Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

The Borrowed Cloak

The Borrowed Cloak

A Reflection on the Stripping in the Square

From the Way of Francis  ·  Jubilee Pilgrimage, Station Four

 

In the bishop’s square of Assisi, on a spring afternoon in 1206, a young man took off his clothes.

The story has lasted eight hundred years, and you do not have to be Catholic, or religious, or even particularly drawn to medieval saints for it to land. What happened in that square is one of the great hinge moments in the long human story of refusing to live a life defined by someone else — and it happened because something inside Francis Bernardone had finally broken in the right direction.

His father had taken him to court. Pietro Bernardone — successful cloth merchant, heir-builder, social climber — had run out of patience with a son who would not return to the family business, would not stop giving things away, would not stop kneeling in ruined chapels. He wanted his money back, and he wanted, more than that, his son back. The bishop, (present in the square) was trying to restore the peace, urged Francis to surrender the disputed funds and trust in providence.

Francis did not stop at the money.

He went into the bishop’s house. He came back out carrying every garment he had on him. He folded them with care and laid them at his father’s feet. He said, in essence: I am no longer your son in the way you have meant me to be. I have a different Father now.

The bishop, weeping, wrapped him in his own cloak.

 

WHAT HE SET DOWN

It is tempting to read this story as the renunciation of money, and stop there. Money is a familiar thing to give up — at least in our imaginations. We can picture the cloth, the coins, the warehouse keys. We are practiced at admiring Franciscan poverty in the abstract.

But cloth was not the heaviest thing Francis was carrying.

What he set down at his father’s feet was an entire identity composed by other people. A son’s role. A merchant’s future. The whole architecture of expectation that had been built around him before he was old enough to refuse it. He gave back the story — the one in which he was supposed to become a prosperous and well-regarded citizen of Assisi, in which his charm and ambition would be put to predictable use, in which the shape of his life would be drawn by appetites that were not his own.

He could not become Francis until he stopped being the version of himself that Pietro had been writing.

The genius of this scene — and the reason it has not lost its force in eight hundred years — is that the divestment is total without being cruel. He does not curse his father. He does not tear the cloth. He folds the clothes. He places them down. He simply will not carry them another step.

 

THE BORROWED CLOAK

What strikes me, year after year, is what happened next.

Francis did not stand naked for long. The bishop wrapped him in his cloak. The world he had just renounced — represented in that moment by the Bishop, (dressed in vestments), who could not have predicted any of this — covered him with his own cloak. The freedom Francis was walking into did not leave him exposed. It clothed him in something borrowed, something gifted, something not his own.

This is the Franciscan economy in a single image. We let go of what was given to us by inheritance and self-protection and acquisitive habit. And what we are then given back is received. Borrowed. Held lightly. Returned to its source eventually, gratefully, without grasping.

Lady Poverty — the medieval name Francis gave to this whole way of living — is not the absence of provision. She is the presence of trust.

 

EIGHT CENTURIES ON

Eight hundred years later, in a valley on the other side of the world, in a retreat center named for the chapel where Francis first knelt, the same gesture is still trying to take shape in us.

It does not look identical. We are not, most of us, called to undress in public squares. We are called, instead, to a quieter and more sustained version of the same act — to set down, again and again, the inherited self that gets in the way of the called self.

That is what every retreat is, finally. A square. A clearing. A moment in which we are invited to fold up something we have been wearing too long.

It is also what the Franciscan approach to hospitality has always been. When San Damiano commits that no one will ever be turned away for lack of means — when the suggested donation is offered without ever becoming a gate — that is not marketing. That is the heart of it. That is Francis at the bishop’s feet, and the bishop covering him, and the world shifting an inch closer to what it was always meant to be.

Money is not the enemy. Money as the price of belonging is the enemy. Francis broke the assumption — for himself in 1206, and for us now — that what is most worth receiving must first be earned, deserved, or paid for.

That is the freedom we are still learning to extend.

 

THE SQUARE WE STAND IN

Each of us, in some season, will stand in a version of that square.

The clothes will be different. For some it will be a job that has long since stopped fitting but feels too dangerous to remove. For some it will be a story their family has told about who they are — the responsible one, the difficult one, the one who never quite arrived. For some it will be a grief they have been wearing so long they have mistaken it for skin. For some it will be a successful life that quietly does not contain them.

The square is wherever the costume becomes intolerable.

