A Spiritual Break

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?

Carrying something else today? Take a Spiritual Break made for this moment →

Posted on October 9, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham · 2 Comments

The Drifting Prayer

A Reflection on Unhurried Attention

A Prayer for the Lunch Hour

It is 12:15. You have thirty minutes, perhaps forty if the meeting before ran short and the one after starts late. Somewhere you have read that you ought to pray more, and somewhere else that it’s good to meditate, and both pieces of advice arrive with instructions: find a quiet room, sit upright, close your eyes, set a timer, settle the breath, let the mind grow still.

These are good instructions. I have taught many of them for years and still keep them faithfully. But I will be honest with you. At 12:15 on a Tuesday, with the inbox still humming in my chest and a sandwich awaiting, I do not have a quiet room. I simply do not have the twenty minutes it takes simply to come down from the morning. And the deliberate, interior stillness those prayers ask for is often not available to me. It is not that I refuse it. It is that the door to that room is locked from the other side, and the key is time I do not have.

So for a long while I did what most of us do. I spent the half hour on my phone, or finishing an email, or eating at my desk, and called it a break. It was not a break. It was more rowing.

This reflection is about a different kind of prayer, one that asks for no special state at all. You keep your eyes open. You keep your feet moving, or not. You stay entirely in the ordinary, conscious, waking world, the world of sidewalks and pigeons and the sound of a delivery truck backing up. You simply stop steering it for a while. We call it The Drifting Prayer, and it is as old as the Irish sea.

Where the Drifting Comes From

In the year 891, three Irishmen came ashore in Cornwall in a small boat of hide stretched over a wooden frame. They had set out without oars. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle thought this strange enough to write down. Brought before King Alfred and asked why, they gave an answer that has outlived the kingdom: they wished to be pilgrims for the love of God, and they cared not where.

The Celtic monks had a name for this way of travelling: peregrinatio pro amore Dei, wandering for the love of God. It was pilgrimage with the destination taken out. Columba left Ireland for Iona around 563 not knowing what his work would become. The Voyage of St. Brendan tells of monks who let wind and current carry them from island to island. They spoke of going out to find their “place of resurrection,” the place where God was waiting for them. They did not plan their way there. They let themselves be carried.

Seven centuries later, in the hills of Umbria, the same instinct surfaced in a different accent. The Little Flowers of St. Francis tells of a day when Francis and Brother Masseo came to a crossroads, one road to Siena, one to Florence, one to Arezzo. Francis told Masseo to spin around in place like a child until he was dizzy, and to set out in whichever direction he fell facing. Masseo grumbled, spun, and stopped facing Siena. To Siena they went. Another day, walking near Bevagna, Francis left the road entirely because the trees were full of birds. He had not planned a sermon to them. He simply turned toward what was in front of him.

These are not stories about carelessness. They are stories about trust. The monks and the friars had decided, with their whole bodies, that God was a better navigator than they were. Then they built small, deliberate ways of letting go of the steering.

Now look at your own week, and count the oars. The calendar. The GPS. The to-do list, the step counter, the plan for next quarter. Even our rest has an agenda now; we measure our sleep and optimize our weekends. There is nothing wrong with oars. But a life that never ships them has quietly decided who is steering, and it is worth noticing what that decision is.

How to Drift

You do not need a retreat center, a chapel, or a quiet room. You need a small boat, and a willingness to put down the oars. The whole invitation is short enough to memorize:

The Celtic monks set out to sea in small boats with no oars, and let the current decide. For the next while, this place is your current. There is nowhere to get to and nothing to bring back. Walk, or don’t. If something finds you, let it.

Here is how it unfolds, gently, in a lunch hour or a coffee break.

