A Spiritual Break

Posted on August 29, 2025 by Michael J. Cunningham · 2 Comments

Waiting in Sacred Space

A serene landscape at sunset featuring ruins of a stone structure surrounded by lush green grass and wildflowers, with the sun shining brightly in the background.

Waiting in Sacred Space

The retreat director’s instructions were simple enough: “Sit quietly for twenty minutes. Don’t try to pray. Don’t try to think holy thoughts. Just be available to whatever comes.” Simple instructions, perhaps, but sitting in that circle of silence with fifteen other retreatants, I discovered something unsettling. I had forgotten how to wait.

Now when it comes to Not waiting for something, I’m quite good at that kind of waiting. Waiting for the coffee to brew, waiting for traffic to move, waiting for test results or phone calls or the right moment to have a difficult conversation. That’s the waiting of anticipation, of problem-solving, of preparing for what comes next. But this was different. This was waiting without agenda, resting without purpose, being present without trying to accomplish anything at all.

My mind, trained by decades of productivity culture, immediately began offering suggestions. “While you’re sitting here,” it whispered, “you could plan tomorrow’s schedule. Or pray for your family. Or contemplate on that scripture passage from this morning.” It was as if my interior life had become a helpful but anxious assistant, unable to believe I might actually want to just sit and be available to whatever God might want to offer in the silence.

This kind of waiting—what the contemplative tradition calls “sacred space”—requires a fundamental shift in how we understand our relationship with time, with God, and with our own souls. It asks us to trust that sometimes the most important thing we can do is nothing at all, or at least nothing that looks productive from the outside.

Zooming to scripture for a moment … I think of Mary, sitting at Jesus’s feet while Martha bustled about with important tasks. Martha’s complaint was reasonable: there was work to be done, and Mary was just sitting there. But Jesus defended Mary’s choice to wait in his presence, to create sacred space for listening rather than doing. “Mary has chosen what is better,” he said, and it’s a choice that still confuses us in our achievement-oriented world. Many homilists have tried to explain this over the centuries … and still do.

The soul, it turns out, is like a garden that requires a different kind of attention than we might expect. We want to plant seeds, water plants, pull weeds—to do something purposeful. But the deepest cultivation happens in the waiting, in the patient attention that allows us to notice what is already growing, what needs tending, what wants to emerge without our forcing it.

During that first retreat silence, I began to understand why the mystics spoke of “divine darkness” and “unknowing” not as problems to be solved but as sacred territories to be entered. When we stop trying to figure everything out, when we release our grip on the need to understand and control, we create space for a different kind of knowing to emerge. The kind that comes not through thinking but through being, not through analysis but through presence.

This waiting is not passive. It requires what I can only call active openness—a quality of attention that remains open and alert without grasping or chasing after anything in particular. Like a photographer waiting for the perfect light, we position ourselves and then allow what wants to happen to happen. (Now that’s my kind of waiting!)

In centering prayer, we learn to return gently to a sacred word when thoughts arise, not because thoughts are bad but because we’re practicing a different way of being present. We’re learning to rest in God rather than work for God, to receive rather than achieve. It’s a form of prayer that makes no sense to the part of us that measures success by output, but it speaks to the deeper part that longs simply to be held.

The breath becomes our teacher in the practice of waiting. We don’t try to control our breathing or make it special—we simply notice it, allow it to carry us deeper into presence. In the rhythm of inhale and exhale, we find an ancient pattern of receiving and releasing, of being filled and emptied, that mirrors the spiritual life itself.

Sometimes what arises in the sacred space of waiting is difficult emotion—grief we’ve been avoiding, anger we’ve suppressed, fear we didn’t know we were carrying. The temptation is to suppress these feelings, to analyze them, to make them disappear. But waiting in sacred space teaches us a different response: to simply be present with what is, to hold our own experience with compassion, to trust that feelings, like weather, will change if we don’t resist them.

This practice challenges everything our culture teaches us about time and productivity. We live in a world that equates busyness with importance, constant activity with purpose. The idea of spending time doing nothing—especially nothing that produces measurable results—feels almost wasteful. Yet the contemplative tradition insists that this kind of waiting is not only valuable but essential for spiritual growth.

