A Spiritual Break

Posted on March 20, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham

The Caretaker Within

A Spiritual Break Reflection

Something of you remains after you leave every room you enter.

Not the memory of what was said. Not the impression you were trying to make. Something quieter than both — a quality of presence that persists in the people who received it long after the conversation has ended and the day has moved on. You have felt this in others. Their steadiness like medicine. Their kindness carried with you for years. Their particular way of being in a room that changed the room simply by being in it.

What you may not yet fully know is what you are leaving behind. What trace of your soul — the ground beneath the whole of your life — is reaching others without your awareness, without your arrangement, often in spite of your best efforts to present something more carefully composed.

This is where the Caretaker enters.

— ✦ —

The Caretaker

He comes before we wake,

Cleaning the hallways,

Unlocking the doors,

Making way.

Leaving our bedroom in silence.

The caretaker is our protector,

Or so our mind thinks,

Making our face to the world acceptable,

To the various audiences we play to.

However, the soul,

Hidden in the house which is our presentation to others,

Knows the rooms we have locked,

That others, even ourselves, are scared to enter.

For whatever reason,

When in fact they may contain the very treasures,

Others, and God see in us,

That we have obscured.

Without intention.

— ✦ —

There is a part of every person that wakes before they do.

Before the first conversation of the day. Before the demands arrive. Moving quietly through the interior life — through the house that is our heart and mind, sitting on the ground that is our soul — and preparing the version of us that will meet the world. Adjusting the face. Deciding, without much consultation, which rooms are open today and which stay closed. Making the whole presentation acceptable to the various people and situations the day will bring.

Most of us have never named this part of ourselves. But we have all felt its work. It is the voice that adjusts your tone a half-second before you speak to someone difficult. The instinct that knows, without deliberation, which version of you this particular room requires. It has been managing the household of your interior life — quietly, faithfully, for longer than you can remember — so that what you offer the world is ordered and unlikely to disturb.

This is the Caretaker.

And the Caretaker, for the most part, is genuinely on your side. The parts of you that are ready for company are kept in good repair. The face you bring to your friendships, your work, your family — the ordinary social grace of meeting the world without placing every interior weather on the people you love — this is real and useful work. Most of us would not want to be without it entirely.

But the poem names something else the Caretaker also does, in the same faithful and often invisible way.

Some doors are kept shut.

Not always because of what is difficult behind them. Not only the grief that arrived too large, the wound that needed time, the anger that felt too dangerous to carry openly. Sometimes the Caretaker closes a door because what is behind it felt like more than the moment could hold. More specific than the situation seemed to allow. More genuinely, particularly this person than the various audiences seemed ready to receive.

Think of the person who learned to listen because speaking felt unsafe — and whose listening became, over years, a gift of extraordinary depth that they have never quite named as a gift. Or the patience that was forged in a long season of difficulty and has been sitting quietly in a back room of the house ever since, waiting to be recognised for what it is. Or the courage that exists in someone because they survived something they did not think they would survive — and has never been claimed, only half-known, never fully brought forward.

These rooms are not locked because they contain damage. They are locked because opening them requires a kind of permission the Caretaker has not yet been given. Permission to bring the specific, unrepeatable self — with its particular gifts, its hard-won wisdom, its specific quality of presence — more fully into the rooms where others live.

The locked rooms may contain the very treasures others, and God, see in us. Not only the wounds waiting to be tended. The gifts waiting to be lived.

I may not be able to sing. But perhaps I can listen in a way that changes what people carry when they leave the room. I may not have the confidence the situation seems to require. But perhaps what I carry instead — the specific quality of steadiness or honesty or care that the Caretaker has been keeping quietly in reserve — is exactly what is needed and has been waiting, with more patience than I have shown it, for the door to be opened.

The Caretaker did not lock these rooms out of cruelty or error. It locked them for reasons that felt right at the time, in conditions that may no longer apply, with a faithfulness that deserves acknowledgment before it deserves critique. The rooms have simply been waiting. The gifts inside them have simply been waiting. Patient, uncomplaining, present all along beneath the house’s familiar and well-maintained surface.

The poem ends with two words that carry the whole of it.

Without intention.

Neither the locking nor the waiting was deliberate. The Caretaker learned its work gradually, usually early, always in response to something real. And the gifts have been accumulating in those rooms — the listening, the patience, the courage, the specific way of being that is yours and no one else’s — with a generosity that asks nothing except, eventually, to be let through.

The spiritual trace we leave in every room we enter — the quality of presence that persists in the people who received it — is shaped by what the Caretaker permits to come forward. The managed version of ourselves leaves a particular trace. The inhabited version, the one that includes what has been waiting behind the closed doors, leaves a different one. Not louder. Not more impressive. More genuinely itself. And it is the genuine self that others have been carrying without knowing it, in the way you carry someone’s steadiness like medicine for years without quite being able to explain where it came from.

