I wrote a reflection this summer on the issue of sanctuary. We often consider sanctuary as a safe, secure and sacred place for us to retreat into. Many would say our sanctuary lies within, and the interior life, however one sees that, is the place of safety we all try to enter.
Sometimes, taking this interior path leads us to see the inner self as a lifeboat, a place we can retreat to and “hide” from whatever is plaguing us in the real world. In that sense, a sanctuary is something a little different from an exterior place or location, which is often what we think of when we hear the word.
In recent discussions with some groups on this topic, some felt that even a new place, but one with a familiar evocative vibe, can meet these requirements. One such example was the sanctuary of a Chapel, where they can be visited around the world, and even if they are not ones we have ever entered before, they create that safety and security we have felt in the ones we have known.
Another way of thinking about the inner sanctuary —that is, ourselves— is to consider what that might mean to others. Have you ever thought about yourself as a sanctuary? Probably not, but I am sure that others have. In a meeting last week with a group of Spiritual Directors, we discussed this possibility. Where someone just wants to meet with you because you are that safe, secure, confidential companion who isn’t going to judge you immediately. Someone who will listen to what is going on in your life, in your heart, with compassion and love. Whether we realize it or not, some people will view you as a sanctuary —not a static one, just a place by the tree or in a Chapel —but a living, breathing sanctuary who will be there for someone.
There are people in our lives who fulfil this role, even if they don’t realize it. You may find that you are someone else’s sanctuary without knowing it. They want to connect with you —come over for coffee or take a walk. We can be a sanctuary to each other almost without thinking about it. So, when someone calls us, and we are tired after a long day, do we let the phone go to voicemail? Will we invite someone over when we can tell they have had a long day, and we have too?
I cannot say what makes us a sanctuary to another, but when we are, we have a responsibility to respond, even when we feel that we are not qualified to do so.
Because sometimes it’s enough to be present, to listen, to empathize; even when we don’t have the solution. Because others may find their way just because you can give them the fuel to continue the journey.
Continuing the journey of awakening to the spiritual path around us
When we last left Liam, he had just received a book of Irish poetry from Miss Hennessy, the librarian who recognized his slow erasure of self. Reading those poems, he’d noticed—truly noticed—what he’d been doing: the violence of self-denial, the cost of trying to be someone else’s idea of acceptable. More importantly, he’d become aware of spiritual footprints—the traces we leave behind in every encounter. Simon left footprints of fear. Liam had been trying to leave no footprint at all. Now came the hardest question: Could he learn to leave a footprint of truthful presence? Could he respond to the world from wholeness rather than fear?
III. The Response
The change didn’t happen overnight. Sacred noticing isn’t magic—it’s practice, daily and unglamorous. But Liam began to experiment with a third way of being, neither the full Dublin boy he’d been nor the English ghost he’d been trying to become.
He started small. In Literature class, when they studied Yeats, he raised his hand and let his accent come through naturally as he read aloud. His voice lilted and sang the words in a way the English voices couldn’t quite capture. The room went quiet—but it was the quiet of attention, not mockery.
“Beautiful,” Mrs. Patterson said simply. “That’s how it’s meant to sound.”
Simon Blackwood rolled his eyes, but Liam noticed something new—a flicker of uncertainty in the gesture. As if Simon was recognizing, perhaps for the first time, that his cruelty was revealing his own poverty of experience.
But Liam noticed something else too: the quality of the room had changed. Where before there had been a certain tightness, a holding of breath whenever he spoke, now there was… space. Room. His authentic voice had left a different kind of footprint—one that made the air feel more open, more breathable. Even Mrs. Patterson seemed to stand a little taller, as if his willingness to be himself had given her permission for something too.
Respond. The third movement. Not react—respond. Choose, from a place of awareness, how to engage with what’s present.
When the next jibe came—”Going back to the bog this weekend, Paddy?”—Liam paused. Noticed the automatic shame rising in his chest. Paused again. And then spoke from a different place.
“Actually, my grandmother lives near the Wicklow Mountains. Do you know them? Some of the most beautiful country in the world. You should visit sometime—I could show you around.”
