Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 1 Comment

The Carousel of Our Own Making

 

A Reflection on Freedom and the Sacred Noticing of Our Patterns

Notice

We ride the carousel of our own lives—round and round, the painted horses rising and falling in their predetermined arc. The music plays, familiar and comforting. We know every note, every rhythm, every moment when the brass ring appears. For a time, it’s delightful. The lights flash, the world blurs into pleasant motion, and we feel the rush of movement without the risk of actually going anywhere.

But sit with this long enough, really notice it, and something shifts. The delight becomes duty. The music, once charming, becomes the soundtrack of our confinement. We realize that we’ve ridden this same circuit a thousand times—the same conflicts, the same compromises, the same carefully constructed identity spinning in its grooved track.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth that Sacred Noticing reveals: we are both the rider and the operator. We bought the ticket. We climb aboard each morning. We hold ourselves to the painted horse even when our legs ache and our spirit longs for solid ground.

Pause

St. Francis of Assisi knew something about carousels. The whole courtly world of Assisi was one—the merchants spinning in their pursuit of wealth, the nobles in their pursuit of honor, the church in its pursuit of power. Round and round, each carousel maintaining its own illusion of progress while going nowhere at all.

His genius was the pause. That moment in the cave. That kiss of the leper. That stripping away of his father’s clothes in the public square. Not a rejection of the world, but a rejection of the wheel.

In that pause, in that stepping off, he discovered something radical: we have freedom of movement. We always have. The carousel continues spinning, but we need not remain on it. We are the only ones who lock ourselves into the patterns of our lives—into jobs that drain us, relationships that diminish us, identities that no longer fit the people we’re becoming.

But here’s the deeper truth that Francis embodied: the only thing truly spinning is the world itself. We’ve mistaken the world’s motion for our own. The earth turns on its axis, seasons cycle, circumstances rise and fall—but we, at our center, can be still. We can be home.

And home, Francis teaches us, isn’t a place we’re spinning toward or away from. Home is the ground of our being, the presence of God that travels with us. He made home in a cave, in a leper colony, on a mountain, beneath the stars. Home was wherever he stood in awareness of the Divine presence.

The Franciscan insight is that this freedom isn’t found in acquiring something new. It’s found in the poverty that lets go. It’s in the simplicity that walks away from the most recent, irrelevant call. It’s in the humility that admits: this ride isn’t serving me anymore. It’s in the recognition that I can plant my feet anywhere and call it holy ground.

Respond

So what does Sacred Noticing call us to do?

First, notice without judgment where you’re spinning. What patterns have become prisons? What familiar circuits have you mistaken for the journey itself? Be gentle here—we don’t climb onto carousels because we’re foolish, but because they once brought us joy, or safety, or belonging.

Then pause. Really pause. Step off the platform even if just for a breath. Feel what solid ground is like beneath your feet. This is the contemplative moment—not thinking about freedom, but experiencing it. Recognize that while the world spins in its endless revolution, you don’t have to spin with it. You can be still. You can be centered. You can be home right here, right now.

Finally, respond. Not with drama or self-recrimination, but with the simple wisdom of someone who recognizes they’re free to move. Maybe you walk away from the carousel entirely. Maybe you return for one more ride, but now as a choice rather than a compulsion. Maybe you invite others to step off with you. Maybe you simply stand still and let the world do its spinning while you rest in the unchanging love that holds you.

Francis would remind us: the creation is vast. God’s playground extends far beyond our small mechanical circles. There are fields to walk through, lepers to embrace, birds to preach to, a sun to call brother, a moon to call sister. And wherever we stand in that vastness, we are home. Because home isn’t a destination. Home is the awareness that we are held, we are loved, we are free—no matter what spins around us.

The carousel will keep spinning. The world will keep turning. They always do. But you—blessed, beloved, free—you can notice where you are, pause in the awareness of your own stillness at the center, and respond with the wisdom of one who knows: I can make home wherever I am.

The question isn’t whether you can step off.

It’s whether you’ll notice that you’ve been standing on holy ground all along.

