Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

The Sound Across the Water

A Reflection on Being Found

Most of us will never drown.

But most of us know the water.

We know what it feels like when the waves come bigger than expected — when what began as a manageable swim quietly becomes something else entirely. We know those strange mathematics of exhaustion, how energy disappears not all at once but in small, almost polite withdrawals, until one day we look up and realize the account is nearly empty. And we cannot remember the last time we felt solid ground beneath us.

It rarely announces itself as a crisis. That’s the thing nobody warns you about.

We imagine drowning would be dramatic — thrashing, panic, calling out. But I have been in the water long enough to know that the deeper kind of drowning is quieter than that. It feels, almost, like acceptance. It feels, at times, remarkably like peace. The head starts to bob. We call it equilibrium. We call it maturity. We call it, with great conviction, I’m fine, really.

We are not fine.

I have sat with enough people in these seasons — and have lived through more than a few of my own — to know that the quiet depletion is the one nobody talks about. The retreat leader who has led everyone else to stillness and forgotten where he left his own. The mother who pours herself out so completely that she cannot remember what she was full of to begin with. The executive who has mastered the language of resilience while quietly running on fumes. There is a kind of surrender that looks like wisdom but is really just depletion. We stop fighting not because we’ve found our center, but because we’ve run out of fight.

And yet.

Even here — especially here — something is moving across the water toward us.

This is what I keep learning, both from my own quiet drownings and from sitting alongside others in theirs: God is almost never where we expect the rescue to come from. The divine rarely shows up in the form we prepared for. We watch the horizon for a lifeboat with the right credentials, and the rescue arrives not as a boat at all, but as a sound. Faint at first. Familiar. Something we almost dismiss because it doesn’t look like saving.

A phone call from a friend who “just happened” to think of you that morning. A sentence in a book that lands like a hand extended in the dark. A moment of unexpected laughter right in the middle of grief — the kind that surprises you and then breaks something open. A stranger on the retreatants’ path who asks exactly the right question without knowing it. A memory that surfaces, unbidden, like a buoy.

The sound of a ship across the bay.

We hear it and we think: coincidence. We think: good timing. We think: lucky.

We rarely think: this is God’s doing.

And perhaps that’s precisely the point.

Sacred Noticing has taught me that divine presence in our lives operates mostly in the minor key — in the subtle, the understated, the easily overlooked. We want burning bushes. We get burning candles. We want the sea to part. We get a sound in the distance that pulls us back to ourselves just enough to keep going.

And that, I have found, is usually enough.

The rescue doesn’t require us to recognize it as rescue. The grace doesn’t demand that we name it correctly before it works. The ship crosses the water whether we know who sent it or not.

But here is the invitation: What if we learned to notice?

What if we practiced the contemplative art of looking back over our lives — over our near-drownings, our quiet depletions, our “I don’t know how I made it through that” seasons — and asked the honest question: What was moving toward me that I didn’t fully see?

You will find things there. I promise you will find things.

The friend who arrived at exactly the wrong moment that turned out to be exactly the right one. The door that closed so definitively it forced you toward the one that would actually open. The season of stillness that felt like failure — but was, in truth, the sea preparing to give you back to yourself.

God has, as the poem says, a heck of a sense of humor.

This is the quiet mystery at the heart of the contemplative life: we are rarely rescued the way we imagined, but we are rarely not rescued at all. The waves do not have the last word. They never have.

Something is always moving across the water. Something has always been moving across the water. The practice — the sacred, patient, lifelong practice — is learning to hear it before we go completely under.

Notice the sound.

It is closer than you think.

And it has been sent.

______________________________________________-

DROWNING

 

The waves are bigger now,

the coastline receding,

As the salty water soothes my eyes but smothers my breath.

 

It comes soon, I can feel it.

 

This time not with dread but with acceptance,

Legs tiring now, from hours or it’s minutes of movement.

 

No longer trashing,

Slowly doing what’s required to stay in place;

But with ever increasing  peace,

And less energy.

 

The head starts to bob under,

Slowly at first,

Then for longer,

As a call comes in,

“Come in number 10 your time is up”

 

God has a heck of a sense of humor!

 

Then just as the sea was ready to take its one big last swallow:

 

I heard a sound …

 

Faint at first but familiar,

The sound of a ship across the bay,

Waking my spirit,

As I bobbed one last time to see the commotion.

 

My rescuer was near,

And I lived another life thereafter.