The invitation was genuine. Liam had discovered something Miss Hennessy had known all along: the antidote to exclusion wasn’t to shrink yourself small enough to fit their spaces. It was to maintain your own center and invite others in. To leave a footprint of welcome rather than withdrawal.
The change in the room was palpable. Several students looked up, surprised. Simon opened his mouth, then closed it, unsure how to respond to genuine invitation where he’d expected defensiveness. The trace he’d tried to leave—that familiar atmosphere of mockery and shame—dissolved before it could settle.
Some accepted Liam’s new presence. Most didn’t. But Liam found he cared less about the numbers and more about the quality of connection when it came. A boy named James, quiet and thoughtful, sat with him at lunch one day and asked about Dublin. A girl in his art class, also new though from London, recognized a fellow traveler and smiled.
And slowly, Liam’s mother’s fish pie tasted like itself again. Not apologetic. Not disguised. Just what it was—a gift from home, offered to a new world. When his parents had friends over now, Liam no longer disappeared into his room. He stayed. He told stories. He let his voice carry its natural music. And he noticed: the room felt different when he was truly in it. Warmer. More alive. His presence was becoming a kind of gift.
IV. The Green Thread
By the time Liam finished secondary school, he had learned to inhabit the in-between space with something approaching grace. He was the boy who could quote Seamus Heaney and play hurling, who understood both Irish history and English literature, who could navigate multiple worlds without losing himself in the translation.
The green in him—that essential Irish thread—hadn’t disappeared. It had woven itself into everything he became, enriching rather than limiting his identity.
At university, he studied anthropology, drawn to stories of migration and adaptation, of how people carry their cultures across borders and blend them into new forms. He wrote his dissertation on the Irish diaspora in England, interviewing dozens of immigrants who’d made the same journey his family had.
In every interview, he practiced sacred noticing. Listening not just to the words but to what lived beneath them—the grief and resilience, the losses and unexpected gains, the complex truth that couldn’t be reduced to simple narratives of rejection or acceptance.
But more than that, he learned to attend to the spiritual footprints in each encounter. He could feel when an interview subject relaxed, when the quality of their presence shifted from performance to truth. He learned that his own quality of attention—patient, curious, non-judgmental—created a kind of sacred space where people felt safe enough to share their real stories. His presence was becoming a container for others’ truth-telling.
One woman, in her eighties, told him: “I spent fifty years trying to be English enough. And then one day, I was at my grandson’s wedding, and they played an Irish song for me, and I wept. Not because I was sad—because I finally understood. I was always both. I was always enough.”
She paused, looking at Liam with eyes that had seen decades of hiding and emerging. “And you know what changed? Not the world around me. But the trace I left behind me. When I stopped apologizing for being Irish, when I let my whole self show up, I left a different feeling in rooms. People could breathe around me. Does that make sense?”
It made perfect sense. Liam thought of Miss Hennessy, long retired now but still occasionally sending him books and notes. He thought of his parents, who’d given him the gift of movement even if they couldn’t fully understand its cost. He thought of himself at fourteen, desperately trying to erase his own face.
And he understood: sacred noticing had saved him. The simple practice of paying attention—to what hurt, to what called, to what was actually present rather than what he feared or wished for. The pause that created space for choice. The response that came from wholeness rather than fear. And through it all, the growing awareness of his spiritual footprint—the quality of presence he brought to every encounter, the invisible trace he left behind that could either diminish others or create space for them to breathe.
For it is often in these moments that God is moving inside us, sometimes without our awareness. And in those moments, we leave behind not just memories, but traces of grace—spiritual footprints that others might follow toward their own wholeness.
In memory of all who have journeyed between worlds, carrying their colors faithfully, leaving footprints of presence for those who follow.
A reflection in the spirit of awakening to the spiritual path around us
Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham image and reflection
The kitchen table in their new English village held a casserole dish that might as well have been a mirror. Liam O’Connor stared at his mother’s fish pie. It was the same recipe his grandmother had served in Dublin.
The fish was surrounded by mash,
dollops of love, and island hospitality,
clearly showing what made their fish pie the best.
