach what we most need to learn.

What I have learned is that the fidget does not need to be cured. It needs to be noticed. When I feel that familiar urge to move, to start, to improve, to fix, I have begun asking a few simple questions:

Am I moving toward something, or away from something?
Is this motion leaving room for me to be surprised?
If I stopped for an hour, what am I afraid I would meet?
Is this restlessness feeding others, or only feeding the robot?

None of those questions require us to stop moving. They only ask us to move with our eyes open. That, I think, is what sacred noticing has always been for people like me. It does not ask the fidget to sit perfectly still. It asks him to keep walking, but to walk awake.

Let Us Begin Again

Near the end of his life, worn out and nearly blind, St. Francis turned to his brothers and said, Let us begin, brothers, for up to now we have done little or nothing.

This was the man who had rebuilt churches with his own hands, walked across battle lines to meet a sultan, and gathered thousands of followers. And at the end, he wanted to start over. That is not the voice of a man who failed to rest. It is the voice of a man whose restlessness had finally become love. Beginner’s mind, all the way to the last breath.

So if you have spent your life being told to sit still, settle down, and finish what you started, take heart. Your fidget may be the Holy Longing itself, still looking for home. The work is not to stop it, but to turn it toward God.

The Church has always understood this, which may be why it gave its fidgeters something to do with their hands: rosary beads, prayer ropes, a labyrinth to walk, a road to make pilgrimage on. This week, try a fidget prayer. Take a walk without a destination, or hold a set of beads, or simply let your hands move while your heart settles. Let the body fidget so the soul can rest.

My mother was right. I am such a fidget. I am beginning to think God made me that way on purpose.

Where is your restlessness carrying you right now—toward something, or away from something?

What might change if, for a while, you don’t demand that it stop, but you ask what it’s trying to point to?

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Posted on October 16, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham

On Becoming “Like-Hearted”

On the afternoon of October 4th, the feast of St. Francis, a circle of chairs filled at San Damiano. It was the first gathering of Common Ground, a year of conversations we have begun here, one Sunday afternoon a month, asking what an eight-hundred-year-old Franciscan story might have to say to the way we live now. Some in the circle were longtime retreatants. Some had grown up in the Church and left it. Some had come because a friend asked them to. A few, I suspect, were not entirely sure why they had come at all.

Before I said a word about Francis, I asked them to remember something. Think of a conversation from this past year that went badly. Not a catastrophe. Just one of those conversations where, somewhere along the way, somebody stopped listening. Maybe it was them. Maybe it was you.

We sat with that in silence. Then I asked one more question, and asked them to share the answer with someone they did not know: What did that conversation need that it didn’t get?

What the Wall Said

Carrie Rehak, one of our facilitators, wrote the answers on newsprint as they came. Patience. Listening. Curiosity. Kindness. Honesty. Sensitivity. Attunement. Openness. Softening.

And then a few that stopped me. The assumption that we are the same, without checking. Not seeing, or not honoring, the other person’s boundary. And one that every one of us has thought at some point, whether or not we have said it out loud: Why can’t they read my mind?

Look at that list again, and notice what is missing from it. Nobody asked for better facts. Nobody asked for a sharper argument, a cleverer comeback, or a more persuasive point of view. Not one word on that wall was about winning. Every one of them was about attention: the quality of presence we bring, or fail to bring, to the person in front of us.

Most of us have been trained to think of a conversation as an exchange of positions. I state mine. You state yours. We see whose survives. When it goes badly, we assume we needed better positions. But a room full of people, asked to remember their own hard conversations, said something quite different. The problem was never the argument. The problem was that somewhere along the way, someone stopped listening and started waiting to speak.

That is not a communication problem. It is a spiritual one.

The Ear of the Heart

Near the end of his life, Francis wrote a letter to all of his brothers. He did not open it with instructions or corrections. He opened it with an invitation: Hear, my lords, my sons and my brothers, and with your ears receive my words. Incline the ear of your heart.