I remember a conversation with a friend who was going through a difficult divorce. “I just need to do something,” she kept saying. “I need a plan, I need action steps, I need to fix this.” But sometimes life calls us into liminal space, those in-between times when action is not what’s needed. Sometimes we’re called to wait in the darkness, to trust the process, to let God work in ways we cannot see or understand. I know, that’s hard to swallow and accept.

This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of waiting in sacred space—being comfortable with the mystery, with not having all the answers immediately available. Our problem-solving minds want to know what will happen next, want to control outcomes, want to ensure that our waiting will produce specific results. But sacred waiting asks us to trust divine timing rather than human urgency, to believe that sometimes the most faithful response is to remain present without needing to fix anything.

The Formidable Waiting Game

The obstacles to this kind of waiting are formidable. Beyond the cultural pressure for constant productivity, there’s our own deep discomfort with silence and stillness. In the quiet, things emerge that we’ve been too busy to notice. Unresolved grief, unacknowledged longing, uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our relationships. The noise of our daily lives often serves as protection from these deeper realities.

There’s also what is almost an addiction to urgency—the belief that everything important must be addressed immediately, that waiting is somehow irresponsible or lazy. We’ve trained ourselves to respond instantly to every notification, every request, every internal prompting. Learning to wait, to be still, to resist the impulse to react can feel like learning a foreign language.

But in the practice of sacred waiting, we discover something surprising: that our souls are not empty spaces that need to be filled with activity and achievement, but already complete presences that need only to be recognized and received. The peace we seek is not something we must create but something we must allow, not something we earn but something we inherit by virtue of being created in God’s image.

This is not to say that waiting in sacred space is always peaceful or pleasant. Sometimes what we encounter in the silence is our own resistance, our boredom, our restlessness. Sometimes we meet parts of ourselves we’d rather avoid. But even these encounters are sacred, opportunities to practice the kind of unconditional presence that God offers to us—acceptance without judgment, attention without agenda.

The practice I’ve learned to treasure is simple: spending minutes each morning, sitting quietly sipping my morning tea without trying to accomplish anything spiritual or meaningful. Not prayer in the traditional sense, not meditation with specific techniques, just availability. Available to whatever God might want to offer, available to whatever my soul needs to communicate, available to the mystery of simply being alive in this moment.

Sometimes these ten minutes feel empty, unproductive, and pointless. I still savor them. Other times they overflow with insights, peace, or unexpected clarity about some challenge I’m facing. But the fruit of the practice is not in what happens during the waiting but in how it changes the quality of presence I bring to the rest of my life.

When we learn to wait in sacred space, we begin to recognize that all of life offers opportunities for this kind of presence. Waiting in line becomes a chance to practice patience. Sitting with someone who is grieving becomes an opportunity to offer the gift of non-anxious presence. Times of uncertainty or confusion become invitations to trust the process rather than force solutions.

The most profound discovery is that waiting in sacred space is not primarily about us receiving something from God; though that certainly happens; but about us learning to be the kind of people who can receive, who can be present, who can trust. It’s about cultivating the interior spaciousness that allows us to respond to life from a place of centeredness rather than reactivity.

This practice does not make us passive or disengaged from the world’s needs. Instead, it grounds our action in something deeper than anxiety or the need to prove ourselves. When we know how to wait in sacred space, our doing flows from being, our service emerges from love rather than obligation, our responses arise from wisdom rather than impulse. In a world that often feels chaotic and demanding, the discipline of sacred waiting offers an alternative way of being. It whispers the ancient truth that we are human beings, not human doings, and that our deepest identity rests not in what we accomplish but in whose we are. In the sacred space of waiting, we remember that we are beloved before we are useful, cherished before we are productive, held before we achieve.

Posted on July 25, 2025July 24, 2025 by Michael J. Cunningham · 3 Comments

The Yellow Light

This morning, washing hands at the sink, soap bubbles catch the light and turn into tiny rainbows. For just a moment, my hands slowed in the warm water. Not because I needed to stop and have a “home-made” spiritual experience, but because something lovely was happening right there in my kitchen sink.

It reminded me of traffic lights—specifically that yellow light that begs us from motion into stillness. Not the jarring red that demands we stop, but that gentle amber invitation: something’s shifting here.

I’ve sometimes notice these yellow light moments scattered throughout my days like breadcrumbs. They’re not asking for dramatic responses or profound revelations. They’re simply there, quiet invitations to notice what’s already present.

