Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

The Other Way In

The Other Way In

I have enormous respect for Thomas Merton.

His willingness to go deep — to sit in silence long enough that the noise of the constructed self finally runs out of things to say — is one of the most serious spiritual commitments a human being can make. Richard Rohr, too. His insistence that we stop splitting the world into tidy categories, that we learn to sit with complexity rather than resolve it into something manageable — that kind of thinking has opened doors for countless people who thought the Church had nothing left to offer them.

I am not dismissing any of that. I want to say that plainly before I say what comes next.

But I want to talk about a different door.

Most of us don’t live in monasteries. Most of us don’t have hours of protected silence. We live in the middle of things — difficult meetings, fractured relationships, financial pressure, the particular chaos of a family in the morning before anyone has had enough coffee. We live in the world as it actually is, not as we wish it were, and that world has a way of arriving faster than any interior preparation can handle.

The traditional model of spiritual transformation — the one Merton and Rohr both inhabit, each in their own way — starts inside. Get the values right. Shift the interior architecture. Deconstruct the false self. Achieve non-dual awareness. And then, once the inner work is done, the outer behavior will follow.

I understand this model. I believe in its depth.

And I am genuinely grateful both of them exist. These are huge contributions. They have opened the tradition to people who thought it was closed to them, and they have changed lives — including mine.

However, I have also noticed — in myself as much as anywhere — is that the gap between understanding something and living it in the actual friction of a Tuesday afternoon is real, and wide, and it doesn’t close automatically. You can have read every word Merton ever wrote and still send the email you shouldn’t send. You can understand Rohr’s concept of the shadow self and still find it fully operational at dinner. This is not a failure of the tradition. It is simply the truth that the interior life and the ordinary life don’t always find each other on their own. They need a bridge. And the more bridges we can build, the better.

And I have found — something the Franciscan tradition has always quietly known — is that sometimes the door into the interior life opens from the outside. Not always. Not exclusively. But for many people, in many seasons of life, the place where transformation begins is in the next small behavior.

Not the next retreat. The next conversation.

Not the next chapter of a difficult book. The next breath, taken deliberately before you respond to something that made you angry.

Francis of Assisi didn’t begin with a theology. He began with an embrace. A leper on a road. A revulsion he chose not to act on. And something shifted — not in his ideas about holiness, but in him, at the level of his actual life. The action opened the door. The transformation followed the doing.

This is what Sacred Noticing asks: not that you first achieve a correct interior disposition, but that you change one behavior, right now, in this moment. Notice what is actually happening in you before you react. Pause long enough for something wiser to surface. Respond from that place rather than from the momentum of your first impulse.

That is not a lesser form of spiritual practice. It is a different entry point to the same territory.

The spiritual footprint you leave behind — the emotional atmosphere you create in a room, the quality of attention you bring to the person in front of you, the trace that remains after you’ve moved on — that footprint doesn’t wait for your interior life to be sorted out. It is happening now. Every day. In every encounter.

The question isn’t whether you are leaving one. You are.

The question is what kind.

And the work of noticing that — not in theory, but in the actual texture of your day — has a way of teaching you things about yourself that no amount of reading ever quite manages. You discover your own values not by reflecting on them in the abstract, but by watching what you actually do when something unexpected arrives. You find out what you truly believe not in the quiet of a chapel, but in the sudden pressure of a difficult moment.

The interior life and the exterior life are not two separate projects. They feed each other. Act well enough times, and the values begin to follow. Behave with more patience than you feel, and one day you notice you really feel more patient.

This is not a shortcut. It is a different road up the same mountain.

Merton will take you somewhere profound. So will Rohr. I have learned from both of them, and I suspect I will keep learning. The tradition needs every door it can find. It always has. The monastery and the marketplace have always been two ways into the same life, and the people who found God in one have rarely regretted that there were people finding God in the other.

But if you are a person living inside an ordinary, complicated life — if you have commitments and pressures and relationships that don’t pause for your spiritual development — then the door I want to show you is right here. In your next meeting. Your next disagreement. The next time something small goes wrong and you feel the familiar pressure beginning to build.

That is the place. That is the practice.

