Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

“Michael, You Are Such a Fidget”

My mother had a phrase for me. She would say it with a sigh, sometimes with a smile, and occasionally with the particular Irish tone mothers reserve for a child who has just created an imaginary new game from a wooden stick: “Michael, you are such a fidget.”

She was right. I was always on the move. Moving towards the next thing as soon as the last one was finished. Always wanting to know how something worked. To know what the word “omnipresent” meant at six years of age, or to try something no one had asked me to try. If there was a new path, I wanted to walk it. If there was no path, I created one. If there was a better way, I wanted to find and explore it.

The fidget grew up, but never really sat down. Today we have kinder words for him. We might call him an entrepreneur, or a creative, or say he is wired a certain way. Some would hand him a personality type and a number. But none of those labels quite touch the thing itself: a restlessness that keeps compelling us forward, a desire to make something better, to change it, to discover it, even when some quiet part of us already knows we will never quite arrive.

I have come to believe that restlessness is not a flaw to be managed. It may be one of the ways God has been calling us all along.

The Restless Heart

Sixteen centuries ago, Augustine began his Confessions with a sentence that has outlived empires: Our heart is restless until it rests in you.

We usually hear that line as a criticism of restlessness, as if the goal of the spiritual life were to finally stop squirming. But read it again. Augustine is not condemning the restless heart. He is explaining it. The restlessness is a homing instinct. It is the heart’s way of knowing it was made for something larger than anything it has found so far.

The writer Ronald Rolheiser makes a similar point. Every one of us, he says, carries a fire inside: an unquenchable longing, an energy that will not let us settle. Spirituality is not about putting that fire out. It is about what we do with it.

I used to think of the fidget in me as the opposite of the Holy Longing, the inward pull that draws us toward God. One moves outward, the other inward. One builds and tinkers and explores; the other waits in silence. But I no longer think they are opposites. I think they are the same desire, facing in different directions. The question is not whether we are restless. The question is which way our restlessness is pointing.

The Noonday Demon

The desert fathers knew the shadow side of the fidget well. Evagrius, a fourth-century monk, wrote about a temptation he called acedia, the noonday demon. It came in the heat of the day, when the monk sat in his cell. Suddenly the hours seemed endless. He would get up, look out the window, check the sun, wonder whether the brothers in some other monastery had it better. Anything to avoid staying where he was.

That is the fidget as flight. The motion looks like energy, but it is really escape: from silence, from ourselves, from whatever might be waiting for us if we stopped long enough to meet it.

There is a modern version too, and it often looks virtuous. A comedian once built a whole career on the phrase “Git ‘er done.” Most of us have a little of that inside. Call it the robot within: the part of us that keeps producing, fixing, improving, and checking things off, not because love is drawing us but because stopping feels dangerous. The robot can do a great deal of good work. It can even do holy work. It just cannot rest.

I will confess that I know this robot. I have spent part of my life helping people find their way to stillness, leading retreats, teaching prayer, creating space for others to encounter the divine within. And more than once I have caught myself so busy making room for other people’s silence that I left none for my own.

Straining Forward

And yet the tradition does not tell the fidget to stop. It tells him where to go.

St. Paul wrote to the Philippians that he had not yet arrived, but that he was straining forward to what lies ahead. Gregory of Nyssa took that image and built a whole spirituality from it. He called it epektasis: the soul’s endless stretching toward God. Because God is infinite, Gregory said, we never reach the end of God. We never arrive, sit down, and declare ourselves finished. Each discovery opens onto a larger one. The more we find, the more we long for. Perfection is not standing still. It is never ceasing to grow.

That is the fidget made holy. Not the restlessness that flees, but the restlessness that explores. Not the robot, but the pilgrim.

The old Celtic monks had their own version. Some of them set out to sea in small boats called coracles, sometimes without oars, letting the wind carry them wherever God intended. They called it peregrinatio, wandering for the love of God. They were not running away from anything. They were moving toward a place they had not yet seen, trusting that the movement itself was a kind of prayer.

Which Way Is It Pointing?

Looking back on my own life, I can see the fidget at every turn. I spent years in the world of technology, starting a company and mapping how work moves from one hand to another. Then the same restless mind turned toward ministry, toward theology, toward prayer. And somewhere along the way, the fidget became a teacher of centering prayer, the stillest practice I know.

I do not think that was an accident. We often teach what we most need to learn.