Choose your coracle. The coracle was the little round boat of the Irish rivers, and it is the only real decision you make. Your coracle is a boundary: twenty minutes, thirty, the length of a lunch break. A place: the park near the office, the block around your building, a bench in the courtyard, the long way back from the car. Decide the edges, and then stop deciding. The boundary is what holds you, so that you are free to stop holding yourself.
Say the six words. Before you step out, borrow the pilgrims’ own prayer of consent: Lead me; I care not where. You can say it aloud or under your breath. It is not a technique. It is a handing over of the tiller.
Ship the oars. Put the phone in your pocket, on silent, or better still leave it at your desk. Drop the errand you were going to squeeze in. Release any idea of what this half hour ought to produce. You are not walking for exercise, or thinking through a problem, or getting some air so you can be more productive this afternoon. You are simply going out.
Let the current carry you. Begin to move, or sit, and follow whatever gently draws you. A turn in the path. The way the light lies on a wall. The smell of bread from a doorway. A child’s laugh across the street. A memory that rises without being asked. Look at the familiar as though you had never seen it before; the same tree you pass every day is not, in fact, the same tree. Notice what is outside you, and notice too what moves inside you as you look, without grading any of it. Steer only for safety. Otherwise, let the drawing do the steering.
When something finds you, stay. Somewhere in the drift, something may stop you: a sparrow in a puddle, a stranger’s kindness, a line of shadow that seems, for a moment, unbearably beautiful. Stop there. Let your feet feel the ground. Breathe once, twice, three times, slowly. You do not have to name it, photograph it, or turn it into a lesson. You might simply ask, without needing an answer, What is here for me? Then let it be what it is.
Let it, and drift on. Sometimes what finds you asks something of you: a word to the person at the next table, a call you suddenly know you should make, a softening toward the colleague you were rehearsing an argument with. Sometimes it asks only that you remain with it a moment longer. Sometimes it asks nothing at all. Whatever it is, let it be enough, and when it releases you, let the current have the boat again.

Out on the Water

You will reach for the oars. Let me say that plainly, so you are not surprised. Five minutes in, you will find yourself planning the afternoon, or replaying the meeting, or wondering whether this is “working.” You may catch yourself turning the walk into a step count, or the sunlight into a photograph for later.

When that happens, notice it, smile, and take your hands off the handle. That reach for the oars is not failure. It is the practice. Each time you let go, something in you learns a little more about trust. On some days you will let go forty times in thirty minutes. Those are not wasted days. They may be the best ones.

This is also why The Drifting Prayer does not ask you to empty your mind. Your mind will be full: of the street, of the weather, of your own wandering thoughts. That fullness is not in the way. It is the water you are floating on. The other great prayers of stillness ask us to let thoughts go by like boats on a river. In this one, you are the boat, and the river is the whole ordinary afternoon.

As a boy I spent long days on the bank of the river Avon with a fishing rod, reading the water and the season and the shadows where the big one might be lying. My elders called it daydreaming. I know now it was something closer to prayer: awake, attentive, unhurried, and not in charge. The Drifting Prayer gives that boy’s afternoon back to the grown man with half an hour and a paper bag.

And if nothing finds you? If the whole half hour is just wind and footsteps and an ordinary sky? Then the drifting itself was the prayer, and it was enough. Being led is a form of prayer, perhaps the oldest one. Nothing in the drift has to be harvested to count.

A word for those in a drifting season of life. Some of you did not choose your coracle. Retirement chose it, or illness, or the empty house, or the long wait between what ended and what has not yet begun. Our culture will tell you that because you are not doing anything, nothing is happening. The three men in the boat say otherwise. And notice this: the monks did not drift to relax. They drifted to be sent. Columba’s drift ended at Iona, and Iona changed the world. If the way ahead is unclear, the drift is not the opposite of discernment. It is discernment, at the speed of trust.

Coming Ashore

When your coracle reaches its edge, when the half hour is up, come ashore gently. Stand still for a moment before you go back through the door. Feel your feet. Take one slow breath. Say a simple thank you, for whatever found you or for the plain gift of having been carried.

Then go back to your afternoon, and see what comes with you. Often it is not a thought but a texture: a slower step on the stairs, a little more room between the email arriving and your reply, a gentler eye for the person across the desk. Do not grasp at it. It came on the current, and it will return on the current.

The Drifting Prayer replaces none of the other prayers. The chair, the sacred word, the Scriptures, the chapel will all be there when you have the time and the quiet they ask for. This prayer simply consecrates the hours they cannot reach: the in-between ones, the unplanned ones, the thirty minutes we were about to waste by filling. And over time, something curious happens. The drift begins to leak into the rest of the day. You find yourself, at a red light or in a hallway or on hold, taking your hands off the oars for a single breath. The lunch hour becomes a doorway rather than a gap.

This week, then: one oarless half hour. Choose your coracle. Say the six words. And let the current decide.

Where in your day are you still gripping the oars, and what might find you if, for thirty minutes, you let the current decide?

A Prayer for the Drift

Lord of wind and water,

you carried Brendan over the deep

and turned Francis toward the birds.

Here is my little boat,

this half hour, this ordinary street.

I lay down the oars.

Lead me; I care not where.