Sometimes it’s the particular way morning light falls across the lobby at the retreat house, turning ordinary wood golden. My mind pauses mid-sentence, not because I must stop and appreciate beauty, but because beauty has already stopped me. The moment passes, I return to whatever I was supposed to be doing, but something has shifted—a small opening where grace slipped in.

Or it’s the sound of rain beginning while writing an email. That first gentle pattering doesn’t demand I abandon my work for contemplation. It simply offers itself, and if I happen to notice, the soundtrack of an afternoon changes from mental chatter to nature’s rhythm.

These moments seem to arrive most naturally at transitions. Walking from the house to the car, I may notice how the air feels different today. Shifting from one task to another, there’s often a brief pause where I remember I’m not just a person checking boxes but someone alive in this moment. Even breathing has these built-in yellow lights—that slight pause between inhale and exhale, where everything briefly suspends.

Last week, talking with my daughter, she said something that made her voice catch slightly. Such a small thing—anyone might miss it. But there it was, a yellow light moment. I found myself listening differently, not interrogating or fixing, just receiving what she was really saying beneath the words. The conversation meandered into places it wouldn’t have gone if I’d stayed in my usual efficient parent mode. She was happy to be talking with me, the words might be somewhat irrelevant.

I don’t think life is constantly signaling us to pay attention—that would be exhausting. But there do seem to be these natural pause points woven through our days, gentle as that amber light that says transition is happening, no rush.

The poet Rumi wrote about selling cleverness and buying bewilderment. Maybe these yellow lights are life’s way of offering that trade. For just a moment, we can let go of knowing exactly where we’re going and simply be present to where we are.

This isn’t about trying to notice everything or turn daily life into a spiritual practice. It’s more like discovering that ordinary moments have their own quiet wisdom if we happen to be available when they offer it. The way tea changes color as it steeps. How shadows move across the wall as the afternoon progresses. The peculiar and beautiful silence that overcomes when snowfall begins.

Some days, I’m moving too fast to notice any yellow lights at all. Other days, one small moment of recognition—a dog stretching in a patch of sun, the smell of coffee brewing, the feeling of soft socks on tired feet—creates a tiny opening. Not a door demanding I walk through, just a window showing me what’s here.

Awakening isn’t something we achieve through effort. It could be more like slowly recognizing what’s been glowing softly all along. The sacred is scattered throughout our hours, not as a test or a challenge, but as a quiet gift for anyone who happens to be looking when life gently signals: here’s something worth noticing, if you’d like.

Tomorrow morning, you might catch one of these moments. Or you might not. Either way, they’ll keep coming, gentle as light itself, marking the transitions between rushing and resting, doing and being, sleeping and waking up to what’s been here all along.

The yellow lights aren’t trying to stop us or make us more spiritual. They’re simply part of the landscape, faithful as breathing, available as morning. And sometimes, when we’re moving at just the right speed, we notice them. And something in us says oh, yes and slows down just enough to receive what’s being offered.

That’s all. That’s enough. That’s everything.

Posted on July 11, 2025July 11, 2025 by Michael J. Cunningham

Emergency Pause: Three Breaths Before Responding to Triggers

Emergency Pause: Three Breaths Before Responding to Triggers

There’s a moment—you know the one—when someone says, with precision, the thing that sets you off. Maybe it’s that specific tone your spouse uses, or the way a colleague dismisses your idea, or how your teenager rolls their eyes when you ask about homework. In that moment, something primal awakens within us, and we’re ready to react with the full force of our accumulated frustrations.

But what if, in that precise moment, we could find what the mystics have always known exists: a sacred space between stimulus and response?

John Cassian, that 3rd-century desert father, who I often refer, discovered something profound in his retreat from the distractions of city life. Even in the supposed peace of the desert, he found himself bombarded by what he called “a river full of thoughts”—not unlike the 60,000 thoughts modern psychology tells us we experience daily. His insight was revolutionary: thoughts become desires, desires become passions, and passions inevitably become actions.

The emergency pause is our invitation to interrupt this ancient pattern. And in particular, the one which happens at lightning speed.