What I have learned is that the fidget does not need to be cured. It needs to be noticed. When I feel that familiar urge to move, to start, to improve, to fix, I have begun asking a few simple questions:

  • Am I moving toward something, or away from something?
  • Is this motion leaving room for me to be surprised?
  • If I stopped for an hour, what am I afraid I would meet?
  • Is this restlessness feeding others, or only feeding the robot?

None of those questions require us to stop moving. They only ask us to move with our eyes open. That, I think, is what sacred noticing has always been for people like me. It does not ask the fidget to sit perfectly still. It asks him to keep walking, but to walk awake.

Let Us Begin Again

Near the end of his life, worn out and nearly blind, St. Francis turned to his brothers and said, Let us begin, brothers, for up to now we have done little or nothing.

This was the man who had rebuilt churches with his own hands, walked across battle lines to meet a sultan, and gathered thousands of followers. And at the end, he wanted to start over. That is not the voice of a man who failed to rest. It is the voice of a man whose restlessness had finally become love. Beginner’s mind, all the way to the last breath.

So if you have spent your life being told to sit still, settle down, and finish what you started, take heart. Your fidget may be the Holy Longing itself, still looking for home. The work is not to stop it, but to turn it toward God.

The Church has always understood this, which may be why it gave its fidgeters something to do with their hands: rosary beads, prayer ropes, a labyrinth to walk, a road to make pilgrimage on. This week, try a fidget prayer. Take a walk without a destination, or hold a set of beads, or simply let your hands move while your heart settles. Let the body fidget so the soul can rest.

My mother was right. I am such a fidget. I am beginning to think God made me that way on purpose.

Where is your restlessness carrying you right now—toward something, or away from something?

What might change if, for a while, you don’t demand that it stop, but you ask what it’s trying to point to?

Reflection Copyright 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham OFS

 

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The Drifting Prayer

The Drifting Prayer

A Reflection on Unhurried Attention

A Prayer for the Lunch Hour

It is 12:15. You have thirty minutes, perhaps forty if the meeting before ran short and the one after starts late. Somewhere you have read that you ought to pray more, and somewhere else that it’s good to meditate, and both pieces of advice arrive with instructions: find a quiet room, sit upright, close your eyes, set a timer, settle the breath, let the mind grow still.

These are good instructions. I have taught many of them for years and still keep them faithfully. But I will be honest with you. At 12:15 on a Tuesday, with the inbox still humming in my chest and a sandwich awaiting, I do not have a quiet room. I simply do not have the twenty minutes it takes simply to come down from the morning. And the deliberate, interior stillness those prayers ask for is often not available to me. It is not that I refuse it. It is that the door to that room is locked from the other side, and the key is time I do not have.

So for a long while I did what most of us do. I spent the half hour on my phone, or finishing an email, or eating at my desk, and called it a break. It was not a break. It was more rowing.

This reflection is about a different kind of prayer, one that asks for no special state at all. You keep your eyes open. You keep your feet moving, or not. You stay entirely in the ordinary, conscious, waking world, the world of sidewalks and pigeons and the sound of a delivery truck backing up. You simply stop steering it for a while. We call it The Drifting Prayer, and it is as old as the Irish sea.

Where the Drifting Comes From

In the year 891, three Irishmen came ashore in Cornwall in a small boat of hide stretched over a wooden frame. They had set out without oars. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle thought this strange enough to write down. Brought before King Alfred and asked why, they gave an answer that has outlived the kingdom: they wished to be pilgrims for the love of God, and they cared not where.

The Celtic monks had a name for this way of travelling: peregrinatio pro amore Dei, wandering for the love of God. It was pilgrimage with the destination taken out. Columba left Ireland for Iona around 563 not knowing what his work would become. The Voyage of St. Brendan tells of monks who let wind and current carry them from island to island. They spoke of going out to find their “place of resurrection,” the place where God was waiting for them. They did not plan their way there. They let themselves be carried.

Seven centuries later, in the hills of Umbria, the same instinct surfaced in a different accent. The Little Flowers of St. Francis tells of a day when Francis and Brother Masseo came to a crossroads, one road to Siena, one to Florence, one to Arezzo. Francis told Masseo to spin around in place like a child until he was dizzy, and to set out in whichever direction he fell facing. Masseo grumbled, spun, and stopped facing Siena. To Siena they went. Another day, walking near Bevagna, Francis left the road entirely because the trees were full of birds. He had not planned a sermon to them. He simply turned toward what was in front of him.

