Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

What Do I Leave Behind?

If I were trying to explain my idea of the Spiritual Footprint to a friend, I would not begin with a theory. I would begin with a question: What do I leave behind? Not what do I intend, not what do I believe about myself and not what image do I hope others have of me—but what remains in people after they have spent time with me?

That question is at the heart of the Spiritual Footprint. I use the image of a footprint because it is simple, concrete, and honest. A footprint shows that someone has passed through a place. It reveals presence, movement, and direction. In the same way, each of us leaves a mark on the lives we touch. Our words, tone, choices, attitudes, patience, impatience, kindness, silence, courage, and care all leave something behind. Some marks are small and temporary. Others are carried for years.

We may understand this most clearly when we begin by admitting that others have left a Spiritual Footprint in us. We carry the memory of people who encouraged us, wounded us, steadied us, dismissed us, welcomed us, or made us feel small. Their presence did not disappear when the encounter ended. It stayed with us. If that is true—if others leave something behind in us and with us—then why would we imagine that we do not do the same?

This is where our personal empathy becomes more than a virtue; it becomes a form of spiritual sight. The more empathetic we become toward what others carry, the more able we are to recognize what they may be carrying from us. We begin to see that people are not only reacting to our intentions; they are responding to our tone, our timing, our attentiveness, our impatience, our gentleness, and our willingness to make room for them. Once we see that, we cannot easily unsee it.

This is what makes the Spiritual Footprint so important. It moves spirituality from the realm of private feeling and into the realm of lived impact. Many people today think about spiritual wellness in terms of inner peace, balance, mindfulness, healing, or emotional health. Those things matter deeply. But there is more needed to press the question further. We ask ourselves to consider not only whether we feel centered, but whether our presence helps others feel seen, respected, encouraged, safe, and less alone.

There can be a painful gap between the person I believe I am and the person others actually experience. I may think of myself as kind, but do people experience kindness from me? I may think of myself as caring, but do I take time to listen? I may value honesty, but is my honesty also gentle? I may believe I bring strength, but does my strength protect others or overpower them? The Spiritual Footprint helps bring those questions into the light without turning them into shame. It is not about perfection. It is about awareness.

I think this is why this work becomes especially relevant for our time. We live in a culture that measures almost everything: productivity, influence, performance, health, popularity, and success. Even spirituality can become something we try to manage, improve, or display. The Spiritual Footprint offers a different measure. It asks whether my life leaves behind peace or tension, hope or discouragement, warmth or coldness, healing or harm. It asks whether the people around me are more burdened or more blessed because of my presence.

This does not mean living for the approval of others. The idea is not about trying to control everyone’s opinion or becoming anxious about every interaction. It is about taking responsibility for the atmosphere we help create. We cannot control how others interpret us, but we can pay attention to how we speak, how we listen, how we repair what we damage, and how we treat people when there is nothing to gain. In that sense, the Spiritual Footprint can be a daily examination of love in action.

What I appreciate most is that the Spiritual Footprint is formed in ordinary places. It is shaped in family conversations, workplace pressures, friendships, difficult decisions, apologies, interruptions, disappointments, and passing encounters with strangers. It has helped me. Legacy is often spoken of as something that belongs to the end of life, but I believe this visibility makes legacy immediate. My Spiritual Footprint is not only what people may say about me someday; it is what people experience from me today.

That changes the way I understand spiritual wellness. Wellness is not only the state of my inner life; it is also the quality of my presence. A spiritually well person is not simply calm, reflective, or personally grounded. A spiritually well person becomes, over time, someone through whom others encounter mercy, steadiness, honesty, humility, courage, and peace. The point is not to appear holy. The point is to become less harmful and more healing.

This is why the Spiritual Footprint is both encouraging and demanding. It is encouraging because every day gives us another opportunity to leave something good behind: a kind word, a patient silence, a sincere apology, a moment of courage, a willingness to listen, a choice to be gentle when we could have been harsh. It is demanding because it reminds us that our lives are never neutral. We are always contributing something to the emotional and spiritual climate around us.

In this sense, it gives us a practical way to think about holiness without making it abstract. Holiness is not only what happens in prayer or worship, though those are essential. Holiness is also what remains after we leave the room. Did someone feel more seen? Did a wound begin to heal? Did fear soften? Did peace become more possible? Did my presence make it easier for someone else to believe that goodness is real?