But here, at fourteen, displaced from the only streams he’d ever known, Liam felt the metaphor settle into his bones with an uncomfortable weight.
Like the fish, slippery and fun filled, we look for friendly spots full of food yet devoid of danger.
The move to Thornbury had been necessary—his father’s career, better opportunities, the vague adult promises of “a good future.” But Liam had left behind more than a city. He’d left behind the easy laughter of cousins, the peculiar cadence of Dublin streets, the unspoken knowing of being among his own.
Notice. That’s what would save him, though he didn’t know it yet. The first movement of sacred awareness, the simple act paying attention to what was present, not what he wished was there or feared might be there.
At school, the boys had already formed their territories. Simon Blackwood and his circle occupied the center of the social solar system. Super confident in their Englishness and generations-deep roots in this place, they wrapped their casual cruelty in posh accents. They noticed Liam’s difference immediately, the way predators sense vulnerability.
“Paddy,” Simon called him. “Potato boy.” The jokes came in daily installments, each one a small paper cut to the soul.
Liam didn’t yet have the language for what he was experiencing. Still, he could feel it: Simon left a trace behind him wherever he went—an atmosphere of anxiety and diminishment that lingered in the hallway after he passed. Even the air felt different after Simon spoke, as if cruelty had weight and texture. Liam learned to sense these invisible footprints, the spiritual residue people left in their wake.
Liam did what many immigrants do. He began to edit himself. The green Irish accent is packed neatly away. The stories of home, sealed in boxes. At night, alone in his new bedroom that smelled wrong and felt wrong, he would practice his new voice. Flattening the Dublin lilt, rounding his vowels into proper English shapes.
I once tried to wring the Irish out of me, he would later write in his journal. Transplanted to England like a green frog from the water, where everyone else was a newt and I was not.
His parents didn’t understand. “You’re doing well,” his mother would say brightly, seeing only his grades, not the soul-erasure happening behind his eyes. His father spoke of opportunity, of blending in, of the practical necessities of success. Neither noticed the boy at their kitchen table was slowly disappearing.
But Liam noticed something else, something he couldn’t quite name yet: when he walked through his own house now, he left almost no trace. He moved like a ghost, careful not to disturb anything, not to take up space, not to remind anyone of his foreignness. His presence—once so vibrant in Dublin, full of laughter and stories—had become nearly invisible. He was learning to leave no spiritual footprint at all, as if he could protect himself by becoming nothing, or something that would not offend.
II. The Pause
It was Miss Hennessy, the school librarian, who first interrupted Liam’s vanishing act. She was older, Irish herself though long settled in England, with eyes that had learned to see past the performance.
“You’re working hard at being someone else,” she said one afternoon, finding him alone in the library’s corner, hunched over homework as if he could make himself smaller through concentration alone.
Liam looked up, startled. The kindness in her voice was dangerous—it threatened to crack the careful shell he’d been constructing.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he lied.
“Of course you do.” She sat down without invitation. “I did the same thing myself, forty years ago. Thought if I just became English enough, the loneliness would stop.” She paused, letting the silence do its work. “Do you know what I learned?”
Liam shook his head.
“That you can’t outrun your own face. And more than that—you shouldn’t want to.”
Pause. The second movement of sacred noticing. Creating space between stimulus and response, between the world’s cruelty and your reaction to it. Miss Hennessy was offering Liam something more precious than comfort—she was offering him a choice.
“But they don’t want me here,” Liam said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Not really. I’m always going to be the Irish kid, the outsider.”
“That’s true,” Miss Hennessy agreed, and her honesty was somehow more consoling than false promises would have been. “You’re in the in-between place. Not fully Irish anymore, not English either. Do you know what we call that in Irish?”
“What?”
“Idir eatarthu.” She smiled. “Between and betwixt. It’s uncomfortable, Liam. But it’s also where the interesting people live. The ones who can see both worlds.”
She leaned forward, her voice taking on a different quality—teaching now, but gently. “Can I tell you what I’ve learned? Every person leaves a spiritual footprint, whether they know it or not. It’s the quality of presence you bring to a room, the atmosphere that lingers after you leave. Simon Blackwood leaves a footprint of fear and smallness. You can feel it, can’t you? That heaviness after he speaks?”