What Francis shows us is that the right response, when we get there, is not to manage it more skillfully. It is to set it down. Not in despair. Not as protest. As an act of trust that something else will be given.

There is a word for this — detachment — a word that sounds austere until you have actually tried it, at which point it begins to sound like relief.

 

WHAT WE MIGHT GAIN

What we gain is not nothing. This kind of letting-go is never about ending up with less.

We gain the freedom of an unburdened identity — the lightness of finally not having to be someone for anybody.

We gain the capacity to hear the actual call — the one that has been waiting underneath all the inherited noise.

We gain a kind of joy that is unmistakable when you encounter it in the genuinely Franciscan: the joy of a person who is not performing.

We gain, perhaps most surprisingly, the ability to receive. The borrowed cloak. The unearned grace. The provision we did not arrange for ourselves.

We gain a Father in heaven who was never going to send us a bill. We gain — in language that fits whatever tradition or none — the slow, astonishing discovery that what we most needed was never something we could have bought.

 

“Start by doing what is necessary; then do what is possible;

and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”

—  Saint Francis of Assisi

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

The Spiritual Footprint You Are Already Leaving Behind

The Spiritual Footprint You Are Already Leaving Behind

On the Gifts of the Holy Spirit and the Franciscan Way

 

There is a moment most of us have had and almost none of us have named.

You are with someone — in their kitchen, across a hospital bed, at the end of a phone call that went longer than you expected — and when you leave, something has shifted. Not because of what was said. Not because anything was resolved. But because of a quality in that person’s presence that you received before you understood what it was.

Peace. A sense of being genuinely seen. The feeling, arriving without explanation, that you are not as alone as you thought you were five minutes ago.

You carry it home. You set it down gently on the counter of your interior life, unsure what to do with it but unwilling to let it go entirely.

That exchange — that unnamed gift moving between two ordinary people in an ordinary place — is what the tradition has always been trying to describe. We have elaborate theological language for it. We have the Gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge, fortitude, piety, fear of the Lord. We have Paul’s list of fruits in Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

What we are less practiced at is recognizing them in the wild.

Francis of Assisi was, among many other things, the most effective demonstrator in Christian history of what happens when a human life stops getting in the way of these gifts.

He did not acquire them. He did not earn them through virtue or study or the accumulation of holy experiences. He stripped away everything that was sitting on top of them.

The poverty of Francis — the poverello, the little poor man — is usually understood as a social or economic posture. And it was. But it was also an interior posture. Francis divested himself of the armor of assumption. He arrived at every person and every creature without defenses, without a predetermined category, without needing the encounter to be anything other than what it was. And in that radical openness, something that had been given to him long before — at his Baptism, at his Confirmation, in the bread broken at ten thousand Masses — found its way through.

He held still long enough for the Gifts to do what they had always been able to do.

Consider what happens when we do not hold still.

The Gift of Understanding is the capacity to perceive what is actually happening beneath the surface of a moment — the real emotion under the difficult behavior, the fear beneath the complaint, the longing beneath the silence. It is not a skill. It is not emotional intelligence, though it resembles it. It is a grace, placed in us at our anointing, waiting for the moment we stop moving fast enough to use it.

When Francis rounded a bend outside Assisi and found a leper standing in the road, the Gift of Understanding was present in him. What was not present — what had to be overcome — was the entire apparatus of his upbringing telling him what the leper was: a category, a disease, something to cross the street to avoid. Francis stopped. He looked. He held still long enough for the Gift to speak. And what the Gift said, in that held stillness, was: there is a person here. The trace of God is in this face. Look.

He dismounted. He embraced him. And Francis later said that this — not the voice at San Damiano, not the wounds on La Verna — was the moment everything changed. The moment he stopped looking away. The moment the Gift found its opening.

The Gift of Understanding was present in him. What had to be overcome was everything telling him what the leper was.

The Franciscan tradition offers us a word for this capacity to dwell in a moment rather than manage it: contemplatio. Not contemplation as a spiritual specialty reserved for monks in silent enclosures. Contemplation as a posture anyone can carry into any Tuesday.

The disciples had ten days in the upper room before Pentecost. The Gifts arrived in wind and fire and the sudden ability to speak into the hearts of strangers. Most of us will not have ten days. We will have three breaths.

But those three breaths are the same interior clearing, at a different scale. The first breath interrupts the reflex — something is happening here, and I am going to stop and notice it before I decide what it means. The second breath grounds you in this actual moment — not the accumulated weight of similar moments, not the anticipated shape of the conversation yet to come, but here, now, this. The third breath opens you to what is actually needed — not what you prepared to say, not what habit suggests, but what this moment, this person, this encounter is genuinely asking for.