These are not stories about carelessness. They are stories about trust. The monks and the friars had decided, with their whole bodies, that God was a better navigator than they were. Then they built small, deliberate ways of letting go of the steering.

Now look at your own week, and count the oars. The calendar. The GPS. The to-do list, the step counter, the plan for next quarter. Even our rest has an agenda now; we measure our sleep and optimize our weekends. There is nothing wrong with oars. But a life that never ships them has quietly decided who is steering, and it is worth noticing what that decision is.

How to Drift

You do not need a retreat center, a chapel, or a quiet room. You need a small boat, and a willingness to put down the oars. The whole invitation is short enough to memorize:

The Celtic monks set out to sea in small boats with no oars, and let the current decide. For the next while, this place is your current. There is nowhere to get to and nothing to bring back. Walk, or don’t. If something finds you, let it.

Here is how it unfolds, gently, in a lunch hour or a coffee break.

  1. Choose your coracle. The coracle was the little round boat of the Irish rivers, and it is the only real decision you make. Your coracle is a boundary: twenty minutes, thirty, the length of a lunch break. A place: the park near the office, the block around your building, a bench in the courtyard, the long way back from the car. Decide the edges, and then stop deciding. The boundary is what holds you, so that you are free to stop holding yourself.
  2. Say the six words. Before you step out, borrow the pilgrims’ own prayer of consent: Lead me; I care not where. You can say it aloud or under your breath. It is not a technique. It is a handing over of the tiller.
  3. Ship the oars. Put the phone in your pocket, on silent, or better still leave it at your desk. Drop the errand you were going to squeeze in. Release any idea of what this half hour ought to produce. You are not walking for exercise, or thinking through a problem, or getting some air so you can be more productive this afternoon. You are simply going out.
  4. Let the current carry you. Begin to move, or sit, and follow whatever gently draws you. A turn in the path. The way the light lies on a wall. The smell of bread from a doorway. A child’s laugh across the street. A memory that rises without being asked. Look at the familiar as though you had never seen it before; the same tree you pass every day is not, in fact, the same tree. Notice what is outside you, and notice too what moves inside you as you look, without grading any of it. Steer only for safety. Otherwise, let the drawing do the steering.
  5. When something finds you, stay. Somewhere in the drift, something may stop you: a sparrow in a puddle, a stranger’s kindness, a line of shadow that seems, for a moment, unbearably beautiful. Stop there. Let your feet feel the ground. Breathe once, twice, three times, slowly. You do not have to name it, photograph it, or turn it into a lesson. You might simply ask, without needing an answer, What is here for me? Then let it be what it is.
  6. Let it, and drift on. Sometimes what finds you asks something of you: a word to the person at the next table, a call you suddenly know you should make, a softening toward the colleague you were rehearsing an argument with. Sometimes it asks only that you remain with it a moment longer. Sometimes it asks nothing at all. Whatever it is, let it be enough, and when it releases you, let the current have the boat again.

Out on the Water

You will reach for the oars. Let me say that plainly, so you are not surprised. Five minutes in, you will find yourself planning the afternoon, or replaying the meeting, or wondering whether this is “working.” You may catch yourself turning the walk into a step count, or the sunlight into a photograph for later.

When that happens, notice it, smile, and take your hands off the handle. That reach for the oars is not failure. It is the practice. Each time you let go, something in you learns a little more about trust. On some days you will let go forty times in thirty minutes. Those are not wasted days. They may be the best ones.

This is also why The Drifting Prayer does not ask you to empty your mind. Your mind will be full: of the street, of the weather, of your own wandering thoughts. That fullness is not in the way. It is the water you are floating on. The other great prayers of stillness ask us to let thoughts go by like boats on a river. In this one, you are the boat, and the river is the whole ordinary afternoon.

As a boy I spent long days on the bank of the river Avon with a fishing rod, reading the water and the season and the shadows where the big one might be lying. My elders called it daydreaming. I know now it was something closer to prayer: awake, attentive, unhurried, and not in charge. The Drifting Prayer gives that boy’s afternoon back to the grown man with half an hour and a paper bag.