Liam nodded, hugely surprised she’d named what he’d been sensing.
“And you, my dear, are learning to leave no footprint at all. You’re becoming invisible, walking through life on tiptoe. But that’s a kind of violence too—violence against yourself. And it leaves its own trace. People can feel when someone isn’t really present, when they’re hiding.”
She reached into her bag and pulled out a small book—a collection of Irish poetry. “The question isn’t whether you’ll leave a footprint. You will. The question is: what kind of footprint do you want to leave? One of hiding and shame? Or one of truthful presence?” “Read this. Notice what it makes you feel. Don’t fight the green in you. Let it show.”
That night, Liam read the poems and felt something long-frozen begin to thaw. He noticed—truly noticed—for the first time since the move, what he’d been doing to himself. The violence of self-erasure. The cost of trying to be someone else’s idea of acceptable.
He sat at his window, the book open in his lap, and let himself feel the full weight of both his grief and his hope. The green thread was still there, wound through everything he was.
Miss Hennessy’s words echoed: What kind of footprint do you want to leave?
He thought of Simon, leaving traces of fear wherever he went. He thought of himself, trying to leave no trace at all, tiptoeing through his own life. He thought of his grandmother in Dublin, whose presence filled a room with warmth before she even spoke, whose very existence seemed to say: You’re welcome here.
That was a spiritual footprint. That was what presence could be.
The question wasn’t whether to cut away his green thread. The question wasn’t even whether to show it.
The question was: Could he learn to be present—fully, truthfully present—and trust that his presence itself was a gift?
To be continued…
Reflection for the week: Notice the spiritual footprints in your own life. What traces do you leave in rooms, in conversations, in the hearts of those you encounter? What would it mean to become aware of your presence as a kind of offering?
Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham image and reflection
I’ve been thinking about walls lately. Not the kind that divide nations or keep people out, but the smaller, older walls; the ones that mark boundaries between one field and another, between the tamed and the wild, between what we’ve claimed and what claims us.
There’s a stone wall near where I lived, ancient and crumbling, that runs along the edge of a churchyard. On one side: mowed grass, orderly headstones, the careful geometry of consecrated ground. On the other: meadow grass grows waist-high, thistles, the anarchic beauty of things left to themselves.
I watched a child walk along the top of it. Arms outstretched, heel-to-toe, completely concentrated. She couldn’t have been more than twelve. The wall is maybe eighteen inches wide—easy enough to walk, dangerous enough to matter.
What struck me wasn’t her balance. It was her face. She wasn’t trying to get from one side to the other. She was walking the wall itself. The in-between. The place that is neither here nor there.
We spend so much energy trying to get from one side to the other, don’t we? Trying to cross over, to arrive, to finally be the thing we’re becoming. We treat thresholds as obstacles—inconvenient gaps between where we are and where we want to be.
But what if the threshold is the point?
What if that narrow space between things—between childhood and adulthood, between one culture and another, between who we were and who we’re becoming—isn’t a gap to be crossed quickly, but a place to dwell?
The girl on the wall was completely present. Not rushing toward either side. Just walking. Just being exactly where she was.
I think about how often I’ve felt “between.” Between callings. Between loves. Between certainties. And how often I’ve interpreted that feeling as lostness rather than location.
But what if liminal isn’t another word for lost?
What if the spaces between the stone walls, the thresholds, the places where one thing becomes another; the places where God speaks most clearly? Not because the answers are there, but because in the in-between, we finally stop demanding answers long enough to listen.
The mystics knew this. They had a word for it: kenosis. Self-emptying. The spiritual practice of becoming nothing so you can be filled with Something Else.
The girl reached the end of the wall. Jumped down. Ran off across the meadow without looking back.
But for those few minutes, she’d inhabited a space most of us rush past. She’d been fully present to the between.
I’m learning—slowly, awkwardly—to do the same. To stop treating my in-between seasons as waiting rooms. To recognize them as sacred spaces in their own right.
To walk the wall with my arms outstretched.
To be, for a little while, precisely nowhere in particular.
And to discover that nowhere is exactly where I need to be.
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