The Sacred Space of Three Breaths

I learned this practice not from a book but from necessity. Years ago, during a particularly heated discussion at a planning meeting, I felt a familiar surge of defensiveness rising. Someone had criticized an approach I’d suggested, and my Irish heritage was preparing to respond with full on Celtic intensity. But something—call it grace, call it wisdom born of too many regrettable responses—made me pause—made me wait.

I took a breath. Then another. Then a third.

In those few seconds, something shifted. The heat didn’t disappear, but it transformed. Instead of reacting from that place of wounded ego, I found myself responding from what felt like a deeper well—one that held both my legitimate concerns and genuine care for the person who had challenged me. The conversation that followed changed everything. Not because I became passive, but because I became present.

Why Three Breaths?

There’s something almost sacramental about the number three in our tradition. Trinity. Three days in the tomb. Peter’s three denials and three affirmations of love. But practically speaking, three breaths give us just enough time for our nervous system to shift from fight-or-flight mode into what neuroscientists call the “rest and digest” state—the place where wisdom has room to breathe, and maybe emerge.

The first breath creates space. Like the moment of silence after the church bells stop ringing, it opens a gap in our reactivity.

The second breath invites presence. Here we remember that this moment, even this difficult moment, is where God meets us.

The third breath calls forth choice. We remember that we are not victims of our emotions but stewards of our responses.

The Art of Sacred Noticing in Conflict

This practice isn’t about becoming spiritually superior or emotionally detached. It’s about what I call “sacred noticing”—paying attention to what’s actually happening both within us and around us before we decide how to respond.

Notice the tension in your shoulders. Notice the story your mind is telling about the other person’s intentions. Notice the difference between the facts of what happened and the interpretation you’ve layered on top. Notice, too, that even in this moment of conflict, you are still held by a love larger than your immediate frustration.

As I wrote in my reflection on “The Mothering Instinct,” we all need someone to “mother” us—to hold us with unconditional love even when we’re at our worst. The emergency pause connects us to that divine mothering presence that never withdraws, even when we’re triggered.

Making Friends with Your Triggers

Here’s what I’ve learned after decades of trying to be less reactive: our triggers are often pointing toward something that needs our attention. They could even be our friends. The colleague who dismisses our ideas might be reflecting our own fear of not being heard. The family member who always seems to push our buttons might be showing us where we haven’t yet made peace with parts of ourselves.

This doesn’t mean we become doormats or stop setting healthy boundaries. It means we respond from a place of centered strength rather than scattered reactivity. Like the trees in “Tall Stories About Trees,” we learn to bend without breaking, to stay rooted while moving with the wind.

A Practice for the Week

This week, I invite you to experiment with the emergency pause. When you feel that familiar surge of reactivity—whether it’s frustration, defensiveness, anger, or hurt—try this:

Breath One: Create space. Literally step back if possible, even just an inch. Let your shoulders drop.

Breath Two: Get present. Feel your feet on the ground. Remember you are held by grace in this moment.

Breath Three: Choose response over reaction. Ask yourself: “What would love do here? What would serve the highest good of all involved?”

Then respond—not from your first impulse, but from the deeper wisdom that emerges when we stop moving so fast through our days.

The Ripple Effect of Pause

The beautiful thing about this practice is how it spreads. When we respond rather than react, we invite others into that same spacious place. We become what the mystics called “instruments of peace”—not by avoiding conflict, but by meeting it with presence.

Your teenager might still roll their eyes, but they’ll also sense something different in your response. Your colleague might still disagree, but they’ll feel heard rather than attacked. Your spouse might still use that tone, but they’ll encounter your grounded strength rather than your triggered defensiveness.

As I often remind retreatants, we cannot control what happens to us, but we can choose what happens through us. The emergency pause is our doorway to that freedom—the space between what life hands us and how we choose to receive it.

In that space, we discover we are more than our reactions. We remember we are beloved souls learning to love in a world that doesn’t always make it easy. And in that remembering, both we and those around us find a little more room to breathe.

The way opens as you walk it—one breath at a time.

Posted on June 27, 2025 by Michael J. Cunningham · 2 Comments

The Colors of Sacred Noticing or My Life in a Logo

The Colors of Sacred Noticing

A Spiritual Break Reflection by Michael Cunningham, OFS

There’s something about creating a logo that forces you to stare at yourself in ways you hadn’t expected. When the designer sent me the final version—those flowing colors forming a subtle cross, my name spelled out beneath “Noticing the Sacred”—I found myself doing exactly what I’ve been teaching others to do for years: I began to notice.

