Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

Why Can’t Every Day Be a Spiritual Day?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

The Other Way In

The Other Way In

I have enormous respect for Thomas Merton.

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

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

But I want to talk about a different door.

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

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

I understand this model. I believe in its depth.

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

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

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

Not the next retreat. The next conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The question is what kind.

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

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

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

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

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

That is the place. That is the practice.

You don’t have to find a monastery.

You are already standing in one.

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

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

 

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

No Permission Required

The Threshold You’re Already Standing On

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

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

And so, you have been waiting.

I understand this. I have done it myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You don’t have to go anywhere.

You just have to notice where you already are.

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

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

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 4 Comments

The Play We Have Already Written

A Spiritual Reflection on the Characters We Carry

Somewhere along the way, without quite deciding to, we became playwrights.

Not of fiction. Of the people we know.

We took the person — the partner, the colleague, the difficult brother, the aging parent, the friend who disappoints us in the same way every time — and we began to write them. Slowly, from accumulated evidence. Scene by scene, exchange by exchange, over months and years of shared life, until we had assembled something remarkably complete: a full character, with established traits, predictable responses, known weaknesses, recognizable lines.

We know what they will say before they say it. We know how they will react before they react. We know the shape of their resistance, the particular texture of their defensiveness, the way they will eventually come around or the way they definitively will not. We have, without ever using the word for it, become the expert on who they are.

And we carry that character with us into every encounter. Already written. Already cast. Already placed, in our minds, in the scene that is about to unfold.

Evagrius (fourth century theologian) would have recognized this. He mapped a version of it in his teaching on the logismoi — the thought-streams that arise within us and, if unobserved, construct a narrative so familiar that we mistake it for reality. The logismos of anger, for example, does not simply make us irritable. At its more developed stages it creates an entire interpretive framework — a lens through which the person before us is perpetually seen as threatening, inadequate, or in need of correction. We are no longer responding to what they are doing. We are responding to the character that anger, operating invisibly within us, has written for them.

The same is true of sadness, which writes characters that perpetually fail us. Of vainglory, which writes characters as audiences for our own performance. Of pride, which writes everyone as slightly less than ourselves. Each passion has its preferred cast, its recurring narrative, its predetermined ending toward which every scene is quietly being directed.

We do not experience this as bias. We experience it as knowledge.

This is who they are. I know them. I have seen this before. I know how this goes.

And we are often right enough about enough details that the illusion of accurate perception is very convincingly maintained. The character we have written is, after all, based on real observation. It is not fabricated from nothing. The difficulty is more subtle than simple error.

The difficulty is that the character has become fixed. The person before us continues to live and change and surprise — continues to carry, within them, the full unpredictable depth of a human soul that no amount of accumulated observation has yet fully disclosed. But the character we carry has stopped moving. It was written at some point, with the evidence available at that point, and it has remained largely unchanged since. Because changing it would require us to receive something new about this person, and receiving something new requires the willingness to be surprised, and the willingness to be surprised requires the one thing that long familiarity most powerfully resists.

The Pause. Here is what actually happens, in the ordinary exchanges of ordinary life, when the play we have written meets the person who is supposed to be performing it.

We arrive at the encounter already inside the script. Our position is prepared. Our likely response to their likely response is already assembled. We have, in the privacy of our own minds, conducted a version of this conversation before it has begun — and we have arrived, in that private rehearsal, at the conclusion we need. Now we simply require the other person to play their part so we can arrive there together.

They generally do not comply perfectly. People rarely do. There is usually some deviation from the expected lines — a moment of unexpected warmth from someone we had written as cold, a deflection where we anticipated engagement, a silence where we had scripted defensiveness. These deviations are the grace in the encounter. They are the place where the actual person momentarily exceeds the character we have assigned them.

But we rarely notice them as grace. More often we experience them as interference. An anomaly to be explained, or absorbed back into the existing framework, or noted as an exception that does not disturb the general characterization we have established.