 

 

Take a moment today to look back at one season when you felt you were running out of strength. What arrived? How did it arrive? Could you let yourself call it by its right name — even now?

 

 

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 2 Comments

The Mirror and the MRI

The Mirror and the MRI

 

The mirror shows what you arrange to show.

The MRI shows what you did not know was there.

One instrument serves the self that performs.

The other serves the self that is.

 

 

The Mirror

Most of us have been trained, quietly and relentlessly, to become mirror-people.

A mirror, after all, is a practical thing. It tells us how we appear. It helps us calibrate the face we present before we walk out the door. It asks the same question every time: How do I look?

And so we learn to manage ourselves the way we manage our appearance. We adjust. We curate. We smooth out what is jagged, conceal what is uncertain, brighten what seems dull. We do this socially — Did that land well? Did they like me? We do it professionally — Did I seem capable? Did I hold the room? We do it spiritually — Did I seem at peace? Did I say the wise thing?

This is not dishonesty. It is survival. Many of us learned early that the safest way to exist in the world is to become very good at presentation.

The mirror has its uses. But something quietly dangerous happens when it becomes the primary instrument by which we understand ourselves. We begin to believe that the reflection is the truth. We begin to mistake how we appear for who we are.

And the soul — that deep interior place that tightens in certain conversations, that softens in genuine love, that knows before the mind can justify — the soul gets left on the other side of the glass. Observed. Never inhabited.

 

The MRI

An MRI does something entirely different.

It does not care how you’ve arranged yourself. It does not respond to the face you put on in the morning or the persona you’ve spent years carefully constructing. It passes through all of that. It looks at what is actually inside — the density of tissue, the flow of fluid, the presence or absence of things that should or should not be there.

You cannot perform for an MRI. You can only lie still.

And in the lying still, you are seen.

There is a kind of spiritual reckoning in this image. Because the deepest work of the interior life is not about improving our reflection. It is about submitting, humbly and without defense, to being seen all the way through.

This is what the contemplative tradition has always understood. The Desert Fathers called it the stripping of the false self. The mystics called it kenosis — the gentle, sacred emptying. Thomas Merton wrote of the true self hidden beneath all our performances, waiting quietly like a seed beneath winter ground. Celtic Christianity spoke of thin places — those moments when the membrane between what we show and what we are becomes transparent, and something eternal peers through.

The MRI asks not How do I look? But what is actually here?

And that question, honestly held, is the beginning of transformation.

 

The Locked Rooms

Here is an uncomfortable truth that the mirror will never show you:

The rooms you think are hidden are visible in the shape of your avoidance.

Every house has them — rooms you do not enter. Not because they are empty, but because they are too full. The grief that never finished. The anger that felt too large. The longing that seemed too vulnerable to admit. The failure that became the story you’ve organized your entire life around avoiding.

The people around you already sense these rooms. They have felt the subtle change in your energy when a conversation drifts near them. They have noticed what you never bring up, what you minimize, what you deflect with humor or busyness or sudden competence.

And here is what the spiritual tradition says about those locked rooms: they are not where your shame lives. They are where your most essential material waits. Every locked room, when finally entered with courage and a willingness to be seen, turns out to contain not chaos — but sorrow needing to be witnessed, not danger — but something deeply human, not emptiness — but the most real version of yourself, waiting with extraordinary patience.

Sacred Noticing — the practice of paying attention with the whole of yourself — is, at its heart, the practice of learning to see with the eyes of the MRI rather than the mirror.

Not to catalogue your flaws. Not to perform your healing. But to look, gently and without flinching, at what is actually here. To let yourself be seen by the One who has always seen you, and loved you, from the inside out.

 

What Changes

When we stop living at the mirror — when we stop curating our reflection and begin, slowly, to inhabit what is actually there — something shifts in the way we move through the world.

The footprint we leave becomes honest. You cannot easily perform when you are fully present to yourself. You may still make mistakes. You may still be reactive. But the trace you leave is genuinely yours — unmistakable, unrepeatable, carrying the signature of something that does not die.

People sense this. They receive not the managed version, not the performance, but the actual emanation of a soul that is present to itself — and therefore finally, fully present to them.

This is what love actually is. Not the appearance of warmth, but the warmth itself. Not the performance of peace, but peace that passes understanding — because it was never manufactured. It was found, in the deep interior places, by someone willing to be seen all the way through.