You don’t have to find a monastery.

You are already standing in one.

— Michael J. Cunningham, OFS, D.Min. spiritualbreak.com

Adapted from The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint

 

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

No Permission Required

The Threshold You’re Already Standing On

There is a particular kind of spiritual exhaustion that comes not from absence, but from misdirection.

You may have been looking for the sacred in the wrong places. Not because you chose poorly, but because someone, somewhere, gave you the impression that it lived somewhere else. In a special silence. A retreat center. A rare moment of clarity. A time in your life when things calmed down enough to finally pay attention.

And so, you have been waiting.

I understand this. I have done it myself.

The strange thing about contemplative practice — the thing it takes years to inhabit rather than just understand — is that the threshold you’ve been waiting to cross is the one you’re standing on right now. Not metaphorically. Literally. The doorway of the room you just walked through. The pause before you answer a question someone is waiting for. The moment between an email arriving and your hands beginning to type.

These are not interruptions to the spiritual life. They are the spiritual life.

Francis of Assisi understood this with a kind of reckless clarity. He didn’t organize a program. He didn’t develop a curriculum. He stepped outside and started paying attention. He called the sun his brother and the moon his sister not because he was being poetic, but because he had stopped dividing the world into sacred and secular categories. He had noticed that everything was already charged with presence.

That noticing changed everything. Not just for him — for everyone around him.

What we leave behind in an encounter also matters. Not just our words or our decisions, but the quality of our presence. The warmth or coolness of the atmosphere after we’ve left a room. Whether the people we’ve just spoken with feel more seen or less. More capable or less. Whether something has been added to the world, or quietly subtracted.

This is not a small thing. It accumulates over a lifetime into something that looks very much like a legacy.

The practice isn’t complicated. It asks only that you stop long enough for wisdom to catch up with the pace you’re moving. Perhaps one, maybe three breaths. One moment of genuine attention before you respond. The willingness to notice what is actually here, before assuming you already know.

Ancient voices — from the desert fathers to the Celtic saints to Francis himself — kept returning to this same insistence: that the sacred is not something you attain. It is something you stop running past.

Your ordinary life is already the place. Your daily commute, the difficult conversation you’ve been putting off, the moment your child says something you almost miss because you’re half somewhere else. These are the thin places. Not because they’ve been designated as holy, but because any place becomes thin the moment you stop moving through it, arrive, and then stay there.

You don’t have to go anywhere.

You just have to notice where you already are.

— Michael J. Cunningham, OFS, D.Min. spiritualbreak.com

Reflection derived from the work contained in The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint.

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

The Spiritual Break – The Gathering

 

Dear Friends,

A few years ago I was walking in the woods in New Hampshire with my friend Tom. We had been talking for hours — the way you can with old friends you haven’t seen in a long time. As we entered a stand of trees above the stream on his property, he stopped, breathed in slowly, and said:

“Mike, this is my sanctuary … This is my chapel.”

I’ve thought about that moment many times since. Not because it was unusual — but because it was true. And because most of us have a place like that, or a moment like that, and we rarely stop long enough to name it.

That’s what Sacred Noticing is, at its heart. The practice of stopping long enough to name what is already here.

I’ve been writing about this practice for a few years now. And for a while, I’ve been sitting with a quiet thought: that it might be better practiced together than alone. So I’m opening a monthly gathering. Nothing elaborate. One hour on the first Tuesday of each month, online via Zoom. A small group of people who want to sit with the practice together — with some silence, a short reflection, and honest conversation about what the practice is doing in ordinary life.

The first gathering is in July. We’ll begin with The Sanctuary — which is where everything else begins. Where Tom stopped in the woods. Where the practice finds its ground. I’ve written a reflection on that theme which I’ll share in full on the site. A few lines from it, to give you a feel for where we’ll begin:

We all have these places in our lives. Somewhere where the encounter with the marvel of God’s creation snuggles us tightly. Where we are, once again, in the womb that gave us life.

Perhaps you can visit yours again soon.

