What are we all looking for? If we start by being honest with ourselves—unless we’re completely consumed by our own ego—most everyone would accept the same definition. It would all come down to three words: unshakable inner peace.
That unshakable inner peace comes from God, of course. But how we get there, how we find it, varies considerably according to our beliefs, lifestyles, and attitudes.
So let me dial back just a little bit. What does it mean for us to be at peace? For the purposes of today, let’s say that being at peace means not being in turmoil. It’s being OK with things—not necessarily in a state of bliss, but managing well. You’re on the plus side of whatever heavy things you’re carrying. You’re not discontent with the world overall.
But are we all there? Not everyone is. Most of us aren’t. So where would you put yourself in this category? Where would you like to be?
Often, we look for downtime—prayer time, relaxation, meditation, all of the above—to try and dial down from whatever might be a heightened state. I’m not necessarily talking about being anxious, but you know that feeling when you’ve just had enough with something. Your day at work, whatever. And so we’re looking for lots of different ways to try and relax.
Relaxing is one way into this process. Relaxing with deliberation, using some of those tools I mentioned. A lot of what we end up doing, of course, is separating our normal, perhaps stressful life from our prayer life or our relaxed life. We are more aggravated under one set of circumstances than another.
In the ideal world, of course, whatever we’re doing during our normal life—whether we’re at school or working or retired—we don’t want to be in turmoil, annoyed, angry, or discontent. So how do we get some of this peace to spill over into those situations?
Perhaps some of those situations are unavoidable, but we can have better ways of dealing with them. When we’re faced with the things that aggravate us, we can engage—hopefully through dialogue—and resolve whatever it is. This usually involves more than one person, although sometimes that internal dialogue with ourselves can be just as challenging as when it involves someone else.
Once we have that resolution, we do get that very smooth “aha moment” of inner peace. Forgiveness has occurred. Reconciliation has happened. It’s palpable, and it isn’t just for our soul—physically, we can feel it as well.
There are literally thousands of books in the world, since the beginning of time, trying to give us ways to cope more with the everyday, with whatever lot in life we’ve been given and whatever we make of it. Leaning into the contemplative, into the place where peace can happen in our everyday lives—this is the goal.
As a retreat director, this is one of the main reasons that people come on retreat. They want to go quiet for a while. They want to renew and refresh, reconnect with their inner self and with the supreme being, God. And even those that don’t necessarily believe in a supreme being still want to meditate, quiet down, relax, and look for the same peace that all those following religious paths are seeking.
But what about the separation of our prayer life or our peace-seeking life from our regular life? This is one of the things that causes them to be separated—the fact that we think about them differently. “This is my prayer time. This is my break time. This is my weekend. This is my vacation.”
We want to have the pleasure of being OK with the world in our everyday life. Part of that is not trying to separate it. We can’t have one face to deal with the rest of the world and another face when we want to have conversations with God. It doesn’t make any sense, and it doesn’t work.
Brother Lawrence, an 17th-century French monk, wrote about “the practice of the presence of God”—where every moment of every day, even in the most mundane and boring of tasks, becomes a celebration of the presence of God.
I’m not suggesting that we’re going to be able to dial in the spiritual characteristics of Brother Lawrence as we’re driving down the freeway getting cut off. But we can do what he invited us to do: be aware of the presence of God all the time, not just when we have time to pray.
This was the revelation that the monks in his monastery had. When they were praying at set times, they realized Brother Lawrence was always praying—because he was always aware of the presence of God in all things. In the dirty dishes and laundry he was moving around the monastery. In the cleaning of pots and pans.
Perhaps this awareness would help us bring some of this peace into our own daily lives. What do you think?
Reflection and image Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham OFS
In my own spiritual journey, I have discovered that the moments of deepest connection with God often come not when I am trying to figure something out but when I allow myself to not know, to rest in mystery, to trust that there are forms of communication happening beneath the level of my conscious understanding. Prayer, at its most profound, becomes less like problem-solving and more like the way a child might approach a beloved grandparent—with complete trust, open affection, and no agenda other than to be present.
This is where the practice of Sacred Noticing becomes essential. When we begin to pay attention to the spiritual dimension of our everyday experiences—when we notice the way morning light transforms an ordinary room into something luminous, when we feel the mysterious peace that sometimes emerges from silence, when we recognize the sacred in a stranger’s smile; we are recovering our childlike capacity to see with the eyes of the heart.