The Caretaker is not the problem. It has been doing its job with dedication. But it has been waiting, perhaps for a long time, for permission to open a few more doors.

Not all at once. Not on any particular schedule. Simply — when the moment feels right, when a little more of the genuine self feels safe to offer — a hand on the handle. A door opened a little. The specific gift or wisdom or quality of presence that has been sitting patiently in that room, finally allowed to come forward into the house where others live.

— ✦ —

This week, one question to carry — not to answer, but to hold.

Is there a room in your house — a gift, a quality, a way of being that is genuinely yours — that the Caretaker has been keeping quietly closed? You do not need to open it today. Only notice it is there. And perhaps wonder what it has been waiting to offer.

The soul beneath the house already knows what is in that room.

It has been waiting patiently for the Caretaker to be given permission to open it.

Michael J. Cunningham OFS

From The Inhabited Life: Discovering Your Spiritual Footprint (forthcoming, 2026)

spiritualbreak.com

Posted on March 6, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham · 2 Comments

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.

Posted on March 1, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham · 2 Comments

A Lenten Practice Worth Trying (Sacred Noticing)

A Lenten Practice Worth Trying: Notice. Pause. Respond. (Sacred Noticing)

Someone was trying to tell me something last week, and I wasn’t really there.

I was in the room. I was nodding. But I was already composing my response, already somewhere else. And when I finally tuned back in, the moment had passed — and I had left behind something less than my best self. Not intentionally. Not maliciously. But the trace I left in that exchange — the atmosphere that lingered after I walked away, what that person carried from our conversation — was shaped more by my distraction than my love. We call that a spiritual footprint. It is the lasting presence we leave in every encounter, every room we enter, every exchange we have — chosen or not, conscious or not. The question Lent presses upon us is not whether we leave one. We always do. The question is whether the one we’re leaving is the one we would choose if we were paying attention.

That’s what I think Lent calls us to look at. Not what we’re giving up. But what we’re leaving behind.

We know the familiar Lenten practices. We give something up — chocolate, wine, social media — as an act of penance and self-discipline. We take something on — extra prayer, Mass, works of charity — as almsgiving, a turning outward toward others. Both are ancient, both are good. But there is a third invitation that Lent always carries, quieter than the other two, and perhaps more demanding: conversion of heart. Not the dramatic, road-to-Damascus kind. The slow, daily, ordinary kind. The turning of attention toward what actually matters in each moment we are given.

Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps and went on to write one of the most important books of the twentieth century, put it this way: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

He learned that in the most extreme conditions the human spirit can face. He discovered that the one freedom no one could take from him was the freedom to choose how he met each moment. That space — between what happens and what we do about it — is where character is formed. Where love either happens or doesn’t. Where our spiritual footprint is laid down, one moment at a time, for better or worse, consciously or not. Lent is an invitation into that space.

Sacred Noticing is a practice designed to help us find it, expand it, and use it — not in a chapel, but in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday.

It has three movements that work together as one flowing rhythm.

Notice. Not just what’s happening around you, but what’s really present. The person in front of you — what do they need right now that you might be missing because you think you already know? The situation unfolding — what else might be true here that your assumptions are hiding? Notice invites us to approach the familiar as if for the first time. Francis of Assisi practiced this with every creature he encountered. He called it reading the book of creation. We might call it paying attention with love. And every time we do it, the footprint we leave becomes a little more intentional, a little more worthy of the love we say we want to give.

Pause. This is the space Frankl named. Taking a breath, a pause. Feet on the ground. One quiet question: What does this moment actually need from me? The pause interrupts the automatic, the reactive, the habitual. It is a tiny act of asceticism — a small dying to the ego’s need to respond immediately and on its own terms. In this sense, the pause is genuine Lenten penance. Not dramatic. But real. And in that brief stillness, something shifts. The footprint we were about to leave — shaped by irritation, distraction, or simple inattention — gets a chance to become something else.

Respond. From that deeper place. From something closer to wisdom than reaction. From something closer to love than habit. Your response may be words, or action, or simply staying present when you’d rather leave. Sometimes the most powerful response is a quality of attention that says to another person: you matter, I am here, this moment between us is not nothing. That is the footprint worth leaving. That is what lingers long after the conversation ends.

This is almsgiving in its fullest sense — not only the check we write or the food we donate, though those matter. It is the gift of our genuine presence. It is what we offer when we stop performing our way through the day and start actually meeting the people in front of us. It is the most personal form of charity there is — and unlike money, we have it available in every single moment.

