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After Easter …

An Easter Reflection on Living in Liminal Space

There is a day in the Christian calendar that nobody quite knows what to do with.

Not Good Friday, with its grief and its grandeur. Not Easter Sunday, with its flowers and its alleluias. I mean the day in between. Holy Saturday. The day the stone is sealed, the disciples are scattered, and the story appears — by every visible measure — to have ended badly.

Most of us skip it. We move from the cross straight to the resurrection, from the darkness straight to the light, and in doing so we miss the one day in the entire liturgical year that tells the truth about what most of our spiritual lives actually feel like most of the time.

We live in the liminal.

There is a word for the in-between space. Liminal — from the Latin limen, threshold. The doorway where you are neither inside nor outside. Not the old room and not the new one. The stretch of ground where what was has ended and what will be has not yet arrived.

We tend to visit the liminal zone occasionally and then try to leave. But the truth is that most of our interior life is conducted there. Not in the peaks of consolation or the depths of crisis, but in the long, undramatic stretches in between — the ordinary seasons that carry no particular name, that do not make for dramatic testimony, that simply continue.

You know this territory. It is when prayer has become routine, the words still said, but the warmth somehow gone out of them. The faith that persists but no longer surprises. The sense that God was closer once; in a retreat, a conversation, a moment at Mass that you have never quite been able to recreate … and that you have been quietly looking for the door back ever since.

It is Wednesday morning when nothing has broken, but nothing sings, either. The year when the person you were before a loss did not entirely return afterward. The stretch of life when you show up and do the right things and still feel, somewhere underneath, like you are waiting for something you cannot name.

This is not spiritual failure. This is spiritual life. The mystics did not write their great works in the high moments. They wrote them from exactly here.

The disciples on that first Holy Saturday did not know they were in a liminal space. They only knew they were in a disaster. What looked, from inside the room, like abandonment was — from outside — the longest breath before the dawn.

This is always the problem with liminal space. It does not announce itself as temporary. It presents itself as permanent. The sealed stone does not say three days — it simply says sealed. The locked room does not say until Pentecost — it simply says locked.

And so, we do what frightened people do in locked rooms. We try to manage the uncertainty. We fill the silence with noise, the emptiness with activity, the waiting with plans. We become very busy maintaining the house from the outside because we cannot bear what it feels like on the inside.

The contemplative tradition has a gentler name for what we are doing. It calls it the mirror. The mirror shows what we present — the managed version, the composed face, the spiritual persona that has learned to look well in the light. Most of us have been practicing this management for so long that we have forgotten we are doing it.

But God, as I have said before, does not use a mirror. God has always been the MRI.

An MRI does not see your presentation. It sees what is structuring everything from the inside — what has always been there, what arrived later, what healed and what still carries its fracture. You cannot manage your way past an MRI. You are already living inside it. And the liminal space, the in-between, the Holy Saturday of the spirit, has a way of dissolving the mirror altogether. Strip away the activity and the consolations and the sense of spiritual progress, and what remains is the actual ground.

The mystic Miester Eckert called it the Seelengrund — the ground of the soul. The place beneath all experience of God, beneath feeling and warmth and spiritual momentum, where God dwells not as a sensation but as a fact. A fact that does not fluctuate. A presence that does not require our performance in order to persist.

This is what the liminal is for. It is not punishment. It is not evidence that something has gone wrong with your faith. It is the condition in which we discover — slowly, often reluctantly — how deep the roots actually go. What remains when the feeling goes away. What we are made of when there is nothing left to manage.

We do not have what the first disciples had — the physical presence of Jesus, the sound of a specific voice answering a specific question. We live on the other side of the resurrection and the ascension. The physical form is gone.

But what we have is not a consolation prize. It is the fullness of what was promised.

We have creation — his first and still-speaking language. Every morning that arrives without our asking. Every face that carries, even unknowingly, the trace of the one in whose image it was made. We have Scripture — not a closed archive but a living word with the capacity to find us precisely in the places where we are most stuck. We have the spiritual footprint of a life fully inhabited, left in us and between us — every honest encounter between two human beings exchanges something of it. And we have love, which is not a feeling to be cultivated but a substance. The Great Commandment does not give us an emotion. It gives us a map for every day — bright and dark, liminal and luminous alike.

The burning bush was not special because it burned. It was special because Moses turned aside to look. That turning aside — that small act of noticing in the middle of an ordinary working day — is what keeps us present to God in the in-between. Not the dramatic encounter. The willingness to look at what is already there.

Holy Saturday earns its place in the calendar precisely because most of us cannot say honestly that we live in Good Friday or Easter Sunday. We live in the day between. We live with unanswered questions, with faith that persists but does not dazzle, with the ordinary texture of a life being lived in the presence of a God we cannot always feel.