Sacred Noticing is not about forcing spiritual meaning onto ordinary events but about recovering our natural ability to recognize the spiritual that is already present in all that surrounds us. Children do this instinctively. They see faces in clouds, personalities in stuffed animals, magic in puddles after rain. They have not yet learned to dismiss these perceptions as “just imagination.”
But what if imagination is a form of spiritual perception? What if the ability to see meaning, beauty, and connection where others see only material reality is not childish but deeply wise? What if we have educated ourselves out of precisely the kind of awareness that our souls most need?
The path back to the open eyes of the heart does not require abandoning intellectual rigor or scientific thinking. Rather, it asks us to expand our definition of knowledge to include other forms of truth. We can appreciate both the biochemistry of love and its mystery, both the neuroscience of consciousness and the reality of the soul, both the physics of light and its capacity to serve as a metaphor for divine illumination.
This integration requires what I think of as “both/and” thinking rather than “either/or” thinking. We can be both intellectually sophisticated and spiritually receptive, both scientifically literate and mystically aware, both educated and wonder-filled. The child within us is not the part that needs to be outgrown but the part that needs to be reclaimed and integrated with our adult wisdom.
The practice begins simply: looking at the world around us with fresh eyes, allowing ourselves to be moved by beauty without needing to analyze it, trusting our interior responses to people and situations even when we cannot explain them logically. It means permitting ourselves to be amazed by ordinary miracles—the fact that we can love and be loved, that consciousness exists at all, that meaning emerges from mystery.
When we recover this childlike capacity for wonder, we do not become less intelligent; we become more fully human. We reconnect with the part of ourselves that can receive love without earning it, that can rest in mystery without solving it, that can trust the goodness of existence even when we cannot prove it scientifically.
The divine resides deeply within us all, but it often communicates through channels that our overly educated minds have learned to dismiss. The child within us knows this intuitively. That child is still there, waiting patiently for us to remember how to see with eyes of wonder, how to trust what cannot be proven, how to remain open to the mysteries that our hearts recognize even when our minds cannot comprehend them.
Perhaps today we might risk looking at our world through the open eyes of the heart of a child. We might notice the way light falls across our kitchen table and allow ourselves to see it as a gift rather than merely photons behaving according to physical laws. We might feel the love of someone close to us and trust that this love is as real as anything that can be measured, as true as any scientific fact.
In recovering our childlike capacity for wonder, we do not become naive; we become wise in a different way. We learn to live in both worlds—the world of measurement and the world of mystery, the realm of proof and the realm of trust. And in that integration, we find ourselves home again in the place we never really left but had simply forgotten how to see: the kingdom of heaven that exists wherever hearts remain open to the divine that dances through all things, waiting patiently for eyes willing to see and souls ready to receive.
Image and Reflection Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham OFS
A reflection on awakening to the spiritual path through crisis
During a briefing this morning, on the latest of tragically many political assassinations and assassination attempts, the governor of Utah asked the open question: “Are we at a watershed moment?”
The governor responded to himself, saying it could be “the start of improvement and leaving darker times, or it could be the beginning of going into even darker times.”
You could taste the empathy, the sadness, and the distress in his voice, and, to a certain extent, the leadership in his voice. He was clearly implying the need for civil discourse.
This need has never been greater, and it reminded me of when we were young parents—we had two kindergarteners/first graders. Our first and second children are only 11 months apart, so this puts them in the category of Irish twins. On the rare occasion that they caused trouble (humor intended), they would immediately blame the other for whatever had occurred, whether this was an argument about who started it or perhaps something that was broken that they “didn’t do.”
My wife and I had an interesting strategy. We would say, “OK, well, we can’t find out the truth here, so let’s have you find it out.” These issues often occurred before supper for some reason.
So we sent them both into the smallest bathroom in the house with instructions: “You guys go stay in the bathroom until you figure out what is really the truth and who’s to blame and try and reconcile with each other.” Of course, they didn’t know what “reconcile with each other” meant. “Work it out” or “be nice to each other”—I guess those were the words that we used.