In that third breath, the Gift of Counsel becomes available. Not as a mystical infusion but as a quiet knowing — the right word, arriving from somewhere below your thinking mind, that you did not plan and could not have predicted. You recognize it precisely because it does not feel entirely like you. It feels like something passing through you.

It is.

Paul calls them fruits for a reason that goes deeper than metaphor.

You do not produce fruit. You create the conditions — good soil, sufficient water, the patient willingness to be pruned — and the fruit grows. The Gifts are the root system, placed in you at your Baptism and tended at every sacrament since. The fruits are what grows from that root when the conditions are right: when you are present enough, still enough, undefended enough to stop blocking what has been trying to move through you since before you could speak.

The peace you gave someone who did not know they needed it. The patience that arrived in a moment when impatience would have been entirely understandable. The kindness that surprised even you — that came from somewhere quieter than your intention and landed more truly than anything you had planned to say.

These are not achievements. They are not evidence of your spiritual progress. They are evidence of the Gifts doing what the Gifts do when we get out of the way.

Every life leaves a spiritual footprint in the world. A trace. An impression in the space between people — something of who you are, what you are carrying, where the Spirit is moving in your life — that is available to anyone paying the kind of attention that makes it visible. The person who left you steadier than they found you was not performing a virtue. They were, in that moment, available. The weight had briefly lifted. The fruit grew.

You are leaving that footprint right now. In the kitchen, in the car, in the difficult meeting that went too long. In the silence after a hard conversation. In the small decision — made when no one is watching — about whether to respond from love or from something smaller.

The question is not whether you are leaving a trace. That is happening regardless. The question is whether you are doing it intentionally — whether you are practicing the conditions that allow the Gifts to move more freely, more often, in more ordinary moments.

Every life leaves a spiritual footprint. The question is not whether you are leaving a trace. The question is whether you are doing it intentionally.

The Franciscan charism, distilled to its essence, is the conviction that the Word became flesh — and therefore that no piece of ordinary life is outside the reach of the sacred. God chose the unremarkable. The feeding trough, not the palace. The dusty road, the tax collector’s table, the leper on the bend outside Assisi.

Sacred Noticing is the practice that takes that conviction seriously. It is the discipline of the poverello applied to attention: arriving at each moment stripped of the armor of assumption, open to what is actually there rather than what you have already decided to see. It is the practice of contemplatio applied to the ordinary: holding still long enough for what has been given to speak. It is the expression of fraternitas in its most practical form: recognizing in every person you encounter a brother, a sister, someone in whom the trace of God is present and worth receiving.

Notice. Pause. Respond from the deep place.

Not a system. A description of how wisdom actually moves in a human life when it is not being blocked.

The burning bush was burning before Moses arrived.

He turned aside and looked. That single act — the willingness to stop, to notice, to resist the reflex to keep moving — was enough for the whole conversation to begin. The Gifts were not delivered that morning to a man who had earned them. They were made available to a man who finally held still.

You were anointed. The Gifts are in you, placed there by the God who chose the ordinary as the primary medium of revelation.

 

You only need to notice.

 

 

 

About the Author

Michael J. Cunningham, OFS, D.Min., is Executive Director of San Damiano Franciscan Retreat Center in Danville, California, and a member of the Order of Franciscan Seculars. This reflection draws on the Saturday morning conference “Sacred Noticing and the Franciscan Way,” part of the Rebuild My Church: A Franciscan Jubilee Year Parish Retreat series. Information at sandamiano.org.

His new book, The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint, will be published by Contemplative Company on May 15, 2026, and is available on Amazon and most booksellers.

 

spiritualbreak.com  ·  San Damiano Franciscan Retreat Center  ·  sandamiano.org

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The Fruits of the Gifts

The Fruits of the Gifts A reflection from spiritualbreak.com

I want to ask you something before we begin.

When was the last time someone was genuinely patient with you — not performing patience, not managing their reaction with visible effort, but simply patient, in a way that felt effortless and real — and you thought to yourself: that is a Gift of the Holy Spirit?

I am guessing the answer is not recently. Or possibly ever.

We tend to notice the fruit. We rarely trace it back to its root.

Here is something I have been sitting with.