If Sacred Noticing is the practice that can help transform the Spiritual Footprint, then the Spiritual Footprint itself is the larger invitation. It asks us to live with a deeper awareness of consequence. Every conversation, every decision, every act of kindness, every harsh word, every apology, every moment of patience or impatience leaves a mark. The question is whether we are willing to notice the mark we are making and choose, with humility, to leave behind more peace than unrest, more courage than fear, and more love than indifference.

One way to make this real is to imagine taking a camera with you for a day—not to photograph yourself, but to notice what others might be seeing or glimpsing as you move through the world. What does your face communicate when you are rushed? What does your tone leave behind when you are tired? What does your silence say in a difficult moment? What does your kindness make visible? If you could see the day from the other side of your presence, what would become clear? Once we begin to see our lives from that angle, we cannot simply return to not knowing. Awareness changes responsibility.

That is why I would tell a friend that the Spiritual Footprint matters now. In a world crowded with noise, speed, self-promotion, and anxiety, it restores one of the simplest and most searching spiritual questions: What do I leave behind? The answer is not written only in our intentions. It is written in the experience of the people we meet, the relationships we shape, the wounds we repair, and the love we make visible through the ordinary pattern of our lives.

 

Reflection derived from The Practice of Sacred Noticing: How to Transform Your Spiritual Footprint

Copyright 2026 Michael J. Cunningham OFS

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

A Walk on the Beach


A Walk On The Beach

 

Gone was the smell of rubber, normally ingrained in my father. My mother’s singing voice amplified and persisted more than usual. Strange phenomenon that I only really noticed during family holidays. Let me explain.

My parents were from the West Coast of Ireland; my mom was a “city girl” from Limerick, and my dad a country boy. Even though Limerick is technically on the coast, it cannot really be called a beach town, as the main waterway that dominates the city is the mighty River Shannon.
When the family moved to England in the early 1950s for work and children started to arrive, my parents’ “go to” place every year was the beach. Specifically, the wonderful and sometimes wild coast of Cornwall, home of the novel Poldark, Cornish pasties, and the best clotted cream in the world. (In my opinion).

Family time there always included time on the beach every day, regardless of the weather, which, being England, did not always co-operate with the summer season. These were wonderful days. For my parents, because neither of them could swim, the walk on the beach, with toes in the water was a wonderful break for them. My father had a fresh soap odor. This replaced the rubbery taste that had accompanied him for years of working at the Avon Tire Company. My mother’s step became lighter, and she would sing more than normal. We never knew if that was gift, but we took it as one. And having Fish and Chips a few times during the week was a real bonus. Especially as the fish was likely fresh off the boat and not some frozen specimen as we might find inland. Everything; the sea breeze, the food, the atmosphere, all tasted better.

We all have these places that represent a “walk on the beach”. Somewhere where pondering or reflecting seems to be better, freer, more in contact with nature and with God. Regardless of the weather!

Why is this? What does the ocean wash away that our steady, asphalt-filled, media-entrapped world cannot release from within? I think we may not be able to name it, but we can feel it. There is a release that this wide open place tells us about the doors and passageways of our regular lives. There is something else out there. Something requiring our immersion and permission to enter. Or perhaps expecting us to give ourselves permission to be present to it. Nature. Seasons. The place where land meets sea. Not just physically, but spiritually.

For myself, this taste of the ocean and the coast was always a desirable location to be. Now, located near the Pacific in California, it is always a place of refuge and enjoyment. The openness, the wildness, the calming nature of the waves, all contribute to why so many of us love the sea and the seashore.
I think we all feel this way, even when the ocean can be scary and intimidating. We have a certain respect for our own powerlessness when it rises up to meet us in a way we cannot contain. Just as life is that way sometimes. I wonder what your own experience of the ocean and shorelines is? Is the sea capable of washing away something in your soul, beyond the surface sand, and the daily tides?

All of life may not be a walk on the beach, but still, we look forward to one when we can get there.

 

 

 

 

Copyright 2026 Michael J. Cunningham OFS

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

Why Can’t Every Day Be a Spiritual Day?

I have been asked this question more than once over the years. Sometimes by retreatants leaving San Damiano on the last morning. Sometimes by people who attend the Monday gatherings. Sometimes, honestly, by myself.

The literal answer is that, of course, it cannot be. The world will not stop for you. The meetings will be scheduled. The emails will arrive. The unpleasant colleague will still be sitting across the table tomorrow morning. We cannot turn each day into a retreat.