The resurrection will not be the arrival of something that was absent.

It will be the revelation of what was always present.

The seed in the ground does not know it is becoming something. It simply stays with what is. It lets the dark do what the dark does. And what the disciples thought was an ending was, in the grammar of God, a gestation.

If you are in the in-between this Easter — if the alleluias feel a little far away, if the dry season has lasted longer than you thought it would — let me suggest that you are not outside the story.

You are in the most honest chapter of it.

Stay a little longer here. The ground holds. The seed is doing what seeds do. And God, who does not use a mirror, has never needed your performance to remain.

What is the liminal season you are in right now? What would it mean to stop managing it — and simply let the ground hold you?

 

Reflection and image copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham

 

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The First Life Skill: An Easter Reflection

The First Life Skill

An Easter Reflection

I was walking my dog Bella this morning when three runners came towards us on the path — a life coach and what looked like a young married couple working hard to keep up with him. I stepped aside to let them pass, and caught only a fragment of what the coach was saying, mid-sentence, to his clients:

“…meditation should be the first life skill you learn. It’s as important as reading or writing.”

The couple sounded like they needed to breathe more than anything else at that moment as they struggled to keep up with the coach. They were around the bend before I could hear more. But the fragment stayed with me for the rest of the walk, which is, of course, a form of meditation in itself.

Easter has something to say about this.

I kept turning that phrase over — the first life skill — because the coach wasn’t wrong. What changes when you learn to be genuinely present — before you react, before you perform, before you start managing the day — is not one area of your life. It is the whole thing.

But there was something about the morning itself that had been doing the teaching before the coach opened his mouth.

The light was already on the hills. My dog was doing what dogs do — completely in the moment, no argument with it. Three people running together on an ordinary Friday morning, already alive to something. And the whole scene had a quality I can only describe as already full.

That is what Easter keeps trying to say to me, and I keep needing to hear it differently.

The resurrection doesn’t introduce God to the world. It tears the veil on what was always here — patient in the ordinary, present in the morning light, carried in the fragment of a sentence caught on a path between one bend and the next.

Meister Eckhart called it the Seelengrund — the ground of the soul. The place beneath all the fluctuating — the good seasons of prayer and the dry stretches, the days when God feels close and the longer ones when God seems to have left the building entirely. Beneath all of it, something holds. Not as feeling. As fact.

I have spent enough time in the dry stretches to have tested this. And what I found — not dramatically, more like a slow recognition — is that the mystics were right about this one thing: you cannot turn God off. Not by your doubt. Not by your distraction. Not by the stone at the door.

The only real question — the one Easter puts back on the table every year — is whether I am present to what is already present to me.

What about you? Where have you stopped looking — quietly assuming there is nothing there?

That question, honestly held, is itself a practice.

It is, in fact, the beginning of what I’ve come to call Sacred Noticing — not a technique you apply to your life from the outside, but the moment you realize your life has been unfolding on sacred ground all along.

The morning dog walk. The three runners. The fragment overheard between one bend and the next. Any of these, met with a little waking, becomes the place where the divine is already present and already speaking.

The resurrection doesn’t introduce that.

It just keeps confirming it.

Whatever this Easter holds for you — the alleluias, the quiet uncertainty, or the honest in-between that many of us actually inhabit — the invitation is the same.

The divine is not elsewhere.

It is here. In this day. In this life. In the specific, irreplaceable way that Love has chosen to be present in you.

 

Notice that.

That is, perhaps, the first life skill.

“The desire for belonging is, at its ground, the soul’s memory of the Garden’s chemistry.”

 

Michael J. Cunningham OFS is a Franciscan secular, writer, and retreat director. This reflection is part of the SpiritualBreak.com contemplative series.

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The Sound Across the Water

A Reflection on Being Found

Most of us will never drown.

But most of us know the water.

We know what it feels like when the waves come bigger than expected — when what began as a manageable swim quietly becomes something else entirely. We know those strange mathematics of exhaustion, how energy disappears not all at once but in small, almost polite withdrawals, until one day we look up and realize the account is nearly empty. And we cannot remember the last time we felt solid ground beneath us.

It rarely announces itself as a crisis. That’s the thing nobody warns you about.

We imagine drowning would be dramatic — thrashing, panic, calling out. But I have been in the water long enough to know that the deeper kind of drowning is quieter than that. It feels, almost, like acceptance. It feels, at times, remarkably like peace. The head starts to bob. We call it equilibrium. We call it maturity. We call it, with great conviction, I’m fine, really.