This is penance in its deepest sense — not only what we deny ourselves, but the small daily discipline of not letting our first impulse have the last word. Three seconds. One breath. The pause that chooses love over reaction. Every time we do it, we are practicing the conversion Lent is actually after.

And this is prayer — not confined to morning quiet, but carried into the afternoon argument, the exhausting meeting, the moment someone needs more of us than we feel we have to give. When we bring that quality of presence into our ordinary encounters, we are not just being more mindful. We are being more holy. And the world around us — the people who move through our days — begins to feel the difference in the footprint we leave.

Try it today in one small moment. The traffic light turns red — let it be an invitation instead of an interruption. Someone says something that stings — notice what rises in you before you speak. The phone rings — one breath before you answer it. See what changes. Notice what you leave behind.

Many days of that kind of attention leaves its mark. On you. And on everyone you encounter along the way.

The ancient Lenten call is metanoia — a turning, a change of mind, a reorientation of the whole self. We don’t have to go somewhere extraordinary to answer it. We just have to show up differently to where we already are — and trust that the footprint we leave when we do will be one we’re glad we chose.

Notice. Pause. Respond. Repeat.

That may be all the Lenten practice you need.

Michael Cunningham OFS is the author of The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint, releasing April 2026. Weekly reflections at spiritualbreak.com.

Posted on June 20, 2025 by Michael J. Cunningham · 1 Comment

I Am the Instrument

I Am the Instrument: A Reflection on Sacred Transparency

You know that moment when you pick up your camera and suddenly… click. You’ve taken a picture. But you can’t even remember deciding to do it.

This happened to me a while ago. Walking on the beach, some young children scare off the birds scurrying on the seashore. My footing faltered, yet somehow my phone was in my hand. The photo: the birds flying off, leaving the food buried in the sand below, in a flurry all around me. The Southern Californian sun was mixed with the sea spray. I stared at the image later, wondering. When did I take this? Why?

I am a camera, who cannot see, or even know why I took the picture.

We spend so much time trying to be good at things. Good photographers. Good musicians. Good writers. Good prayers, even. But what if… what if the trying is getting in the way?

Meister Eckhart knew something about this. He talked about the Grund—this deep place inside us where God lives. Not God as separate from us, but God as the very ground of who we are—the place we touch when we stop trying so hard.

My friend plays the flute. She used to practice for hours every day, frustrated that her music never quite captured what she heard in her heart. Then something shifted. She stopped practicing to get better and started just breathing into the instrument, letting whatever wanted to come, come.

I am a flute, who has the breadth, but not the sound, or from where it comes.

The music that flows through her now… it’s not hers, exactly. She has the breath. She learned the fingerings. But the melody? That comes from somewhere else. Somewhere deeper. And people stop on the street when they hear it. Not because it’s perfect. Because it’s true.

This is what Eckhart meant about detachment. Not coldness. Not not caring. But this letting go of our need to be the source of things. To be in control. To understand.

I write these morning reflections, and half the time I don’t know where the words come from. My fingers move across the keyboard and thoughts appear that I wasn’t thinking a moment before.

I write these words, as the ink bleeds from me, not knowing their form or meaning.

It’s unsettling at first. This not knowing. We want to be the author of our lives, our art, our prayers. But what if we’re meant to be something else? Something simpler and more mysterious?

What if we’re meant to be instruments?

Not tools that get used up. But… channels. Pipes with no blockages. Wires with no resistance. Waterfalls of God’s love, flowing through us into a world that’s thirsty for exactly what wants to come through.

The birds in my photo probably don’t know they were being photographed. The birds don’t know they’re beautiful. The light doesn’t know it’s falling perfectly. And yet… something is being revealed. Something is being shared.

I am a prayer, or sayer of thoughts, not of my making.

We can practice this. This not knowing. This letting go. We can learn to stop interrupting the flow with our need to understand it, to direct it, to take credit for it.

When you pick up your camera today, or your pen, or your instrument… try asking: What wants to be seen? What wants to be heard? What wants to be said?

Then step back. Breathe. Let your hands do what they know how to do. Let the light fall where it wants to fall. Let the words come from that deep place Eckhart called the ground of being.

You might be surprised by what flows through you when you stop trying to be the source.

You might discover you’ve always been the instrument you were meant to be.

I Am the Instrument

I am an instrument.

I am a camera, who cannot see,

Or even know why I took the picture.

I am an instrument.

I am a flute, who has the breadth,

But not the sound, or from where it comes.

I am an instrument.

I write these words, as the ink bleeds from me,

Not knowing their form or meaning.

I am an instrument.

I am a prayer, or sayer of thoughts,

Not of my making.

Posted on June 6, 2025 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?