But the question contains its own answer if we are willing to look at it differently.

What we are really asking, when we ask that question, is whether the peace we found on retreat can travel home with us. Whether the silence that opened something can keep opening it on a Tuesday morning. Whether God, who felt so near in the chapel, can be near in the conference room too.

The answer is yes. But it requires a different kind of seeing.

I spent thirty-five years in the competitive high-tech industry. Some of that time was spent trying to help people in discord work toward a common goal. We usually had the goal. What we sometimes did not have was a culture, or a set of behaviors, that matched it. People in the same meeting could agree on the destination and still treat each other in ways that made the destination impossible. I watched it for decades. I sometimes contributed to it.

It was in those years that I came to believe Karl Rahner was right when he said the Christian of the future will be a mystic, or will not exist at all.

That sentence is often misread as a warning about decline. It is actually a description of what is required to remain human. Rahner was not talking about visions or ecstasies. He was talking about the lived experience of love, of goodness, of God — directly, in one’s own life, not borrowed from a teacher or absorbed from a book. He believed that without that direct experience, faith would not survive what was coming.

I think he was describing not just the future of faith but the future of any meaningful day at work.

So, I spent more than a decade trying to figure out how the peace of the monastery could travel into the ordinary. The Celts knew how. The desert fathers knew how. The Sufis, the Hasidim, and the Zen masters knew how, each in their own language. None of them taught withdrawal as the goal. They taught a way to stay present in the midst of what is, without losing the thread that connects you to God.

This is what I have come to call everyday mysticism. It does not require a different life. It requires different attention. The same conference room becomes a different room when you walk into it, noticing, pausing, and responding from a settled heart rather than a reactive one. The unpleasant interaction is not transformed by avoidance. It is transformed by the trace you leave inside it.

That trace is your spiritual footprint. It is the soul leaking out around the edges of whatever you do. And it can be formed.

So no, every day cannot be a spiritual break day. But every day can carry the same mystical possibility, if you are willing to bring it in yourself. The retreat is not the place. The retreat is the disposition. You can leave the chapel and take it with you, or you can sit in the chapel and never receive it.

The choice is interior. It is yours. And it is available tomorrow morning at nine.

 

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

The Other Way In

The Other Way In

I have enormous respect for Thomas Merton.

His willingness to go deep — to sit in silence long enough that the noise of the constructed self finally runs out of things to say — is one of the most serious spiritual commitments a human being can make. Richard Rohr, too. His insistence that we stop splitting the world into tidy categories, that we learn to sit with complexity rather than resolve it into something manageable — that kind of thinking has opened doors for countless people who thought the Church had nothing left to offer them.

I am not dismissing any of that. I want to say that plainly before I say what comes next.

But I want to talk about a different door.

Most of us don’t live in monasteries. Most of us don’t have hours of protected silence. We live in the middle of things — difficult meetings, fractured relationships, financial pressure, the particular chaos of a family in the morning before anyone has had enough coffee. We live in the world as it actually is, not as we wish it were, and that world has a way of arriving faster than any interior preparation can handle.

The traditional model of spiritual transformation — the one Merton and Rohr both inhabit, each in their own way — starts inside. Get the values right. Shift the interior architecture. Deconstruct the false self. Achieve non-dual awareness. And then, once the inner work is done, the outer behavior will follow.

I understand this model. I believe in its depth.

And I am genuinely grateful both of them exist. These are huge contributions. They have opened the tradition to people who thought it was closed to them, and they have changed lives — including mine.

However, I have also noticed — in myself as much as anywhere — is that the gap between understanding something and living it in the actual friction of a Tuesday afternoon is real, and wide, and it doesn’t close automatically. You can have read every word Merton ever wrote and still send the email you shouldn’t send. You can understand Rohr’s concept of the shadow self and still find it fully operational at dinner. This is not a failure of the tradition. It is simply the truth that the interior life and the ordinary life don’t always find each other on their own. They need a bridge. And the more bridges we can build, the better.

And I have found — something the Franciscan tradition has always quietly known — is that sometimes the door into the interior life opens from the outside. Not always. Not exclusively. But for many people, in many seasons of life, the place where transformation begins is in the next small behavior.

Not the next retreat. The next conversation.

Not the next chapter of a difficult book. The next breath, taken deliberately before you respond to something that made you angry.

Francis of Assisi didn’t begin with a theology. He began with an embrace. A leper on a road. A revulsion he chose not to act on. And something shifted — not in his ideas about holiness, but in him, at the level of his actual life. The action opened the door. The transformation followed the doing.