God, after all, does not use a mirror. God has always been the MRI.

 

 

Be still.

Let the instrument pass through you.

Do not arrange yourself.

Do not prepare your best angle.

Simply lie in the grace of being known —

all the way down,

all the way through..

 

 

Questions for Reflection

Where in your life are you most likely to reach for the mirror — to curate, adjust, or perform?

What is one “locked room” in your interior life that you sense is waiting to be entered?

When have you experienced the grace of being truly seen — not for how you appeared, but for who you are?

What would it feel like to be still, today, and let yourself be known all the way through?

 

 

 

A Closing Invitation

 Uncross your arms. Let your face be soft.

You are not here to be impressive.

You are here to be present.

That is enough.

And has always been enough.

 

Copyright 2026 Michael J. Cunningham OFS

 

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 2 Comments

A Lenten Practice Worth Trying (Sacred Noticing)

 

A Lenten Practice Worth Trying: Notice. Pause. Respond. (Sacred Noticing)

Someone was trying to tell me something last week, and I wasn’t really there.

I was in the room. I was nodding. But I was already composing my response, already somewhere else. And when I finally tuned back in, the moment had passed — and I had left behind something less than my best self. Not intentionally. Not maliciously. But the trace I left in that exchange — the atmosphere that lingered after I walked away, what that person carried from our conversation — was shaped more by my distraction than my love. We call that a spiritual footprint. It is the lasting presence we leave in every encounter, every room we enter, every exchange we have — chosen or not, conscious or not. The question Lent presses upon us is not whether we leave one. We always do. The question is whether the one we’re leaving is the one we would choose if we were paying attention.

That’s what I think Lent calls us to look at. Not what we’re giving up. But what we’re leaving behind.

We know the familiar Lenten practices. We give something up — chocolate, wine, social media — as an act of penance and self-discipline. We take something on — extra prayer, Mass, works of charity — as almsgiving, a turning outward toward others. Both are ancient, both are good. But there is a third invitation that Lent always carries, quieter than the other two, and perhaps more demanding: conversion of heart. Not the dramatic, road-to-Damascus kind. The slow, daily, ordinary kind. The turning of attention toward what actually matters in each moment we are given.

Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps and went on to write one of the most important books of the twentieth century, put it this way: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

He learned that in the most extreme conditions the human spirit can face. He discovered that the one freedom no one could take from him was the freedom to choose how he met each moment. That space — between what happens and what we do about it — is where character is formed. Where love either happens or doesn’t. Where our spiritual footprint is laid down, one moment at a time, for better or worse, consciously or not. Lent is an invitation into that space.

Sacred Noticing is a practice designed to help us find it, expand it, and use it — not in a chapel, but in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday.

It has three movements that work together as one flowing rhythm.

Notice. Not just what’s happening around you, but what’s really present. The person in front of you — what do they need right now that you might be missing because you think you already know? The situation unfolding — what else might be true here that your assumptions are hiding? Notice invites us to approach the familiar as if for the first time. Francis of Assisi practiced this with every creature he encountered. He called it reading the book of creation. We might call it paying attention with love. And every time we do it, the footprint we leave becomes a little more intentional, a little more worthy of the love we say we want to give.

Pause. This is the space Frankl named. Taking a breath, a pause. Feet on the ground. One quiet question: What does this moment actually need from me? The pause interrupts the automatic, the reactive, the habitual. It is a tiny act of asceticism — a small dying to the ego’s need to respond immediately and on its own terms. In this sense, the pause is genuine Lenten penance. Not dramatic. But real. And in that brief stillness, something shifts. The footprint we were about to leave — shaped by irritation, distraction, or simple inattention — gets a chance to become something else.

Respond. From that deeper place. From something closer to wisdom than reaction. From something closer to love than habit. Your response may be words, or action, or simply staying present when you’d rather leave. Sometimes the most powerful response is a quality of attention that says to another person: you matter, I am here, this moment between us is not nothing. That is the footprint worth leaving. That is what lingers long after the conversation ends.

This is almsgiving in its fullest sense — not only the check we write or the food we donate, though those matter. It is the gift of our genuine presence. It is what we offer when we stop performing our way through the day and start actually meeting the people in front of us. It is the most personal form of charity there is — and unlike money, we have it available in every single moment.

This is penance in its deepest sense — not only what we deny ourselves, but the small daily discipline of not letting our first impulse have the last word. Three seconds. One breath. The pause that chooses love over reaction. Every time we do it, we are practicing the conversion Lent is actually after.

