Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 5 Comments

The Watershed Moment or the Case of the Missing Dialog

Two people standing on a beach at sunset, reflecting on the wet sand, with palm trees and beachside buildings in the background.

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

Posted on 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.

Reflection and Photograph Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham OFS

Posted on 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 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.


Copyright Image and Reflection Michael J. Cunningham 2025

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 4 Comments

Beyond Boundaries: The Franciscan Heart as Bridge

Beyond Boundaries: The Franciscan Heart as Bridge

There’s a question that surfaces often in our rapidly changing spiritual landscape: “How do we connect across the growing chasm between traditional faith and the increasing percentage of our neighbors who’ve stepped away from institutional religion?”

I’ve discovered that the answer isn’t found in arguments or apologetics. It’s found in something far simpler and more profound: the recognition that we’re all walking the same path, just using different maps.

Consider this … You woke up this morning carrying something—perhaps worry about a loved one, stress from work pressures, or the weight of a world that feels increasingly divided. You breathed. You hoped. You reached out, in whatever way you could, toward something larger than yourself. Whether you call that reaching “prayer,” “intention,” or simply “getting through the day,” the movement is the same. The longing is identical.

This is where the Franciscan heart becomes a bridge.

When Francis embraced the leper outside Assisi, he wasn’t checking the man’s religious credentials. He was responding to suffering with love. When Clare opened her doors to women seeking meaning beyond the confines of medieval marriage, she wasn’t conducting theological interviews. She was creating a space for authentic spiritual seeking.

At our beloved San Damiano Retreat in Northern California, this ancient Franciscan wisdom intersects with our current contemporary world. Our mission statement reads simply: “to provide a hospitable place of spiritual renewal for people of all faiths.” And our retreat offerings Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction to programs on building resilient relationships—demonstrate what this looks like in practice.

Someone recently stopped by my office at the retreat and reflected on the following. “What strikes me most about the San Damiano approach is this gentle clarification: “We are Franciscan Catholics and our retreat themes reflect our faith tradition. The retreats are open to all people of good will, regardless of religious affiliation.” There’s no disguising, no bait-and-switch. Just honest hospitality that says, “This is who they are, and there’s room for you here too.”

Think about what this means. A stressed-out executive, perhaps someone who hasn’t set foot in a church for years, can attend an eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program and begin to discover that same present-moment awareness that the mystics have cultivated for centuries. A couple struggling in their marriage can find tools for deeper connection through a weekend retreat that honors psychological wisdom and spiritual tradition. Someone carrying grief can find healing in community without having to first sort out their beliefs about afterlife or theology.

The beautiful truth is that Franciscan values—radical love, care for creation, attention to the marginalized, and embrace of simplicity—aren’t just religious positions. They’re human necessities. When we offer programs focused on these universal needs, we’re not watering down our tradition. We’re distilling it to its essence.

Consider the many Contemplative Walks offered at San Damiano. Visitors practice “recognizing the sacred light of Christ in all things” while walking slowly through gardens on ancestral territory. Here, Christian mysticism, indigenous wisdom, and ecological awareness converge. Participants don’t need to believe in Christ to experience the sacred light that permeates creation. They simply need to slow down enough to notice it.

This is evangelization in its truest sense—not persuasion but invitation, not conversion to doctrine but introduction to a way of seeing. The person seeking stress relief discovers the path to contemplative prayer. The couple learning communication skills encounters the mystery of love that transcends human understanding. The grieving parent finds themselves held by a community that knows something about resurrection, even if they’ve never articulated it that way.

As I enter my third year at San Damiano, I am still deeply moved by the Franciscan commitment to financial accessibility: “We are committed to providing access regardless of financial circumstances.” This isn’t just good social policy—it’s profoundly Franciscan. It says that spiritual nourishment isn’t a luxury good for those who can afford it but a basic human need that requires no credentials, financial or theological.

In our polarized time, this kind of radical hospitality becomes prophetic. While others build walls between sacred and secular, traditional and progressive, believer and seeker, the Franciscan charism creates doorways. It says: Your questions are welcome here. Your doubt is not a disqualification. Your different path doesn’t make you a stranger.

What if we stopped asking, “How can we get them to believe what we believe?” and started asking, “How can we serve what you are already seeking?” What if we recognized that the person struggling with addiction, the executive burned out from corporate culture, the parent overwhelmed by modern life’s demands, are all engaged in spiritual work, whether they name it that way or not?

Programs like “Your Story, Your Legacy” honor the deep human need to make meaning of our lives and leave something worthwhile behind. This isn’t Christian work or secular work—it’s soul work. It’s the work of becoming fully human.

The thirty-five percent who’ve stepped away from traditional religious institutions haven’t stopped being spiritual. They’ve stopped believing that institutional religion holds the only keys to transcendence. The Franciscan response isn’t to argue with this conclusion, but to demonstrate through our actions that institutions can be containers for the sacred rather than gatekeepers of it.

When we create spaces where people can encounter truth without having to sign doctrinal statements, experience love without religious prerequisites, practice compassion without theological explanations, we’re not abandoning our tradition. We’re embodying its deepest wisdom.

The path you’re walking—whether you call it Christian discipleship or mindful living or simply trying to be a good human—passes through the same territories: suffering and healing, loneliness and connection, fear and love, despair and hope. The Franciscan heart recognizes these territories as sacred geography, regardless of the spiritual vocabulary we use to navigate them.

This is what true hospitality looks like: not the tolerance that says “I’ll put up with your differences,” but the recognition that says “your seeking and my seeking spring from the same source.”

In the end, what binds us together isn’t shared doctrine but shared humanity. What calls us forward isn’t the same creed but the same longing for meaning, connection, and love.

The bridge we’re building isn’t between us and them. It’s between the false divisions we’ve created and the unity that was always already there, waiting for us to notice it.

What would happen if we simply started there?


Copyright 2025 Image and Reflection Michael J. Cunningham OFS