Read the full reflection — The Sanctuary

If you’d like to join us in July, just reply to this email with the word Gathering. I’ll send you the Zoom link — it’s permanent, so you’ll only ever need to ask once. There’s no registration form, no course to sign up for, no commitment beyond showing up when it’s right for you. The door is open on the first Tuesday. Come if you can.

The Sacred Noticing Gathering — July

And going forward the First Tuesday of each month

Time: [6:30pm] Pacific · [9:30pm] Eastern · [TIME] GMT

One hour · Online via Zoom · Free

 

Theme for July: The Sanctuary

 

To join: reply to this email with the word Gathering.

I will send the Zoom link by return.

One more thing. Some of you have been asking about the book. The Practice of Sacred Noticing is now available — on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and as a signed copy directly from me if you’d prefer that. It’s the written companion to what we’ll be doing together each month. I’m glad it’s finally in the world.

Get the Book

All formats

Order a personally signed copy, or find Sacred Noticing at your preferred bookseller.

Where is your sanctuary right now?

Perhaps it’s closer than you think.

I’ll see you on the first Tuesday.

— Michael

spiritualbreak.com

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 1 Comment

The First Life Skill: An Easter Reflection

The First Life Skill

An Easter Reflection

I was walking my dog Bella this morning when three runners came towards us on the path — a life coach and what looked like a young married couple working hard to keep up with him. I stepped aside to let them pass, and caught only a fragment of what the coach was saying, mid-sentence, to his clients:

“…meditation should be the first life skill you learn. It’s as important as reading or writing.”

The couple sounded like they needed to breathe more than anything else at that moment as they struggled to keep up with the coach. They were around the bend before I could hear more. But the fragment stayed with me for the rest of the walk, which is, of course, a form of meditation in itself.

Easter has something to say about this.

I kept turning that phrase over — the first life skill — because the coach wasn’t wrong. What changes when you learn to be genuinely present — before you react, before you perform, before you start managing the day — is not one area of your life. It is the whole thing.

But there was something about the morning itself that had been doing the teaching before the coach opened his mouth.

The light was already on the hills. My dog was doing what dogs do — completely in the moment, no argument with it. Three people running together on an ordinary Friday morning, already alive to something. And the whole scene had a quality I can only describe as already full.

That is what Easter keeps trying to say to me, and I keep needing to hear it differently.

The resurrection doesn’t introduce God to the world. It tears the veil on what was always here — patient in the ordinary, present in the morning light, carried in the fragment of a sentence caught on a path between one bend and the next.

Meister Eckhart called it the Seelengrund — the ground of the soul. The place beneath all the fluctuating — the good seasons of prayer and the dry stretches, the days when God feels close and the longer ones when God seems to have left the building entirely. Beneath all of it, something holds. Not as feeling. As fact.

I have spent enough time in the dry stretches to have tested this. And what I found — not dramatically, more like a slow recognition — is that the mystics were right about this one thing: you cannot turn God off. Not by your doubt. Not by your distraction. Not by the stone at the door.

The only real question — the one Easter puts back on the table every year — is whether I am present to what is already present to me.

What about you? Where have you stopped looking — quietly assuming there is nothing there?

That question, honestly held, is itself a practice.

It is, in fact, the beginning of what I’ve come to call Sacred Noticing — not a technique you apply to your life from the outside, but the moment you realize your life has been unfolding on sacred ground all along.

The morning dog walk. The three runners. The fragment overheard between one bend and the next. Any of these, met with a little waking, becomes the place where the divine is already present and already speaking.

The resurrection doesn’t introduce that.

It just keeps confirming it.

Whatever this Easter holds for you — the alleluias, the quiet uncertainty, or the honest in-between that many of us actually inhabit — the invitation is the same.

The divine is not elsewhere.

It is here. In this day. In this life. In the specific, irreplaceable way that Love has chosen to be present in you.

 

Notice that.

That is, perhaps, the first life skill.

“The desire for belonging is, at its ground, the soul’s memory of the Garden’s chemistry.”

 

Michael J. Cunningham OFS is a Franciscan secular, writer, and retreat director. This reflection is part of the SpiritualBreak.com contemplative series.

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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.

 

Copyright 2026 Michael J. Cunningham OFS