And if nothing finds you? If the whole half hour is just wind and footsteps and an ordinary sky? Then the drifting itself was the prayer, and it was enough. Being led is a form of prayer, perhaps the oldest one. Nothing in the drift has to be harvested to count.

A word for those in a drifting season of life. Some of you did not choose your coracle. Retirement chose it, or illness, or the empty house, or the long wait between what ended and what has not yet begun. Our culture will tell you that because you are not doing anything, nothing is happening. The three men in the boat say otherwise. And notice this: the monks did not drift to relax. They drifted to be sent. Columba’s drift ended at Iona, and Iona changed the world. If the way ahead is unclear, the drift is not the opposite of discernment. It is discernment, at the speed of trust.

Coming Ashore

When your coracle reaches its edge, when the half hour is up, come ashore gently. Stand still for a moment before you go back through the door. Feel your feet. Take one slow breath. Say a simple thank you, for whatever found you or for the plain gift of having been carried.

Then go back to your afternoon, and see what comes with you. Often it is not a thought but a texture: a slower step on the stairs, a little more room between the email arriving and your reply, a gentler eye for the person across the desk. Do not grasp at it. It came on the current, and it will return on the current.

The Drifting Prayer replaces none of the other prayers. The chair, the sacred word, the Scriptures, the chapel will all be there when you have the time and the quiet they ask for. This prayer simply consecrates the hours they cannot reach: the in-between ones, the unplanned ones, the thirty minutes we were about to waste by filling. And over time, something curious happens. The drift begins to leak into the rest of the day. You find yourself, at a red light or in a hallway or on hold, taking your hands off the oars for a single breath. The lunch hour becomes a doorway rather than a gap.

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

Where in your day are you still gripping the oars, and what might find you if, for thirty minutes, you let the current decide?

A Prayer for the Drift

Lord of wind and water,

you carried Brendan over the deep

and turned Francis toward the birds.

Here is my little boat,

this half hour, this ordinary street.

I lay down the oars.

Lead me; I care not where.

Open my eyes to what you place before me,

and let me be content to be carried.

Amen.

 

Reflection Copyright 2026 Michael J. Cunningham OFS

 

 

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

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The Leash by the Door

The Leash by the Door

I could not put the leash away.

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

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

What Flame Left

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

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

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

Flame had no gap.

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

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

Why It Hurts This Much

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

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

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

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

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

St. Francis Saw This First

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Prayer

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

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

Praised be you through Brother Sun,

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

and through Sister Moon, who kept watch with us

through the last of the long nights.

We come to this threshold carrying small things:

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

the sound our ears still listen for

and no longer hear.

Praised be you, Lord, for the creatures.

Francis called them brother and sister

and meant it plainly, without embarrassment —

Brother Wolf, who was hungry and not evil,

Sister Lark, who sang the day open,

the fish returned to the water,

the animals who came to him

because he did not come to them armed.

Praised be you through Brother Fire,

beautiful and playful and robust and strong,

whose name she carried without ever being told,

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

You gave us a companion who never once

asked us to be more than we were.

Who did not measure our failures,

or keep an account of our absences,

or love us less on the days we deserved less.

Who met us at the door

as though we had been gone a hundred years,

and taught us, without a single word,

the whole grammar of welcome.

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

Through Mother Earth, who receives what she has given

and asks nothing for the keeping.

Through Sister Bodily Death, whom Francis blessed

and did not fear —

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

and love was the last thing in the room.

We do not ask you to explain this.

We ask only that you receive Flame back

into the same creation that made her,

your first and still-speaking language,

where nothing you have loved is ever wasted

and nothing you have made is ever lost to you.

And send us out again into that creation

carrying what she placed in us

before we had a name for it:

her patience, her gladness, her uncomplicated presence,

her footprint on the quiet floor of our lives.

May what we held in our hands

be held now in our living.

Through Christ, who is the mirror and the light,

the bread and the dawn,

the space between and the One who fills it.

Amen.

What She Was Teaching

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

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

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

Notice. Pause. Respond. And then … Repeat.

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

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

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

Reflection Copyright 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham OFS

 

 

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

 

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The Boat Without Oars

The Boat Without Oars

A Spiritual Break Reflection

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

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

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

Now look at your own week. Count the oars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflection Copyright 2026 Michael J. Cunningham OFS

 

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The Yellow Light

The Yellow Light

A Spiritual Break Reflection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Copyright 2026 Michael J. Cunningham OFS

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