The blues caught my attention first. They flow from deep navy at the top into lighter azure, like dawn breaking over the hills in the East Bay. I’ve always been drawn to that liminal time when night surrenders to day, when the world holds its breath before wake-up time. Perhaps it’s my Celtic roots, or maybe it’s simply that I’ve learned to trust the wisdom that comes in quiet moments. But there’s something about that particular blue that speaks of mystery, of depths ready to be fathomed.

The greens emerge next in the design—forest greens that remind me of the ancient oaks on our retreat grounds, the ones that have been practicing sacred noticing far longer than I have. These trees know something about staying rooted while pointing skyward, about finding the sacred in the rhythm of our seasons. They seem ready to be present to whatever each day brings.

Then come the earth tones—those warm browns and golds that speak of my journey from the green hills of Wales to my new home, the sun-soaked California landscape. I think about all the places where sacred noticing has found me, or perhaps where I’ve finally slowed down enough to find it. The muddy banks of the River Avon where I spent countless hours as a boy fishing, learning patience before I knew that’s what the word meant. The stone floors of ancient churches, where centuries of prayers had worn smooth pathways for seeking souls. The redwood forests where silence teaches you that some things are just too wonderful for explanation.

And scattered throughout this small logo, are these small elements that seem to be in motion—flowing, dispersing, awakening. I stare at them and see all the moments when sacred noticing has surprised me. This is what I mean by “life awakened”—not some dramatic spiritual transformation, but this gradual recognition that we’ve been swimming in sacred waters all along. We just needed to notice.

I recall the moment when this phrase first came to mind. I was sitting in my office here at San Damiano, struggling to find the words for what happens when people really begin to practice sacred noticing. It’s not that their lives become perfect or that suffering disappears. It’s more subtle than that, but no less profound. For myself, it was as if I had been living in a house for years without realizing there were windows, and suddenly someone showed me how to open the curtains.

Life awakened. Not life improved, or life fixed, or life perfected. Life awakened. Life seen with eyes that have learned to notice what was always there.

The cross formation in the logo wasn’t intentional, the designer inferred it from the brief of our work here, but there it is—subtle, organic, formed by the natural flow of the colors themselves. I found this very moving. Much of my spiritual journey has been about discovering that the sacred doesn’t impose itself on our lives like an external force demanding attention. Instead, it emerges from within the very fabric of our ordinary existence, waiting to be noticed.

This is what I’ve learned through years of retreats and writing reflections: the spiritual path isn’t somewhere we go; it’s where we are every day. The sacred isn’t something we add to our lives; it’s what our lives are made of.

I think about my journey from those early days in Wales and England, through decades in business when I thought spirituality was something you did on Sundays, to my doctoral studies where I tried to understand God with my mind, to today when I have given up trying to understand and just be. Noticing the sacred is the way I am now grounded.

The Celtic tradition of my childhood taught me that creation itself is God’s first book, written in a language older than words. The Franciscan path I’ve adopted as an adult has shown me that this divine manuscript is especially clear when we approach it with the humility of St. Francis, who saw Christ in lepers and heard sermons in the song of birds.

But it’s been the daily practice of sacred noticing—this conscious choice to pay attention to the present moment as sacred ground—that has slowly awakened me to what was always true: we are already living in the presence of the holy. We always have been. We just needed to learn how to see.

When I look at this logo now, I see my own journey reflected in those flowing colors. The deep blues of mystery and contemplation, the greens of growth and rootedness, the earth tones of human experience in all its messiness and beauty, and those scattered points of light that represent every moment when the ordinary has revealed itself as extraordinary. This is what noticing the sacred offers: not escape from our daily lives, but awakening within them. Not a spiritual practice we add to our schedules, but a way of seeing that transforms everything we already do. Not life improved, but life awakened.

I’ve come to believe that this potential for awakening is less about achieving some elevated spiritual state and more about returning to the wonder we knew as children, when everything was worthy of attention and nothing was taken for granted. Sacred noticing is the practice of growing up without growing numb, of becoming wise without losing our capacity for surprise. Without learning all the things we are not supposed to know about and instead being excited and discovering that the ordinary is not at all ordinary.