And this is prayer — not confined to morning quiet, but carried into the afternoon argument, the exhausting meeting, the moment someone needs more of us than we feel we have to give. When we bring that quality of presence into our ordinary encounters, we are not just being more mindful. We are being more holy. And the world around us — the people who move through our days — begins to feel the difference in the footprint we leave.

Try it today in one small moment. The traffic light turns red — let it be an invitation instead of an interruption. Someone says something that stings — notice what rises in you before you speak. The phone rings — one breath before you answer it. See what changes. Notice what you leave behind.

Many days of that kind of attention leaves its mark. On you. And on everyone you encounter along the way.

The ancient Lenten call is metanoia — a turning, a change of mind, a reorientation of the whole self. We don’t have to go somewhere extraordinary to answer it. We just have to show up differently to where we already are — and trust that the footprint we leave when we do will be one we’re glad we chose.

Notice. Pause. Respond. Repeat.

That may be all the Lenten practice you need.

Michael Cunningham OFS is the author of The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint, releasing April 2026. Weekly reflections at spiritualbreak.com.

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 4 Comments

Known

Known

 

I thought I knew

The formulas, the truths, reality

But now I know

Nothing

 

Only presence,

Being,

 

A temporary glimpse of you,

By peaking into your heart,

Seeing the love which pumps relentlessly to get out

Letting you live

Or survive

Or delight

 

Which it is I cannot tell

But I know I love you

 

Not for what you have done

Good or bad

Not for what you have become

Rich or poor

Not for what you gave

Willing or involuntarily

 

But just because

Because I encountered you

 

That’s all.

It was enough

It is enough

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

 

Friday the 13th: A Day to Notice

 

It’s Friday the 13th today. I notice the date on my phone this morning in a way I didn’t notice yesterday’s. I notice the ladder on the sidewalk. I notice the black cat outside the house, who, for the record, doesn’t seem to know what day it is. He’s doing just fine.

I’m not a superstitious person. Not really. But if I’m honest, I’m a little more awake today than I was yesterday. There’s a hum to the day. I’m watching it more carefully, scanning for what might go wrong, half-seriously expecting something to jump out at me. As if the date itself has teeth.

And I think most of us are like this. We joke about it, sure. We knock on wood and throw salt over our shoulders and pretend we’re being ironic. But underneath the humor, something real is happening. We’re noticing. We’re paying attention to the day in a way we usually don’t bother with. The calendar has been highlighted as special, and so we show up differently. Maybe more alert. Perhaps, more present. More aware that the next moment may matters.

Which makes me wonder: when was the last time I paid this much attention on a Wednesday?

Because here’s what I find interesting. Some of our normal activities are done on autopilot. Driving to work, putting out the trash, even feeding the dog. Certain activities are moved between without really being terribly aware of what spiritual trace I might be leaving.

But give me a day with a reputation, and suddenly I’m wide awake. Suddenly the moments matter.

So superstition, for all its silliness, proves something rather important about us. We already have the capacity to notice. We just apparently need permission. And a number on a calendar is enough to grant it. But here’s where my thinking has taken a turn recently.

I’ve been spending the morning watching the day. Carefully. A little nervously. Waiting to see what it does.

But what if the day has been watching me?

What if every day is watching? Not just this one. What if every moment I walk through — the room I enter, distracted, a conversation half-listened to, the person I pass without seeing — what if all of it is already awake, already open, already receiving whatever I bring into it? Already noticing the trace I’m leaving behind, long before I think to notice it myself?

I think of my friend Tom in his New Hampshire woods. (The picture above). We were walking his property one afternoon when he stopped, breathed deeply, and said, “Mike, this is my sanctuary. This is my chapel.” Those woods didn’t become sacred because Tom finally noticed them. They were already there. Already holding something. He just stopped long enough to receive what was being offered.

I wonder if every day is like Tom’s woods.

Already present. Already watching. Already waiting to see what we’ll bring.

And if that’s true, then we’re not just in the audience of our own lives, watching the day unfold from a safe distance. We’re in the movie at the same time. Being watched and participating. Leaving traces in a story that is somehow both ours and not ours, one that’s already paying attention to us; whether we return the favor or not.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion for this one. I just have the question. And maybe the question is enough for today.

What would change if you walked into tomorrow knowing the day was already watching?