Reflection Copyright 2026 Michael J. Cunningham OFS

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 1 Comment

The Guest

The Guest

I met her at a Christmas party this week, sitting quietly among the seasonal chatter. Tall and elegant in clothes from another era, she spoke about her work, her influence, and her many connections. The words came easily, practiced, filling the space with accomplishment.

But underneath it, something else seeps out.

That’s what the moment taught me—not about her specifically, but about all of us. How we construct these careful presentations, these compartments where we store our longing, our unfulfillment, our desire for something more. We believe we’re containing it, managing it, keeping it properly hidden. And then it seeps out anyway.

Because vulnerability isn’t something we can permanently bottle up; it finds its way through the cracks. It shows itself in the pause between sentences, in the way our eyes drift when we talk about success, in the depth of a look that’s almost a stare, and in the reaching for words that never quite capture what we’re actually feeling.

She made a statement with her elegant bearing, her bygone fashion, her stories of influence. But the vulnerability came anyway, uninvited yet somehow essential. Like a guest we didn’t mean to welcome but who belonged at the table nonetheless.

I’ve spent this week thinking about these compartments; how we divide ourselves into acceptable pieces—the competent professional, the accomplished friend, the person who has it together. We present these pieces carefully, keeping the messier parts tucked away. The desire for another person, another life, another experience, another meaning.

But here’s what I see: when we live compartmentalized, something vital goes missing. We become a collection of presentations rather than a whole person. The vulnerability that seeps out isn’t a failure of our containers—it’s our wholeness trying to break through.

What if vulnerability isn’t the problem but the path? Not something to manage or hide, but something essential to feeling fully human? Yes, it might hurt us at times. Yes, it exposes us in ways that feel uncomfortable. But without it, we’re just elegant performances, telling stories of influence while the real story—the one about longing and searching and not having arrived—goes unspoken.

The party continued around us that evening. Christmas music played. People moved from conversation to conversation, everyone presenting, everyone containing. And I sat there recognizing something I’ve known but keep forgetting we’re all carrying desires that will not abate. We must continue seeking, reaching, and being vulnerable.

The question isn’t whether vulnerability will emerge. It will. It must. The question is whether we’ll make room for it, acknowledge it, let it be part of our wholeness rather than something to resist and store for another day.

Maybe that’s the real gift of the season—not the wrapped packages or the seasonal gatherings, but the moments when our careful containers crack open and something truer seeps out, when we stop long enough to be present with our unfulfillment, our reaching, our very human desire for more.

Vulnerability keeps showing up like an uninvited guest.

Perhaps it’s time to set a place at the table.

 

 

 

The guest

She sits quietly,

Telling stores of her vast influence,

Without boastful words,

Unaware of her pain exposed,

In her unfulfillment.

 

Tall, elegant and beautifully dressed,

She is slightly out of fashion,

With clothes from a bygone era,

Yet making her statement.

 

Here she moves amongst the guests,

At the Christmas party, yet underneath,

With something else,

Yet underneath it seeps out.

 

This desire for another,

Another person, life, experience, meaning;

That will not abate.

 

She must continue …

 

 

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

BETWEEN WALLS

A grassy landscape featuring a stone wall with a metal gate, surrounded by scattered rocks and wildflowers.

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.

Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham OFS

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

On Inner Peace

A scenic landscape featuring ruins and grassland under a bright sun, with a cloudy sky in the background.

What are we all looking for? If we start by being honest with ourselves—unless we’re completely consumed by our own ego—most everyone would accept the same definition. It would all come down to three words: unshakable inner peace.

That unshakable inner peace comes from God, of course. But how we get there, how we find it, varies considerably according to our beliefs, lifestyles, and attitudes.

So let me dial back just a little bit. What does it mean for us to be at peace? For the purposes of today, let’s say that being at peace means not being in turmoil. It’s being OK with things—not necessarily in a state of bliss, but managing well. You’re on the plus side of whatever heavy things you’re carrying. You’re not discontent with the world overall.

But are we all there? Not everyone is. Most of us aren’t. So where would you put yourself in this category? Where would you like to be?

Often, we look for downtime—prayer time, relaxation, meditation, all of the above—to try and dial down from whatever might be a heightened state. I’m not necessarily talking about being anxious, but you know that feeling when you’ve just had enough with something. Your day at work, whatever. And so we’re looking for lots of different ways to try and relax.

