A Spiritual Break

Posted on January 19, 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham

Being and Doing: What Centering Prayer Teaches

Being and Doing: What Centering Prayer Teaches

If you practice centering prayer, you already know the dance between being and doing. You sit in silence, consenting to God’s presence. That’s being. But when thoughts arise—and they always do—you gently return to your sacred word. That’s doing. Not much doing, just a whisper of intention, a soft returning. But it’s doing nonetheless.

The practice works because being and doing aren’t opposites. They’re partners.

What Happens in the Prayer

In centering prayer, you’re not trying to empty your mind or stop your thoughts. You’re learning a different way of relating to them. A thought arises—your to-do list, a worry, a memory—and you don’t fight it. You simply notice it’s there, and gently return to your sacred word.

Notice. Return. Notice. Return.

That gentle returning is doing. But it emerges from being—from your fundamental openness to God’s presence within you.

This is what Thomas Keating meant when he said centering prayer isn’t about getting rid of thoughts but about changing our relationship to them. You’re learning that you don’t have to chase every thought, engage every worry, or solve every problem that floats through your awareness.

You can simply let them pass, like boats on a river, while you remain present to Something deeper.

What This Teaches About Life

Here’s what surprised me after years of centering prayer: the practice wasn’t just teaching me how to pray. It was teaching me how to live. That same quality of gentle noticing and returning? It works in daily life too.

You’re in a meeting and your mind starts racing toward the next task. Notice. Gently return to presence, to this meeting, to these people.

You’re washing dishes and treating it like just another chore to get through. Notice. Gently return to the experience—the warm water, the simple service, this moment.

Someone says something that triggers defensiveness and you feel the familiar reaction rising. Notice. Pause. Return to your deeper intention—to listen, to understand, to respond from love rather than react from fear. Sacred Noticing is centering prayer extended into the rest of your day.

The Same Gentle Movement

In centering prayer: Thought arises → Notice → Gently return to sacred word
In Sacred Noticing: Stimulus arises → Notice → Pause → Respond from presence

See the similarity? Both practices involve the same fundamental movement—a gentle returning to presence when you’ve drifted into autopilot. A soft choosing of being even in the midst of doing.

The miracle of centering prayer isn’t that thoughts stop coming. They don’t. The miracle is that you learn you don’t have to be controlled by them. You can notice them and choose something deeper—presence, openness, consent to God’s action within you.

The miracle of Sacred Noticing is the same. The tasks don’t stop coming. The to-do list doesn’t disappear. But you learn you don’t have to be controlled by the tyranny of productivity. You can notice what’s present and choose to engage your life from being, not just doing.

Both Require Doing

Here’s what people sometimes miss: even centering prayer involves doing.

You choose to sit. You choose your sacred word. You choose to return to it, again and again, with the gentlest intention. It’s minimal doing—a whisper, not a shout—but it’s doing nonetheless.

This is the integration: Being doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means doing from a different place—from presence, from openness, from consent rather than control. In prayer, you consent to God’s presence and action within. That consent is both being (receptive openness) and doing (active choice to return when thoughts pull you away).

In daily life, you consent to each moment as it is, bringing that same quality of receptive presence to whatever needs doing. The dishes still need washing. The email still needs sending. The difficult conversation still needs to happen. But you’re there; actually there, while it’s happening.

The Practice Extends Itself

Centering prayer taught me I could sit for twenty minutes in receptive silence, gently returning to presence whenever I drifted. That was revolutionary. Sacred Noticing taught me I could bring that same quality of gentle returning into the rest of my day. That was life-changing.

You’re making coffee—notice you’re lost in planning, gently return to the experience of making coffee.
You’re talking to your spouse—notice you’re formulating your response instead of listening, gently return to presence with them.
You’re walking to your car—notice you’re already three tasks ahead, gently return to the walk itself, the air, the light, your body moving.

Same gentle movement. Same patient returning. Same integration of being and doing.

The Gift of Both

What centering prayer gives you in the silence, Sacred Noticing gives you in the noise.

Both teach you that being isn’t separate from doing. Being is what makes your doing human, conscious, alive.
Both teach you that you don’t have to control everything. You can trust the gentle returning, the patient practice, the accumulated moments of choosing presence.
Both teach you that the spiritual life isn’t somewhere else, in some other moment when things are quieter or holier or more perfect. It’s here, in this moment, with these tasks, in this ordinary life.

The sacred word in centering prayer isn’t magic. It’s just a way back to presence when you’ve drifted. Sacred Noticing isn’t magic either. It’s just the same way back, extended into the rest of your day.

Notice. Return. Notice. Return.

In prayer and in life, being and doing dance together. And both are sacred.

Pause for Thought:
The gentle returning you practice in centering prayer—what if that same movement could inform every moment of your day?

Michael Cunningham, OFS
spiritualbreak.com

Posted on January 3, 2026 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.

Posted on December 21, 2025 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 October 3, 2025October 3, 2025 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.

Posted on September 26, 2025September 26, 2025 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?