We were taught — and the teaching is not wrong, exactly, just incomplete — that the Gifts of the Holy Spirit are something we receive and then, over time, develop. Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety, Fear of the Lord. Given at Baptism, confirmed at Confirmation, and then — the unspoken implication — waiting to be earned through a life of sufficient virtue, or learned through years of sufficient formation.

Earn or learn. That is the frame most of us are carrying.

And it is the frame, I think, that quietly separates us from something we already have.

The Gifts are not waiting for our readiness. They were placed in us before we had any idea what to do with them. They did not arrive conditionally. They were not issued on a provisional basis pending our spiritual development. They are already present, already operative, already ours — in the full, unconditional sense of a gift from a God who does not give the way we give, with an eye on whether the recipient has done enough to deserve it.

This is not a small distinction.

If the Gifts are something we earn, then the question I am always asking is: have I done enough yet? Am I sufficiently holy, sufficiently formed, sufficiently advanced on the spiritual path to expect Wisdom or Counsel to move through me today, in this ordinary moment, with this person I am finding difficult?

The answer, most days, is no. And so we wait. And the Gifts sit.

If the Gifts are something we learn, the question becomes: do I understand them well enough? Have I been through enough formation, read enough of the right books, practiced enough of the right disciplines to deploy them with any confidence?

Again, most days, the answer is some version of not quite. And so we defer. And the Gifts sit.

But if the Gifts are simply gift — given, present, already ours — then neither of these questions is the right one. The question is not whether we are worthy or whether we are ready. The question is only whether we are available.

I want to be honest about why this is harder than it sounds.

When something is given to you — genuinely given, not earned or learned — there is a particular kind of disorientation that follows. We are not very good at receiving. We are much more comfortable with a transaction we understand: I put in this, I get out that. Gift, in the pure sense, disrupts the transaction. It arrives without an invoice. It cannot be repaid. And without the familiar structure of earning or learning, we are left with a question we do not quite know how to answer: what do I do now?

And into that gap — the gap between receiving a Gift we did not earn and knowing what to do with it — two things tend to move in.

The first is the mind, with its reasonable desire to be in charge. If I cannot earn this or learn this, then let me at least manage it. Let me deliberate about when to deploy patience and how much understanding to offer and whether this situation warrants Counsel or whether I am reading it wrong. The mind steps in with the best of intentions, and in doing so, becomes a kind of intermediary between the Gift and the moment it was given for. The ego, trying to be helpful, ends up being an obstacle.

The second is something subtler. A quiet resistance that does not quite believe the Gifts are a natural part of us. That they belong to another category of person — holier, more practiced, more naturally contemplative. That when something like Wisdom or Fortitude moves through us, it must have been an accident, or someone else’s prayer on our behalf, or a good day we happened to be having. We discount it. We explain it away. We keep it at arm’s length, because to claim it as ours would feel, somehow, presumptuous.

Both of these — the deliberating mind and the resisting heart — have the same effect. They separate us from what was given. Not maliciously. Not even consciously. Just by inserting something between us and the Gift that was never supposed to be there.

What I find most striking is that this separation is not a spiritual failure. It is almost a spiritual inevitability, given how we have been formed.

We have been taught to work for what we receive. We have been shaped by communities that, with genuine love and genuine theological seriousness, emphasized the importance of formation, practice, and growth. None of that is wrong. But somewhere in the transmission, the Gifts got quietly reclassified as achievements rather than endowments. And once that happened, we started approaching our own spiritual inheritance with the posture of a student rather than the posture of a recipient.

The student asks: am I getting this right?

The recipient asks: what is being given here, right now, that I might allow through?

The fruits — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control — are what emerge when the Gifts are unobstructed. They are not produced by trying. They are not the reward for getting the practice right. They are what naturally appears when something that was always present stops being blocked.

The question Sacred Noticing puts to me, every day, is a simple one.

What did I put between myself and the Gift today?

Was it the deliberating mind, calculating whether this was the right moment and whether I had enough spiritual capital to offer something real? Was it the quiet disbelief that Wisdom or Counsel could actually be mine to offer, in this unremarkable moment, to this ordinary person in front of me?

Or did I, even briefly, get out of the way?

I do not think this is a question that generates answers so much as attention. Which is perhaps where it wants to leave us.

The Gifts are present.

They have always been present.

They are waiting not for our readiness but for our willingness to stop standing between them and the moment they were given for.

What would it mean to simply let them through?