Open my eyes to what you place before me,

and let me be content to be carried.

Amen.

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

Carrying something else today? Take a Spiritual Break made for this moment →

Posted on October 6, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham

Spiritual Break Gathering Today

Please join me for a monthly gathering to present and discuss a Spiritual Break reflection and the impact of our Spiritual Footprint in a one-hour gathering each month.

For more details on the next meeting visit https://spiritualbreak.com/the-spiritual-break-gathering/

If you have already registered you should have received a confirmation email today. If not follow the instructions below.

And to go ahead and join us, click the link below:

You only have to register once, and the link will work every time.

Thanks in advance,

Michael

Carrying something else today? Take a Spiritual Break made for this moment →

Posted on September 29, 2026September 29, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham

A Spiritual Break, Made for This Moment

A Spiritual Break, Made for This Moment

For many years now I have been writing down what I notice: the small moments where grace slips in sideways, the questions that won’t let go, the prayers that arrive before the words do. Over time these reflections, poems and prayers have grown, well over a thousand of them, across A Spiritual Break and Daily Prayers and Meditations.

But a reflection only helps if it reaches you when you need it. On a morning when you are grieving, a piece about gratitude can feel like it’s written for someone else.

So I have made something new. It is a quiet page where you can say, in a sentence or a single word, what you are carrying right now. It then goes into the archive and brings back three of my pieces, chosen for that moment. They follow the rhythm of Sacred Noticing:

- - a reflection to help you Notice what is happening in you,
  - a poem or prayer to Pause with,
  - and something to carry into the day, to Respond.

Some technology does the searching, but it writes nothing. Every word you read is mine, written over the years for moments like yours. What you requested is not kept.

If a Spiritual Break speaks to you, you can keep it to return to, or send it to someone who might need it today.

You’ll find it at spiritualbreak.com/break. Take a moment. See what you are carrying. Let it meet you there.

This is new, and I would love to hear how it works for you. Just reply to this email: did the reflections/poems meet you where you were today?

Peace and all good,

Michael

Carrying something else today? Take a Spiritual Break made for this moment →

Posted on September 24, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham

800 Years of St. Francis: A Daily Companion for October

San Damiano Retreat Center, Danville, California

On the evening of October 3, 1226, Francis of Assisi died on the bare ground of a small chapel below the town he had once scandalized. This October 3 marks eight hundred years.

To walk with him through the anniversary, I have written a short daily companion for the month of October. Each day brings one moment from Francis’s life, a brief reflection, and a single question to carry into your own day. Each takes about two minutes to read. It isn’t a course, and there is nothing to keep up with. It is simply a companion for the road.

Two ways to follow along

Read on the website. All thirty-one reflections are gathered on one page, Francis@800, where you can read each day, catch up on days you’ve missed, or find a particular reflection to share.

Receive it by email each day. If you would like each day’s reflection delivered to your inbox, sign up here for the daily emails. They begin on Thursday, October 1, and end on October 31. This is a separate list just for the month, so you will only receive the daily emails if you choose to sign up. Your regular weekly Spiritual Break will continue as usual.

The path we’ll walk together

The Passing (October 1–4): Francis’s last days, the 800th anniversary of his death on October 3, and his feast on October 4.
Rebuild My Church (October 5–11): the leper on the road, the cave on Mount Subasio, the San Damiano cross, and the square in Assisi.
The Canticle (October 12–18): Brother Sun, Sister Water, and every kind of weather.
Peace and Encounter (October 19–25): the Sultan’s tent, the wolf of Gubbio, perfect joy, and Clare at San Damiano.
The Footprint He Left, and Yours (October 26–31): Greccio, La Verna, and the footprint each of us leaves behind.

Join us at San Damiano

If you are near Danville, you are warmly invited to the Blessing of the Animals on Saturday, October 3, from 1:00 to 2:30 pm, and to the Evening Prayer Service for the Transitus of St. Francis, marking the 800th anniversary of his death, that evening from 6:00 to 7:00 pm. Details here.

Share it freely

If you edit a parish bulletin or a newsletter, you are welcome to reprint any day’s reflection, unchanged and with credit. See how to reprint it. And if you know someone who loves Francis, or who simply needs a quiet two minutes each day this October, please pass this along.

Begin at Francis@800 →

Sign up for the daily emails →

Peace and all good,
Michael

Michael J. Cunningham, OFS · San Damiano Retreat Center · spiritualbreak.com

Carrying something else today? Take a Spiritual Break made for this moment →