Relaxing is one way into this process. Relaxing with deliberation, using some of those tools I mentioned. A lot of what we end up doing, of course, is separating our normal, perhaps stressful life from our prayer life or our relaxed life. We are more aggravated under one set of circumstances than another.

In the ideal world, of course, whatever we’re doing during our normal life—whether we’re at school or working or retired—we don’t want to be in turmoil, annoyed, angry, or discontent. So how do we get some of this peace to spill over into those situations?

Perhaps some of those situations are unavoidable, but we can have better ways of dealing with them. When we’re faced with the things that aggravate us, we can engage—hopefully through dialogue—and resolve whatever it is. This usually involves more than one person, although sometimes that internal dialogue with ourselves can be just as challenging as when it involves someone else.

Once we have that resolution, we do get that very smooth “aha moment” of inner peace. Forgiveness has occurred. Reconciliation has happened. It’s palpable, and it isn’t just for our soul—physically, we can feel it as well.

There are literally thousands of books in the world, since the beginning of time, trying to give us ways to cope more with the everyday, with whatever lot in life we’ve been given and whatever we make of it. Leaning into the contemplative, into the place where peace can happen in our everyday lives—this is the goal.

As a retreat director, this is one of the main reasons that people come on retreat. They want to go quiet for a while. They want to renew and refresh, reconnect with their inner self and with the supreme being, God. And even those that don’t necessarily believe in a supreme being still want to meditate, quiet down, relax, and look for the same peace that all those following religious paths are seeking.

But what about the separation of our prayer life or our peace-seeking life from our regular life? This is one of the things that causes them to be separated—the fact that we think about them differently. “This is my prayer time. This is my break time. This is my weekend. This is my vacation.”

We want to have the pleasure of being OK with the world in our everyday life. Part of that is not trying to separate it. We can’t have one face to deal with the rest of the world and another face when we want to have conversations with God. It doesn’t make any sense, and it doesn’t work.

Brother Lawrence, an 17th-century French monk, wrote about “the practice of the presence of God”—where every moment of every day, even in the most mundane and boring of tasks, becomes a celebration of the presence of God.

I’m not suggesting that we’re going to be able to dial in the spiritual characteristics of Brother Lawrence as we’re driving down the freeway getting cut off. But we can do what he invited us to do: be aware of the presence of God all the time, not just when we have time to pray.

This was the revelation that the monks in his monastery had. When they were praying at set times, they realized Brother Lawrence was always praying—because he was always aware of the presence of God in all things. In the dirty dishes and laundry he was moving around the monastery. In the cleaning of pots and pans.

Perhaps this awareness would help us bring some of this peace into our own daily lives. What do you think?



Reflection and image Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham OFS

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 5 Comments

The Watershed Moment or the Case of the Missing Dialog

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

A reflection on awakening to the spiritual path through crisis

During a briefing this morning, on the latest of tragically many political assassinations and assassination attempts, the governor of Utah asked the open question: “Are we at a watershed moment?”

The governor responded to himself, saying it could be “the start of improvement and leaving darker times, or it could be the beginning of going into even darker times.”

You could taste the empathy, the sadness, and the distress in his voice, and, to a certain extent, the leadership in his voice. He was clearly implying the need for civil discourse.

This need has never been greater, and it reminded me of when we were young parents—we had two kindergarteners/first graders. Our first and second children are only 11 months apart, so this puts them in the category of Irish twins. On the rare occasion that they caused trouble (humor intended), they would immediately blame the other for whatever had occurred, whether this was an argument about who started it or perhaps something that was broken that they “didn’t do.”

My wife and I had an interesting strategy. We would say, “OK, well, we can’t find out the truth here, so let’s have you find it out.” These issues often occurred before supper for some reason.

So we sent them both into the smallest bathroom in the house with instructions: “You guys go stay in the bathroom until you figure out what is really the truth and who’s to blame and try and reconcile with each other.” Of course, they didn’t know what “reconcile with each other” meant. “Work it out” or “be nice to each other”—I guess those were the words that we used.