 

Add ten seconds to each moment, And my response would be better, kinder, warmer, more forgiving, than my first.

But can I ever be as loving as He is to me?

— Michael Cunningham OFS

Michael J. Cunningham, OFS, D.Min. is the author of The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint (Contemplative Company, 2026) and Executive Director of San Damiano Franciscan Retreat Center in Danville, California. Weekly reflections at spiritualbreak.com.

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After Easter …

An Easter Reflection on Living in Liminal Space

There is a day in the Christian calendar that nobody quite knows what to do with.

Not Good Friday, with its grief and its grandeur. Not Easter Sunday, with its flowers and its alleluias. I mean the day in between. Holy Saturday. The day the stone is sealed, the disciples are scattered, and the story appears — by every visible measure — to have ended badly.

Most of us skip it. We move from the cross straight to the resurrection, from the darkness straight to the light, and in doing so we miss the one day in the entire liturgical year that tells the truth about what most of our spiritual lives actually feel like most of the time.

We live in the liminal.

There is a word for the in-between space. Liminal — from the Latin limen, threshold. The doorway where you are neither inside nor outside. Not the old room and not the new one. The stretch of ground where what was has ended and what will be has not yet arrived.

We tend to visit the liminal zone occasionally and then try to leave. But the truth is that most of our interior life is conducted there. Not in the peaks of consolation or the depths of crisis, but in the long, undramatic stretches in between — the ordinary seasons that carry no particular name, that do not make for dramatic testimony, that simply continue.

You know this territory. It is when prayer has become routine, the words still said, but the warmth somehow gone out of them. The faith that persists but no longer surprises. The sense that God was closer once; in a retreat, a conversation, a moment at Mass that you have never quite been able to recreate … and that you have been quietly looking for the door back ever since.

It is Wednesday morning when nothing has broken, but nothing sings, either. The year when the person you were before a loss did not entirely return afterward. The stretch of life when you show up and do the right things and still feel, somewhere underneath, like you are waiting for something you cannot name.

This is not spiritual failure. This is spiritual life. The mystics did not write their great works in the high moments. They wrote them from exactly here.

The disciples on that first Holy Saturday did not know they were in a liminal space. They only knew they were in a disaster. What looked, from inside the room, like abandonment was — from outside — the longest breath before the dawn.

This is always the problem with liminal space. It does not announce itself as temporary. It presents itself as permanent. The sealed stone does not say three days — it simply says sealed. The locked room does not say until Pentecost — it simply says locked.

And so, we do what frightened people do in locked rooms. We try to manage the uncertainty. We fill the silence with noise, the emptiness with activity, the waiting with plans. We become very busy maintaining the house from the outside because we cannot bear what it feels like on the inside.

The contemplative tradition has a gentler name for what we are doing. It calls it the mirror. The mirror shows what we present — the managed version, the composed face, the spiritual persona that has learned to look well in the light. Most of us have been practicing this management for so long that we have forgotten we are doing it.

But God, as I have said before, does not use a mirror. God has always been the MRI.

An MRI does not see your presentation. It sees what is structuring everything from the inside — what has always been there, what arrived later, what healed and what still carries its fracture. You cannot manage your way past an MRI. You are already living inside it. And the liminal space, the in-between, the Holy Saturday of the spirit, has a way of dissolving the mirror altogether. Strip away the activity and the consolations and the sense of spiritual progress, and what remains is the actual ground.

The mystic Miester Eckert called it the Seelengrund — the ground of the soul. The place beneath all experience of God, beneath feeling and warmth and spiritual momentum, where God dwells not as a sensation but as a fact. A fact that does not fluctuate. A presence that does not require our performance in order to persist.

This is what the liminal is for. It is not punishment. It is not evidence that something has gone wrong with your faith. It is the condition in which we discover — slowly, often reluctantly — how deep the roots actually go. What remains when the feeling goes away. What we are made of when there is nothing left to manage.

We do not have what the first disciples had — the physical presence of Jesus, the sound of a specific voice answering a specific question. We live on the other side of the resurrection and the ascension. The physical form is gone.

But what we have is not a consolation prize. It is the fullness of what was promised.

We have creation — his first and still-speaking language. Every morning that arrives without our asking. Every face that carries, even unknowingly, the trace of the one in whose image it was made. We have Scripture — not a closed archive but a living word with the capacity to find us precisely in the places where we are most stuck. We have the spiritual footprint of a life fully inhabited, left in us and between us — every honest encounter between two human beings exchanges something of it. And we have love, which is not a feeling to be cultivated but a substance. The Great Commandment does not give us an emotion. It gives us a map for every day — bright and dark, liminal and luminous alike.