We are not fine.

I have sat with enough people in these seasons — and have lived through more than a few of my own — to know that the quiet depletion is the one nobody talks about. The retreat leader who has led everyone else to stillness and forgotten where he left his own. The mother who pours herself out so completely that she cannot remember what she was full of to begin with. The executive who has mastered the language of resilience while quietly running on fumes. There is a kind of surrender that looks like wisdom but is really just depletion. We stop fighting not because we’ve found our center, but because we’ve run out of fight.

And yet.

Even here — especially here — something is moving across the water toward us.

This is what I keep learning, both from my own quiet drownings and from sitting alongside others in theirs: God is almost never where we expect the rescue to come from. The divine rarely shows up in the form we prepared for. We watch the horizon for a lifeboat with the right credentials, and the rescue arrives not as a boat at all, but as a sound. Faint at first. Familiar. Something we almost dismiss because it doesn’t look like saving.

A phone call from a friend who “just happened” to think of you that morning. A sentence in a book that lands like a hand extended in the dark. A moment of unexpected laughter right in the middle of grief — the kind that surprises you and then breaks something open. A stranger on the retreatants’ path who asks exactly the right question without knowing it. A memory that surfaces, unbidden, like a buoy.

The sound of a ship across the bay.

We hear it and we think: coincidence. We think: good timing. We think: lucky.

We rarely think: this is God’s doing.

And perhaps that’s precisely the point.

Sacred Noticing has taught me that divine presence in our lives operates mostly in the minor key — in the subtle, the understated, the easily overlooked. We want burning bushes. We get burning candles. We want the sea to part. We get a sound in the distance that pulls us back to ourselves just enough to keep going.

And that, I have found, is usually enough.

The rescue doesn’t require us to recognize it as rescue. The grace doesn’t demand that we name it correctly before it works. The ship crosses the water whether we know who sent it or not.

But here is the invitation: What if we learned to notice?

What if we practiced the contemplative art of looking back over our lives — over our near-drownings, our quiet depletions, our “I don’t know how I made it through that” seasons — and asked the honest question: What was moving toward me that I didn’t fully see?

You will find things there. I promise you will find things.

The friend who arrived at exactly the wrong moment that turned out to be exactly the right one. The door that closed so definitively it forced you toward the one that would actually open. The season of stillness that felt like failure — but was, in truth, the sea preparing to give you back to yourself.

God has, as the poem says, a heck of a sense of humor.

This is the quiet mystery at the heart of the contemplative life: we are rarely rescued the way we imagined, but we are rarely not rescued at all. The waves do not have the last word. They never have.

Something is always moving across the water. Something has always been moving across the water. The practice — the sacred, patient, lifelong practice — is learning to hear it before we go completely under.

Notice the sound.

It is closer than you think.

And it has been sent.

______________________________________________-

DROWNING

 

The waves are bigger now,

the coastline receding,

As the salty water soothes my eyes but smothers my breath.

 

It comes soon, I can feel it.

 

This time not with dread but with acceptance,

Legs tiring now, from hours or it’s minutes of movement.

 

No longer trashing,

Slowly doing what’s required to stay in place;

But with ever increasing  peace,

And less energy.

 

The head starts to bob under,

Slowly at first,

Then for longer,

As a call comes in,

“Come in number 10 your time is up”

 

God has a heck of a sense of humor!

 

Then just as the sea was ready to take its one big last swallow:

 

I heard a sound …

 

Faint at first but familiar,

The sound of a ship across the bay,

Waking my spirit,

As I bobbed one last time to see the commotion.

 

My rescuer was near,

And I lived another life thereafter.

 

 

Take a moment today to look back at one season when you felt you were running out of strength. What arrived? How did it arrive? Could you let yourself call it by its right name — even now?

 

 

 

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The Mirror and the MRI

The Mirror and the MRI

 

The mirror shows what you arrange to show.

The MRI shows what you did not know was there.

One instrument serves the self that performs.

The other serves the self that is.

 

 

The Mirror

Most of us have been trained, quietly and relentlessly, to become mirror-people.

A mirror, after all, is a practical thing. It tells us how we appear. It helps us calibrate the face we present before we walk out the door. It asks the same question every time: How do I look?

And so we learn to manage ourselves the way we manage our appearance. We adjust. We curate. We smooth out what is jagged, conceal what is uncertain, brighten what seems dull. We do this socially — Did that land well? Did they like me? We do it professionally — Did I seem capable? Did I hold the room? We do it spiritually — Did I seem at peace? Did I say the wise thing?

This is not dishonesty. It is survival. Many of us learned early that the safest way to exist in the world is to become very good at presentation.

The mirror has its uses. But something quietly dangerous happens when it becomes the primary instrument by which we understand ourselves. We begin to believe that the reflection is the truth. We begin to mistake how we appear for who we are.

And the soul — that deep interior place that tightens in certain conversations, that softens in genuine love, that knows before the mind can justify — the soul gets left on the other side of the glass. Observed. Never inhabited.

 

The MRI

An MRI does something entirely different.

It does not care how you’ve arranged yourself. It does not respond to the face you put on in the morning or the persona you’ve spent years carefully constructing. It passes through all of that. It looks at what is actually inside — the density of tissue, the flow of fluid, the presence or absence of things that should or should not be there.

You cannot perform for an MRI. You can only lie still.

And in the lying still, you are seen.

There is a kind of spiritual reckoning in this image. Because the deepest work of the interior life is not about improving our reflection. It is about submitting, humbly and without defense, to being seen all the way through.

This is what the contemplative tradition has always understood. The Desert Fathers called it the stripping of the false self. The mystics called it kenosis — the gentle, sacred emptying. Thomas Merton wrote of the true self hidden beneath all our performances, waiting quietly like a seed beneath winter ground. Celtic Christianity spoke of thin places — those moments when the membrane between what we show and what we are becomes transparent, and something eternal peers through.

The MRI asks not How do I look? But what is actually here?

And that question, honestly held, is the beginning of transformation.

 

The Locked Rooms

Here is an uncomfortable truth that the mirror will never show you:

The rooms you think are hidden are visible in the shape of your avoidance.

Every house has them — rooms you do not enter. Not because they are empty, but because they are too full. The grief that never finished. The anger that felt too large. The longing that seemed too vulnerable to admit. The failure that became the story you’ve organized your entire life around avoiding.

The people around you already sense these rooms. They have felt the subtle change in your energy when a conversation drifts near them. They have noticed what you never bring up, what you minimize, what you deflect with humor or busyness or sudden competence.

And here is what the spiritual tradition says about those locked rooms: they are not where your shame lives. They are where your most essential material waits. Every locked room, when finally entered with courage and a willingness to be seen, turns out to contain not chaos — but sorrow needing to be witnessed, not danger — but something deeply human, not emptiness — but the most real version of yourself, waiting with extraordinary patience.

Sacred Noticing — the practice of paying attention with the whole of yourself — is, at its heart, the practice of learning to see with the eyes of the MRI rather than the mirror.

Not to catalogue your flaws. Not to perform your healing. But to look, gently and without flinching, at what is actually here. To let yourself be seen by the One who has always seen you, and loved you, from the inside out.

 

What Changes

When we stop living at the mirror — when we stop curating our reflection and begin, slowly, to inhabit what is actually there — something shifts in the way we move through the world.

The footprint we leave becomes honest. You cannot easily perform when you are fully present to yourself. You may still make mistakes. You may still be reactive. But the trace you leave is genuinely yours — unmistakable, unrepeatable, carrying the signature of something that does not die.

People sense this. They receive not the managed version, not the performance, but the actual emanation of a soul that is present to itself — and therefore finally, fully present to them.

This is what love actually is. Not the appearance of warmth, but the warmth itself. Not the performance of peace, but peace that passes understanding — because it was never manufactured. It was found, in the deep interior places, by someone willing to be seen all the way through.

God, after all, does not use a mirror. God has always been the MRI.

 

 

Be still.

Let the instrument pass through you.

Do not arrange yourself.

Do not prepare your best angle.

Simply lie in the grace of being known —

all the way down,

all the way through..

 

 

Questions for Reflection

Where in your life are you most likely to reach for the mirror — to curate, adjust, or perform?

What is one “locked room” in your interior life that you sense is waiting to be entered?

When have you experienced the grace of being truly seen — not for how you appeared, but for who you are?

What would it feel like to be still, today, and let yourself be known all the way through?

 

 

 

A Closing Invitation

 Uncross your arms. Let your face be soft.

You are not here to be impressive.

You are here to be present.

That is enough.

And has always been enough.

 

Copyright 2026 Michael J. Cunningham OFS

 

 

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Known

Known

 

I thought I knew

The formulas, the truths, reality

But now I know

Nothing

 

Only presence,

Being,

 

A temporary glimpse of you,

By peaking into your heart,

Seeing the love which pumps relentlessly to get out

Letting you live

Or survive

Or delight

 

Which it is I cannot tell

But I know I love you

 

Not for what you have done

Good or bad

Not for what you have become

Rich or poor

Not for what you gave

Willing or involuntarily

 

But just because

Because I encountered you

 

That’s all.

It was enough

It is enough