So then they went to the bathroom, and we proceeded to listen to what probably would be a good skit in any television sitcom. It usually started with the arm-folding exercise of deadly silence, followed by the “It’s your fault!” “No, it’s your fault!” exchange, which got louder and louder. That also usually ended up with some silence, and then they would start to pick apart the facts of the matter—whatever they were, where someone was, why “I couldn’t have done it,” why “you did it”—sort of like an investigation with the prosecution and defense alternating roles. Some of the funniest conversations would occur here.
Eventually, they would come to the conclusion that “Well, it could have been one of the others—it could have been their younger brother that did it—but now they were going to get the blame for it, and we’re never going to get out of the bathroom.”
After a while we would stop listening outside the bathroom. The sessions didn’t really last that long, but they probably seemed like an eternity to the children—perhaps 10 minutes, perhaps 15; long enough to be able to calm down, realize that they’re in this together (even if it’s just being in the dock together), and figure out what they needed to do to get out.
Now, we’ll never know as parents how many of the stories that emerged out of those results were the truth, the admission of guilt, or whatever. But what it did was help them to reconcile with each other, and it also helped us avoid issuing immediate punishment, at least, not complete injustice, when you’re at the end of your rope as a parent.
I tell this story not because it’s a model for anything in particular as far as parenting goes. Modern psychologists would probably analyze this and explain why this is bad on so many different levels. But I don’t think the kids actually took it that seriously in the end, and some of them even use it with their children now, which they feel bad about. It might be one of those unfortunate hand-me-downs that sometimes happen in families.
Nevertheless, I can’t help but think about this situation that we are in right now in our country, where we have sort of got the opposite of all of this. What we’ve created are separate virtual and physical gymnasiums—giant ones—depending on which side of the argument you’re on, instead of having one assembly hall or gymnasium or gathering space at a high school where people can interact, discuss, and share what’s going on.
One group goes in there, and then they can shout without repercussions, without any pushback, to a global audience or a small audience—whatever they want to say about someone on the other side. And for the most part, the people in these two gymnasiums are not listening to each other. They’re just shouting at each other, but the ones that are doing the shouting are reinforcing the next person shouting. And guess what? Every time someone shouts, the louder you shout, the meaner you shout, the more someone else gets paid for it—maybe even yourself.
This is what has happened: we have lost the ability to dialogue. And I’m not sure that what happened in the bathroom all those years ago in our children’s childhood was what would be considered dialogue, but they were talking to each other. They were discussing something that was contentious to them, at least in their little worlds at that time. And it had a repercussion; a repercussion on how they turned out, how they learned to debate, how they learned to reconcile, how they learned to listen to others.
I’m on the brink of publishing a new book. It’s called Practice of Sacred Noticing, and sacred noticing is a simple mechanism for some of the things that we do when we really want to interact with other humans well. We notice them. We listen to what they’re saying. We absorb what they’re saying. We then wait to let that settles; like ripples in the pond. What does that mean? What should I do? How should I respond? All before we respond. And then the third step is just responding: So we Notice, pause, respond.
This is not rocket science, but it’s something that we need right now.
We also need a break. People are building their own lifeboats. They’re trying to find a way to insulate the ones they love from all that’s going on in the world. They don’t want to engage in a shouting match or, worse still, a shooting match, as it appears to be turning into.
We have to decide what the environment is that we want in our own homes, just as we do in our towns, just as we do in our states, just as we do in our country.
One option is to shut down the gymnasiums. The people collecting the money in the gymnasiums can only do so if we keep shouting. Not that everything that goes on in these two particular gymnasiums is shouting, but taking a break will help us—and it won’t help those who are trying to get rich from all the shouting.
The lifeboat
There she sits …
And what a beauty
Designed to survive any gale
Weather and stormy sea sealed
As if I were a whale
Taking care of all my Jonahs
Someone asked me today
“What’s it for?”
“In case of storms”
And they asked “are you going out to sea?”
And I could not answer
It’s ready, though
My lifeboat
Big enough to hold family
And no others
Because love one’s count
And if it comes …
The big storm that is
I am ready
And have done my duty
To protect myself and a few loved ones
And forget about the others
Who are near or far
Because a lifeboat is for me to live
And survive
For a little while
Reflection, poem and image Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham OFS
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.
Reflection and Photograph Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham OFS
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.