In the Scriptures, the heart is not the seat of our sentiments. It is the center of the whole person, the place where we think, choose, and are known by God. To listen with the heart, then, is not to listen sentimentally. It is to listen with everything we are, and to let what we hear actually reach us before we decide what to do with it.

Here is the hard truth the wall revealed. Most of the time, we listen with our ears and answer from our habits. The words go in, and the reply comes out along the groove where every earlier reply has run. We hear the first sentence and we already know, or think we know, where the other person is going. We have assigned them a category before they have finished being a person.

The Sultan’s Tent

Which brings me to the story at the center of that first afternoon.

In 1219, in the middle of the Fifth Crusade, two armies were dug in against each other outside the city of Damietta in Egypt. Everyone knew who the enemy was. And Francis, with one companion, walked across the lines.

He was brought before the Sultan, al-Malik al-Kamil, and instead of what anyone expected, the two men talked, by the old accounts for days. Francis did not convert the Sultan. The Sultan did not execute this strange, barefoot man from Italy. He listened to him, and sent him back across the lines safely, with a gift: an ivory horn that is still kept in Assisi.

Neither man set down his convictions. What each brought besides was attention. Each met the other as a person, and not as the category that centuries of conflict had assigned him. When Francis came home, he wrote into his Rule that any brothers who went to live among Muslims were, first of all, not to engage in arguments or disputes. In the middle of a holy war, the first instruction was this: don’t argue. Be present. Let your life speak.

What It Stirred

At the end of the afternoon we gathered what the circle had heard, and what it had stirred. I want to be honest about the second of those, because it may be the most important thing we wrote.

People named curiosity, patience, a willingness to try. But they also named the wish to fix things. The temptation to play devil’s advocate. The worry of not “getting it.” And one person wrote six words I have not been able to put down: Excited to stay. Scared, want to flee.

I recognize that sentence. I suspect you do too. It is exactly what happens inside us when a real conversation begins: the part of us that leans in, and the part that is already looking for the door, or the counterargument, or the fix. Listening with the heart does not mean those impulses disappear. It means we notice them. We notice the urge to fix before we start fixing. We notice the urge to oppose before we start opposing. We notice, we pause, and only then do we respond.

That was the rhythm we practiced in small groups that afternoon. First, what I heard. Then, what I noticed in myself. Then, what I am wondering. Opinions come later, and they come better that way.

Like-Hearted

Near the end, the circle began asking about itself. Are we diverse enough? What do we even mean by diversity? How do we keep from assuming we are all alike?

And then someone offered a phrase that may become the quiet motto of the whole year. Perhaps, they said, we are not looking for people who are like-minded. Perhaps we are looking for people who are like-hearted.

Like-minded asks us to agree before we can belong. Like-hearted asks only that we share a willingness to listen: to come as guests rather than combatants, and to let the other person be more than their position. You can be like-hearted with someone whose vote, faith, or background is nothing like your own. In fact, that may be the only place where real conversation across our differences can begin.

That is the different way of thinking Common Ground is asking of us. Not a new set of opinions, but a new posture. Not better arguments, but deeper attention. Not like minds, but like hearts.

Threads to Carry

The circle left with questions it did not try to answer that afternoon. How do we move beyond polarization? Can we live these ground rules outside this room? How might listening eventually lead to action and change?

Those are the right questions, but I am convinced the order matters. Francis heard “repair my house” long before he understood what the house was. The doing grows out of the listening, not the other way around. If we skip the listening, whatever we build will simply be another argument with better furniture.

Common Ground gathers again at San Damiano on Sunday, November 1st, All Saints’ Day, at 3:00 in the afternoon, for Simplicity in an Age of Excess. If you would like to join the circle, you are welcome, whatever you do or don’t believe.

Who in your life have you stopped listening to, because you already know what they are going to say? And what might change if, the next time you speak with them, you inclined the ear of your heart before your answer was ready?

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