The burning bush was not special because it burned. It was special because Moses turned aside to look. That turning aside — that small act of noticing in the middle of an ordinary working day — is what keeps us present to God in the in-between. Not the dramatic encounter. The willingness to look at what is already there.

Holy Saturday earns its place in the calendar precisely because most of us cannot say honestly that we live in Good Friday or Easter Sunday. We live in the day between. We live with unanswered questions, with faith that persists but does not dazzle, with the ordinary texture of a life being lived in the presence of a God we cannot always feel.

The resurrection will not be the arrival of something that was absent.

It will be the revelation of what was always present.

The seed in the ground does not know it is becoming something. It simply stays with what is. It lets the dark do what the dark does. And what the disciples thought was an ending was, in the grammar of God, a gestation.

If you are in the in-between this Easter — if the alleluias feel a little far away, if the dry season has lasted longer than you thought it would — let me suggest that you are not outside the story.

You are in the most honest chapter of it.

Stay a little longer here. The ground holds. The seed is doing what seeds do. And God, who does not use a mirror, has never needed your performance to remain.

What is the liminal season you are in right now? What would it mean to stop managing it — and simply let the ground hold you?

 

Reflection and image copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham

 

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The First Life Skill: An Easter Reflection

The First Life Skill

An Easter Reflection

I was walking my dog Bella this morning when three runners came towards us on the path — a life coach and what looked like a young married couple working hard to keep up with him. I stepped aside to let them pass, and caught only a fragment of what the coach was saying, mid-sentence, to his clients:

“…meditation should be the first life skill you learn. It’s as important as reading or writing.”

The couple sounded like they needed to breathe more than anything else at that moment as they struggled to keep up with the coach. They were around the bend before I could hear more. But the fragment stayed with me for the rest of the walk, which is, of course, a form of meditation in itself.

Easter has something to say about this.

I kept turning that phrase over — the first life skill — because the coach wasn’t wrong. What changes when you learn to be genuinely present — before you react, before you perform, before you start managing the day — is not one area of your life. It is the whole thing.

But there was something about the morning itself that had been doing the teaching before the coach opened his mouth.

The light was already on the hills. My dog was doing what dogs do — completely in the moment, no argument with it. Three people running together on an ordinary Friday morning, already alive to something. And the whole scene had a quality I can only describe as already full.

That is what Easter keeps trying to say to me, and I keep needing to hear it differently.

The resurrection doesn’t introduce God to the world. It tears the veil on what was always here — patient in the ordinary, present in the morning light, carried in the fragment of a sentence caught on a path between one bend and the next.

Meister Eckhart called it the Seelengrund — the ground of the soul. The place beneath all the fluctuating — the good seasons of prayer and the dry stretches, the days when God feels close and the longer ones when God seems to have left the building entirely. Beneath all of it, something holds. Not as feeling. As fact.

I have spent enough time in the dry stretches to have tested this. And what I found — not dramatically, more like a slow recognition — is that the mystics were right about this one thing: you cannot turn God off. Not by your doubt. Not by your distraction. Not by the stone at the door.

The only real question — the one Easter puts back on the table every year — is whether I am present to what is already present to me.

What about you? Where have you stopped looking — quietly assuming there is nothing there?

That question, honestly held, is itself a practice.

It is, in fact, the beginning of what I’ve come to call Sacred Noticing — not a technique you apply to your life from the outside, but the moment you realize your life has been unfolding on sacred ground all along.

The morning dog walk. The three runners. The fragment overheard between one bend and the next. Any of these, met with a little waking, becomes the place where the divine is already present and already speaking.

The resurrection doesn’t introduce that.

It just keeps confirming it.

Whatever this Easter holds for you — the alleluias, the quiet uncertainty, or the honest in-between that many of us actually inhabit — the invitation is the same.

The divine is not elsewhere.

It is here. In this day. In this life. In the specific, irreplaceable way that Love has chosen to be present in you.

 

Notice that.

That is, perhaps, the first life skill.

“The desire for belonging is, at its ground, the soul’s memory of the Garden’s chemistry.”

 

Michael J. Cunningham OFS is a Franciscan secular, writer, and retreat director. This reflection is part of the SpiritualBreak.com contemplative series.