Because the script, once written, is remarkably resistant to revision.

Evagrius called the unobserved operation of the passions a form of captivity — not dramatic captivity, not the captivity of obvious sin, but the quiet captivity of a person who has lost the ability to truly see because the thought-stream operating within them has become the lens through which everything is perceived. The logismos of anger does not announce itself as anger. It presents itself as accurate perception. I am not angry. I am simply seeing this person clearly.

This is the deepest form of the dynamic. We are not performing a script. We are perceiving reality. The character we have written is not a character to us — it is the person. And the narrative we have pre-determined is not a narrative — it is simply what is true.

Sacred Noticing addresses this not by telling us we are wrong about the people we think we know — which is both ineffective and often partially untrue — but by interrupting the sequence at its most critical point.

Between the first movement of recognition and the assembled response, there is a gap.

In that gap, if we allow it, something is possible that the script cannot accommodate.

Notice. Something is arising. A familiar pattern in this person, or so it seems. A movement within me that I recognize — the particular quality of readiness that means I already know what this is and what I think of it.

Notice that too. Notice not just what the other person is doing, but what is already assembling inside me in response. The character I am about to address is not only out there. It is also, and perhaps primarily, an interior construction. I am the playwright. And I am about to perform my own scripted role in the scene I have written.

Pause. Not to interrogate this. Not to analyze the origins of the characterization or work through whether it is fair. Simply to stop, for one moment, before the prepared response is delivered.

In that pause, nothing is required. The script is still there. The character is still there. The accumulated history that produced both is still entirely present. The pause does not erase any of it.

It simply creates, within the encounter, one moment of genuine openness. One moment in which the question is not how do I respond to who I know this person to be but something quieter and more honest: who is actually here?

That question — barely a question, more like a brief interior opening — is one of the most radical acts available to a human being in ordinary relational life. It does not require the dismantling of everything we know. It requires only the willingness, for one unrehearsed moment, to not know completely.

Respond. What comes from that open moment is not the scripted response. It is something less defended, less strategic, less aimed at the predetermined conclusion. It may still say something very similar to what the script would have said. But it will carry a different quality — the quality of something that has actually received the person before speaking to them.

That difference is not always visible from the outside. Sometimes it changes nothing practically. But it changes everything in the quality of the encounter itself — for the person who is finally, even briefly, being met rather than managed. And for the one who has finally, even briefly, set down the burden of already knowing.

The characters we carry are not malicious. They are the accumulated effort of a self trying to navigate a complex world with some degree of orientation and efficiency. They are, in their own way, a form of love — the love that pays enough attention to actually learn the shape of another person’s patterns and difficulties and gifts.

The problem is not that we know the people we love. The problem is when knowing hardens into certainty. When the living, changing, perpetually surprising person before us disappears into the fixed character we have constructed in their place. When the play we have written becomes more real to us than the person standing in front of us, waiting — whether they know it or not — to be received rather than performed at.

Evagrius spent his life in the desert learning to see his own interior movements before they became his perception of reality. He called this nepsis — the unhurried watchfulness that notices what is arising before it becomes the lens through which everything is seen.

Sacred Noticing takes that ancient practice and walks it directly into the encounter — into the moment when the character you have written for someone else is about to be confirmed once again, and the space between recognition and response opens, briefly, like a window.

In that space, you do not have to perform your part.

You do not have to deliver the line the script requires.

You can simply pause — and in pausing, receive the extraordinary ordinary gift of the actual person. Who is always, it turns out, more than you wrote them to be. More complex, more fragile, more capable of surprise. More themselves, and therefore more capable of genuine encounter, than the character ever was.

The play we have written is not the scripture of their life.

It is only, and at most, our first draft.

Grace, when we allow it, is always working on a revision.

 

 

 

© Michael J. Cunningham, OFS — spiritualbreak.com.

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 1 Comment

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