This is what Sacred Noticing asks: not that you first achieve a correct interior disposition, but that you change one behavior, right now, in this moment. Notice what is actually happening in you before you react. Pause long enough for something wiser to surface. Respond from that place rather than from the momentum of your first impulse.

That is not a lesser form of spiritual practice. It is a different entry point to the same territory.

The spiritual footprint you leave behind — the emotional atmosphere you create in a room, the quality of attention you bring to the person in front of you, the trace that remains after you’ve moved on — that footprint doesn’t wait for your interior life to be sorted out. It is happening now. Every day. In every encounter.

The question isn’t whether you are leaving one. You are.

The question is what kind.

And the work of noticing that — not in theory, but in the actual texture of your day — has a way of teaching you things about yourself that no amount of reading ever quite manages. You discover your own values not by reflecting on them in the abstract, but by watching what you actually do when something unexpected arrives. You find out what you truly believe not in the quiet of a chapel, but in the sudden pressure of a difficult moment.

The interior life and the exterior life are not two separate projects. They feed each other. Act well enough times, and the values begin to follow. Behave with more patience than you feel, and one day you notice you really feel more patient.

This is not a shortcut. It is a different road up the same mountain.

Merton will take you somewhere profound. So will Rohr. I have learned from both of them, and I suspect I will keep learning. The tradition needs every door it can find. It always has. The monastery and the marketplace have always been two ways into the same life, and the people who found God in one have rarely regretted that there were people finding God in the other.

But if you are a person living inside an ordinary, complicated life — if you have commitments and pressures and relationships that don’t pause for your spiritual development — then the door I want to show you is right here. In your next meeting. Your next disagreement. The next time something small goes wrong and you feel the familiar pressure beginning to build.

That is the place. That is the practice.

You don’t have to find a monastery.

You are already standing in one.

— Michael J. Cunningham, OFS, D.Min. spiritualbreak.com

Adapted from The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint

 

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

No Permission Required

The Threshold You’re Already Standing On

There is a particular kind of spiritual exhaustion that comes not from absence, but from misdirection.

You may have been looking for the sacred in the wrong places. Not because you chose poorly, but because someone, somewhere, gave you the impression that it lived somewhere else. In a special silence. A retreat center. A rare moment of clarity. A time in your life when things calmed down enough to finally pay attention.

And so, you have been waiting.

I understand this. I have done it myself.

The strange thing about contemplative practice — the thing it takes years to inhabit rather than just understand — is that the threshold you’ve been waiting to cross is the one you’re standing on right now. Not metaphorically. Literally. The doorway of the room you just walked through. The pause before you answer a question someone is waiting for. The moment between an email arriving and your hands beginning to type.

These are not interruptions to the spiritual life. They are the spiritual life.

Francis of Assisi understood this with a kind of reckless clarity. He didn’t organize a program. He didn’t develop a curriculum. He stepped outside and started paying attention. He called the sun his brother and the moon his sister not because he was being poetic, but because he had stopped dividing the world into sacred and secular categories. He had noticed that everything was already charged with presence.

That noticing changed everything. Not just for him — for everyone around him.

What we leave behind in an encounter also matters. Not just our words or our decisions, but the quality of our presence. The warmth or coolness of the atmosphere after we’ve left a room. Whether the people we’ve just spoken with feel more seen or less. More capable or less. Whether something has been added to the world, or quietly subtracted.

This is not a small thing. It accumulates over a lifetime into something that looks very much like a legacy.

The practice isn’t complicated. It asks only that you stop long enough for wisdom to catch up with the pace you’re moving. Perhaps one, maybe three breaths. One moment of genuine attention before you respond. The willingness to notice what is actually here, before assuming you already know.

Ancient voices — from the desert fathers to the Celtic saints to Francis himself — kept returning to this same insistence: that the sacred is not something you attain. It is something you stop running past.

Your ordinary life is already the place. Your daily commute, the difficult conversation you’ve been putting off, the moment your child says something you almost miss because you’re half somewhere else. These are the thin places. Not because they’ve been designated as holy, but because any place becomes thin the moment you stop moving through it, arrive, and then stay there.

You don’t have to go anywhere.

You just have to notice where you already are.

— Michael J. Cunningham, OFS, D.Min. spiritualbreak.com

Reflection derived from the work contained in The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint.