Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

The Leash by the Door

The Leash by the Door

I could not put the leash away.

Everything else I managed. The bowl went into a cupboard. The collar went into a drawer, which is where these things go, apparently, when you cannot bear to throw them out and cannot bear to look at them either. But the leash stayed on its hook by the door for a long time after Flame died, and I walked past it every day, and I did not touch it.

What undoes you is not the grand thought. It’s the particular place on the floor that catches the afternoon sun, where nobody lies anymore. It’s the sound your ears go on listening for weeks after there is nothing left to make it. I sat down eventually to write a prayer for her, thinking it would be a small thing. It was not a small thing.

What Flame Left

I have written before about the Spiritual Footprint — the mark our lives leave on other people, the thing we carry out of the room after we have gone. I have written about it almost entirely in terms of humans. Our words, our tone, our patience or the lack of it. The gap between who we believe ourselves to be and what others actually experience from us.

I had not thought carefully about the fact that a dog leaves one too. And when you look at it directly, something uncomfortable becomes clear. The animal’s footprint might be cleaner than ours. (Metaphorically, that is; dogs do leave real footprints!)

Here is why. Most of what makes the human Spiritual Footprint difficult is the distance between intention and effect. I meant well. I was tired. I had my reasons. All true, and none of it reaches the other person, who received only what actually arrived. That gap is where most of our spiritual work lives.

Flame had no gap.

She was not managing an impression. She had no strategy, no reputation to protect, no version of herself she was hoping you would believe. She did not measure my failures or keep an account of my absences or love me less on the days I deserved less. She met me at the door as though I had been gone a hundred years, when in fact I had been at the dentist for two hours.

She left behind exactly what she was. And what she was, was glad I came back.

Why It Hurts This Much

People are sometimes embarrassed by how hard they grieve an animal. They say it apologetically. I know it’s just a dog. They will grieve a pet more openly than they grieved an uncle, and then feel obscurely guilty about it.

I don’t think there is anything to apologize for, and I think the reason is worth naming.

For many of us, that animal was the one relationship in which our own footprint did not have to be managed. She did not need us to be interesting. She had no opinion about our career. She was not tracking whether we had become the person we said we would become. We could come home defeated and be received without assessment — and for a great many people, that is the only place in their entire life where that happens.

We are not grieving a pet. We are grieving the one witness who never once required us to explain ourselves.

That is not a small thing, and it deserves better than “it’s just a dog.”

St. Francis Saw This First

Francis wrote the Canticle of the Creatures near the end of his life, mostly blind, in considerable pain, in a small, dark hut. He was not out on a hillside feeling pleasantly moved by nature. He was in trouble, and from inside that trouble he called the sun his brother and the moon his sister, and he meant it in the plain sense — not as a poetic flourish, but as a family claim.

That is the part people miss. Brother Sun and Sister Water are not decoration. They are a statement that the created world is not scenery for the human drama. It is kin. And a Franciscan does not have to squint to see why the household dog belongs on that list. She is not a possession, not an accessory to our life. She is a creature, made by the same hand, carrying the same signature.

There is a line in the Canticle about Brother Fire, whom Francis praised as beautiful and playful and robust and strong. I did not name my dog with the Canticle in mind. I named her Flame because of her coat. It was years before I noticed that Francis had already written her description, eight hundred years early, and got it exactly right.

This is why, every year around the fourth of October, we take the blessing outdoors.

It has to be outdoors, and not only for the obvious reasons. Dogs bark straight through the prayers. Leashes braid themselves together while their owners pretend not to notice. Somebody’s cat sits in a carrier at the far end of the lawn, refusing, on principle, to look at anyone. A child arrives holding a hamster the way you would carry the Blessed Sacrament, and someone else has brought a goldfish in a bowl of cloudy water and is holding it up with enormous seriousness. No homily survives it.

And it is entirely, unembarrassedly right; because for one morning, under the open sky where the Canticle was born, we stop pretending that the sacred begins where the animals leave off.

The Prayer

Here is what I finally wrote for her. I offer it in case someone reading this needs it. You may put your own animal’s name where hers is.

Lord God, Most High, All-powerful, All-good —

Praised be you through Brother Sun,

who warmed the place on the floor where Flame used to lie,

and through Sister Moon, who kept watch with us

through the last of the long nights.

We come to this threshold carrying small things:

a collar, a bowl, a leash by the door,

the sound our ears still listen for

and no longer hear.

Praised be you, Lord, for the creatures.

Francis called them brother and sister

and meant it plainly, without embarrassment —

Brother Wolf, who was hungry and not evil,

Sister Lark, who sang the day open,

the fish returned to the water,

the animals who came to him

because he did not come to them armed.

Praised be you through Brother Fire,

beautiful and playful and robust and strong,

whose name she carried without ever being told,

and whose warmth she left in the rooms she passed through.

You gave us a companion who never once

asked us to be more than we were.

Who did not measure our failures,

or keep an account of our absences,

or love us less on the days we deserved less.

Who met us at the door

as though we had been gone a hundred years,

and taught us, without a single word,

the whole grammar of welcome.

Praised be you through Sister Water, who quenches her thirst.

Through Mother Earth, who receives what she has given

and asks nothing for the keeping.

Through Sister Bodily Death, whom Francis blessed

and did not fear —

for she came gently to Flame, and we were allowed to be present,

and love was the last thing in the room.

We do not ask you to explain this.

We ask only that you receive Flame back

into the same creation that made her,

your first and still-speaking language,

where nothing you have loved is ever wasted

and nothing you have made is ever lost to you.

And send us out again into that creation

carrying what she placed in us

before we had a name for it:

her patience, her gladness, her uncomplicated presence,

her footprint on the quiet floor of our lives.

May what we held in our hands

be held now in our living.

Through Christ, who is the mirror and the light,

the bread and the dawn,

the space between and the One who fills it.

Amen.

What She Was Teaching

People ask me whether their animals are in heaven. I am not going to pretend to have an answer I do not. What I will say is that the Franciscan instinct runs entirely against the idea that God makes something, loves it, and then discards it — and that instinct is older and steadier than my opinion.

But there is something closer to hand that I am sure of.

Whatever Flame was doing all those years, she was demonstrating the practice in front of me daily and for free. She noticed. She paused at the door. She responded — always with her whole body, never with a calculation. And she did it again the next morning, and the morning after that, for as long as she had.

Notice. Pause. Respond. And then … Repeat.

Long before I ever had language for Sacred Noticing, it was being practiced in my house by a creature who could not spell.

So when you bring your animal out to be blessed this October, or when you stand at the memorial for one who has already gone — do not apologize for the size of your feeling. You are not being sentimental. You are recognizing kin. And you are grieving a creature who did, effortlessly and without a single thought about it, the thing you and I spend our whole lives trying to learn.

Flame never once wondered what she was leaving behind. That is precisely how she left so much.

Reflection Copyright 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham OFS

 

 

Reflection derived from The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

“The Man with the Face of a Bin”: A Tale of One City

 

“The Man with the Face of a Bin”: A Tale of One City

I did not go looking for this headline. It found me, the way the best material always does, wedged between two stories. A man in a silver cape, wearing an actual rubbish bin as a helmet, had just come second in a British parliamentary by-election. I read it twice. Then I read his manifesto, which is where this stopped being a funny headline and started to become a homily of sorts.

His name is Count Binface. He is, by his own account, an intergalactic space warrior, leader of the Recyclons, from the planet Sigma IX. He has stood for election against two sitting Prime Ministers and lost to both, stood for Mayor of London and lost that too, and on the thirteenth of August stood in Clacton against Nigel Farage (a well-known British politician) and lost again — this time with 9,455 votes to Farage’s 22,239. In electoral terms that is a drubbing. In every other term, nearly ten thousand people in one of the most fought-over patches of England looked at a man dressed as a household waste container and decided he had the better idea.

Reading the Manifesto Out Loud, With a Straight Face

Try it sometime. Here is an actual, documented Count Binface policy platform: cap the price of a croissant at £1.10. (Around $1.45) Cap a 99 ice cream at 99 pence. Cap a kebab at £2. Tie every government minister’s salary to a nurse’s salary for the next hundred years. Strip MPs of their subsidized Parliament-canteen food and drink. Build at least one affordable house.

Read that last one again. Not a thousand houses. Not a bold ten-year plan with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. At least one. He has said, in interviews, with a completely straight face, that he is confident he can hit that target, if not surpass it. It is the single strangest housing policy in modern British politics, and it is also, I would argue, the most honest one on offer — because it does not pretend to be more than it is.

Compassion, Filed Under Comedy

Binface has pledged to hand over the royal palaces — except the one the King still needs — and the seized homes of Russian oligarchs to people who currently have nowhere to sleep. Whatever surplus his campaigns raise, he sends to Shelter, the housing charity, rather than keeping it. This is a joke candidate quietly outperforming a great many non-joke candidates on the single question that most defines whether a society is caring for the people at its edges.

I am not going to stand here and tell you a man in a bin helmet is doing Franciscan charity. But I will say that the instinct underneath the joke, house the person who has no house, and don’t make a production of your own generosity while you do it, is the same instinct that has animated every genuinely compassionate movement in Christian history. Including the one that started with a rich man’s son giving away his father’s cloth in a piazza. (St Francis of Assisi). Count Binface just tells the joke first so the compassion can sneak in the side door while everyone is still laughing.

Humility Is Also a Policy Position

Notice what almost no other politician does: Count Binface makes fun of himself before anyone else gets the chance. He runs as a joke, campaigns as a joke, and loses as a joke, on purpose, every single time. There is no spin team explaining why second place was actually a victory. There is no dignified photograph pretending the silver bin is a crown. Self-deprecation is not a small trick. It is the discipline of refusing to think more of yourself than the moment warrants — which happens to be a fairly good working definition of humility, and a startlingly rare quality in the one wearing a suit and standing at a podium.

Affordability as a Form of Care

The croissant cap gets the headline but pause on what it is actually about. A price cap on small daily pleasures — coffee-shop pastries, ice cream from a van, a kebab on the way home — is a joke wrapped around a real observation: that the cost of ordinary life has crept up on people faster than their wages have, and nobody in a blue suit wants to say so plainly, because plainly is not how you get re-elected. Binface says it in the shape of a pastry, and the room laughs, and then the room goes quiet for a second, because everyone in it has felt that exact squeeze at the check-out.

Tying ministers’ pay to nurses’ pay works the same way. It is a punchline built on a real question: whose labor do we actually value, and does our economy tell the truth about it? A hundred years is an absurd timeframe on purpose. The absurdity is the delivery mechanism. The question underneath it is not absurd at all.

Care for Each Other, One Ridiculous Line Item at a Time

Strip out the space warrior and the Recyclons, and what is left is a platform obsessed, almost embarrassingly, with whether ordinary people are being looked after — housed, fed, paid fairly, protected from a cost of living that keeps rising faster than anyone’s patience. That is not a Franciscan biography. It is a Franciscan instinct: care for the person in front of you, be honest about what you actually have to give, and don’t dress up your own importance while you’re giving it.

A Tale of One City

Clacton will forget the vote count by Christmas. It will remember the bin. Not because the bin was holy — I want to be clear, nobody is canonizing a man from planet Sigma IX — but because the bin got people to take seriously, for one afternoon, what the man in the blue suit could not get them to take seriously. That is not sainthood. That is just a good aim.

Sometimes the truest way to be taken seriously is to stop asking to be taken seriously.

 

 

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

A boy, a stone and a Pond

 

 

A boy stood at the edge of a pond, choosing a stone.

Not the flattest one. Not the one that would skip farthest or make the biggest sound. He turned it over twice. He decided something private about it. Then he let it go.

Asked why that one. He shrugged. “It just felt right.”

He never watched where it landed. By the time the rings were spreading, he was already bent over, looking for the next one.

I have thought about that boy many times.

Because most of us do the opposite. We throw the stone and then we stand there, counting circles. We drop a word, a kindness, a hard conversation into the water, and we wait for the ripples to tell us whether it mattered. Did it reach the far shore? Did anyone see the splash? Was it enough?

Here is what I believe, and you may not agree with me. Everything we do is a spiritual act. Everything. There is no neutral surface on this pond. There is no throw that lands nowhere. Every word, every silence, every small decision made in a kitchen or a car or a hallway sends something outward, and that something touches lives we may never meet. We sort our days into what counts and what doesn’t. The water makes no such distinction. It receives everything.

And here is the strange part. We already know this. Something in us knows it before we act. In the half-second before the words leave, before the hand moves, something inside has already registered: this will land somewhere. On someone.

That knowing has a name. It is called intention.

Intention is the part of the throw no one else ever sees. The person on the far shore receives the ripple. The tone, the timing, the visible act. What they never receive is the inside of your hand at the moment of release. Why you did it. What you hoped. Whether the kindness was whole, or carrying a second, smaller motive underneath.

But unseen is not absent. The intention travels with the stone. It is stitched into the act the way the boy’s private decision was stitched into that particular stone. The pond never knew why he chose it. He knew. And somehow, that was enough to change the throw.

Sit with that for a moment, because it opens in two directions at once.

The first is freedom. If intention is real even when no one sees it, then the worth of what you do is not decided on the far bank. The kind act that went unnoticed lost nothing. The apology that was misread lost nothing. The love was in the release, not the reception. You can stop standing at the water’s edge, waiting for permission to call your throw worthwhile. It already was.

The second direction is harsher. If intention travels unseen, then all of it travels. The motive we thought we tucked inside a generous gesture does not stay hidden in any way that matters. It bends the throw. You have felt this from the other side. The gift that somehow asked something of you. The compliment with a hook in it. No one explained it. You just knew. Intention leaks. It always has.

Mystics have a word for the alternative. Purity of intention. Not purity as perfection. None of us throws a clean stone every time. Purity as singleness. One motive, not three. Doing the thing for its own sake. The mystics went further and said: for God alone. Which is another way of saying that when the heart is single, the outcome can be released the instant the stone leaves the hand. What happens next belongs to the water. It was never ours.

The boy will never know what his stones did. Ten thousand throws he never watched land. And something in him will stay light because of it. Not because the ripples didn’t matter. Because he trusted them to the water.

So do we. Or so we could.

Pause for Thought: Before your next word or act, don’t ask whether it will be seen. Ask what is actually in your hand.

This week, notice the half-second before you speak. That small interior moment when the intention forms. Don’t judge what you find there. Just notice it. Then throw the stone as cleanly as you can, and trust the rest to the One who receives every ripple, even the ones we never watch land.

Peace and all good, Michael

 

 

Reflection derived from The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 2 Comments

The Boat Without Oars

The Boat Without Oars

A Spiritual Break Reflection

In the year 891, three Irishmen washed ashore on the coast of Cornwall, England in a boat made of hide stretched over a wooden frame. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was not given to sentiment, thought the event strange enough to record. What made it strange was not that they had arrived. It was that they had set out, deliberately, without oars. When they were brought before the court of King Alfred and asked why, their answer entered history in a single sentence: they wished to be pilgrims for the love of God, and they cared not where.

I am the son of Irish parents, and I confess that when I first met this story, it did not feel like history. It felt like family. Because I recognized the move: the extravagant, slightly alarming gesture that turns out, on closer inspection, to be theology. Those three men were not being careless. They had simply decided, with their whole bodies, that God was a better navigator than they were — and then they built a boat that made the decision irreversible.

They were not alone. The early Celtic monks had a name for this: peregrinatio pro amore Dei — wandering for the love of God. It was pilgrimage with the destination removed. Columba left Ireland for Iona in c.563 not knowing what his mission would become; the island claimed him as much as he chose it. The Voyage of St. Brendan tells of monks who sailed wherever wind and current carried them, trusting the steering to Someone else. This was how mission and location were often discerned in that world. Not by strategy. By drift.

Now look at your own week. Count the oars.

The calendar is an oar. The GPS is an oar. The to-do list, the fitness tracker, the itinerary, the five-year plan — oars, every one. We are the most thoroughly rowed generation in human history. Even our leisure has an agenda now; we optimize our rest and measure our sleep. And if we are honest, even our prayer can become another form of rowing — twenty minutes, timer set, technique applied, progress quietly assessed. There is nothing wrong with oars. But a life that never ships them has made a decision about who is steering, and it is worth noticing what that decision is.

So here is a practice I have come to love, and one we now offer on retreat at San Damiano in the late afternoon, when the light goes gold on the hills. We call it a Drifting Prayer. The invitation is short enough to memorize: The Celtic monks used to set out to sea in small boats with no oars. They let the current decide. For the next while, the grounds are your current. There’s nowhere to get to and nothing to bring back. Walk, or don’t. If something finds you, let it.

You do not need a retreat center to pray it. You need a coracle — which is to say, a boundary. Thirty minutes. The park near your office. The road home taken slowly. A Saturday afternoon you refuse to schedule. The boundary is the only decision you make; it is the little boat that holds you. Then you ship the oars: leave the phone, drop the errand, release the outcome. If it helps, borrow the pilgrims’ own prayer of consent — Lead me; I care not where — which may be the most honest six words ever said to God.

And then you drift. You follow what gently draws you — a turn in the path, a bench, a birdsong, a doorway, a memory that rises unbidden. You steer only for safety. And when you catch yourself reaching for the oars again — planning tomorrow, evaluating the walk, quietly converting the hour into something productive — you notice, you smile, and you let the current have the boat back. That reach for the oars is not failure, by the way. It is the practice. Every time you release the handle, something in you learns a little more about trust.

Somewhere in the drift, something may arrest you. Stop there. You do not need to name it, photograph it, or turn it into a lesson. If something finds you, let it. And if nothing finds you — if the whole hour is just wind and footsteps and an ordinary sky — then the drifting itself was the prayer, and it was enough.

I want to say a particular word to those in a drifting season of life, because some of you did not choose your coracle. Retirement chose it. Recovery chose it. The empty house, the waiting room, the long stretch between what ended and whatever comes next. Our culture will tell you that because you are not doing anything, nothing is happening. The three men in the boat say otherwise. Being led is a form of prayer — perhaps the oldest one. And notice this, because it matters: the monks did not drift to relax. They drifted to be sent. Columba’s drift ended at Iona, and Iona changed the world. If you are in a season when the way forward is unclear, the drift is not the opposite of discernment. It is discernment, conducted at the speed of trust.

The other prayer forms will still be there when you come ashore — the chair, the sacred word, the Scriptures, the chapel. A Drifting Prayer replaces none of them. It simply consecrates the hours they cannot reach: the in-between ones, the unplanned ones, the ones we were about to waste by filling.

This week, then: one oarless hour. Choose your coracle. Say the six words. And let the current decide.

Where in your life are you still gripping the oars — and what might find you if, for one hour, you let the current decide?

Reflection Copyright 2026 Michael J. Cunningham OFS

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 2 Comments

The Yellow Light

The Yellow Light

A Spiritual Break Reflection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Copyright 2026 Michael J. Cunningham OFS