So then they went to the bathroom, and we proceeded to listen to what probably would be a good skit in any television sitcom. It usually started with the arm-folding exercise of deadly silence, followed by the “It’s your fault!” “No, it’s your fault!” exchange, which got louder and louder. That also usually ended up with some silence, and then they would start to pick apart the facts of the matter—whatever they were, where someone was, why “I couldn’t have done it,” why “you did it”—sort of like an investigation with the prosecution and defense alternating roles. Some of the funniest conversations would occur here.

Eventually, they would come to the conclusion that “Well, it could have been one of the others—it could have been their younger brother that did it—but now they were going to get the blame for it, and we’re never going to get out of the bathroom.”

After a while we would stop listening outside the bathroom. The sessions didn’t really last that long, but they probably seemed like an eternity to the children—perhaps 10 minutes, perhaps 15; long enough to be able to calm down, realize that they’re in this together (even if it’s just being in the dock together), and figure out what they needed to do to get out.

Now, we’ll never know as parents how many of the stories that emerged out of those results were the truth, the admission of guilt, or whatever. But what it did was help them to reconcile with each other, and it also helped us avoid issuing immediate punishment, at least, not complete injustice, when you’re at the end of your rope as a parent.

I tell this story not because it’s a model for anything in particular as far as parenting goes. Modern psychologists would probably analyze this and explain why this is bad on so many different levels. But I don’t think the kids actually took it that seriously in the end, and some of them even use it with their children now, which they feel bad about. It might be one of those unfortunate hand-me-downs that sometimes happen in families.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but think about this situation that we are in right now in our country, where we have sort of got the opposite of all of this. What we’ve created are separate virtual and physical gymnasiums—giant ones—depending on which side of the argument you’re on, instead of having one assembly hall or gymnasium or gathering space at a high school where people can interact, discuss, and share what’s going on.

One group goes in there, and then they can shout without repercussions, without any pushback, to a global audience or a small audience—whatever they want to say about someone on the other side. And for the most part, the people in these two gymnasiums are not listening to each other. They’re just shouting at each other, but the ones that are doing the shouting are reinforcing the next person shouting. And guess what? Every time someone shouts, the louder you shout, the meaner you shout, the more someone else gets paid for it—maybe even yourself.

This is what has happened: we have lost the ability to dialogue. And I’m not sure that what happened in the bathroom all those years ago in our children’s childhood was what would be considered dialogue, but they were talking to each other. They were discussing something that was contentious to them, at least in their little worlds at that time. And it had a repercussion; a repercussion on how they turned out, how they learned to debate, how they learned to reconcile, how they learned to listen to others.

I’m on the brink of publishing a new book. It’s called Practice of Sacred Noticing, and sacred noticing is a simple mechanism for some of the things that we do when we really want to interact with other humans well. We notice them. We listen to what they’re saying. We absorb what they’re saying. We then wait to let that settles; like ripples in the pond. What does that mean? What should I do? How should I respond? All before we respond. And then the third step is just responding: So we Notice, pause, respond.

This is not rocket science, but it’s something that we need right now.

We also need a break. People are building their own lifeboats. They’re trying to find a way to insulate the ones they love from all that’s going on in the world. They don’t want to engage in a shouting match or, worse still, a shooting match, as it appears to be turning into.

We have to decide what the environment is that we want in our own homes, just as we do in our towns, just as we do in our states, just as we do in our country.

One option is to shut down the gymnasiums. The people collecting the money in the gymnasiums can only do so if we keep shouting. Not that everything that goes on in these two particular gymnasiums is shouting, but taking a break will help us—and it won’t help those who are trying to get rich from all the shouting.

The lifeboat

There she sits …


And what a beauty

Designed to survive any gale

Weather and stormy sea sealed

As if I were a whale

Taking care of all my Jonahs



Someone asked me today

“What’s it for?”

“In case of storms”

And they asked “are you going out to sea?”

And I could not answer

It’s ready, though

My lifeboat

Big enough to hold family

And no others

Because love one’s count


And if it comes …

The big storm that is

I am ready

And have done my duty

To protect myself and a few loved ones

And forget about the others

Who are near or far

Because a lifeboat is for me to live

And survive

For a little while




Reflection, poem and image Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham OFS