This is life awakened. This simple little logo on the screen represents a great deal to me. The logo sits on my computer screen, and I smile. It captures something true about the journey we’re all on—a gradual awakening to the sacred presence that flows through everything, connecting all things and making every moment an opportunity for an encounter with the divine.

May you find your own colors in this flowing spectrum of sacred noticing. May your ordinary days become doorways to wonder. May your life, however it looks right now, awaken to its own deep holiness.

Blessings on the path, Michael

Posted on June 13, 2025 by Michael J. Cunningham · 1 Comment

Detachment

A Greater Love: A Reflection on Detachment

The old man sits alone in the coffee shop, weathered hands wrapped around a mug whose contents have long since gone cold. For months, since his wife died, he has been trying to pray; trying to feel close to God; striving to manufacture some sense of the divine presence that might fill the hollowness inside him.

But this morning, something shifts. He stops trying.

What the barista doesn’t know—how could she?—is that in this moment of surrender, even if driven in desperation, the man becomes what he was always meant to be: not someone grasping after God, but someone whom God moves through. Desperate clutching falls away. The desire to control his spiritual experience, to measure his progress, to feel something—all of it; simply dissolves.

Meister Eckhart, the medieval mystic, knew this secret: that our very desire for closeness to God, when we try to manage it, becomes a barrier. Love cannot be captured, measured, or held like water in our fists. Love is God’s grace communicated, flowing freely as we breathe through our lungs, as blood travels through arteries. The moment we try to grasp it, to direct it, to prove we possess it, we interrupt the very current we long to experience.

The man’s hands rest open on the table. In this profound detachment, something Eckhart called “breakthrough” is happening—a movement toward what he named the Grund, the ground. It is not a place to be reached but the fundamental ground of being that was always already there, waiting to be uncovered beneath layers of grasping, trying, and spiritual ambition.

Here, in this deepest of places, the man discovers what the mystic knew: there is a ground, a place, where God and soul meet, a place where all distinctions dissolve. He is no longer praying to God but discovering that God prays in him, breathes in him, beats in the very heart of his being. In this detachment—this deliberate separation from his own spiritual desires—he becomes the clear instrument he was designed to be, but more than that; he touches the place where he and God are one.

And then something remarkable happens. The barista, approaching his table, feels inexplicably lighter in spirit. The man says nothing, yet in his stillness, in his transparency, she encounters something she has no words for. Divine love is transmitting itself through his very presence—not love that he has generated or earned, but love that simply is, flowing from that deepest ground where God dwells. He has found his way to what Meister Eckhart called the little castle in the soul, the place that was never lost, only hidden beneath the noise of wanting and seeking.

This is what the mystics discovered: there is a ground beneath all grounds, a place deeper than desire, deeper than grief, deeper even than love as we understand it. In this Grund, between each heartbeat lives the very pulse of God. When we stop interrupting this sacred circulation with our grasping, our trying, our need to control the flow, others begin to feel and see not us, but the divine ground that sustains all being, beating within us, and through us; and as us.

The barista wipes down tables with unusual tenderness today. A customer who has been rude to her for weeks suddenly offers an apology. The elderly man leaves quietly, and his absence is somehow as grace-filled as his presence was—because the love that moved through him continues moving, rippling outward through every person he touched with his transparent being.

Later, alone in his apartment, the man sits in a silence that has become sacred not because he has achieved something, but because he has stopped trying to achieve anything at all. He has moved through detachment into what Eckhart felt or knew was always already there—the Grund, the ground where God and soul are one. Prayer has become his breath, his heartbeat, his very existence, not as practice but as recognition of what was never absent.

In letting go of his desire for spiritual experience, he has discovered that he is spiritual experience itself—not as an accomplishment, but as his fundamental nature. He has learned what Eckhart taught: that in the deepest ground of being, there is no separation between the lover and Beloved, between the one who seeks and the One who is always already found. We are designed to be a clear window through which this ground shines forth, not stained glass that colors the light with our own efforts.

The divine love that flows from this place needs no one to direct it, no one to prove it exists. It flows as naturally as rivers flow toward the sea, and in that freedom, both the one who has ceased grasping and all who encounter him discover they are being held by the very ground of existence itself—the love that is not an emotion or achievement, but the fundamental reality from which all life springs.