Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

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

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

Spiritual Break Gathering Next Tuesday

Please join me for a monthly gathering to present and discuss a Spiritual Break reflection and the impact of our Spiritual Footprint in a one-hour gathering each month.

For more details on the next meeting visit https://spiritualbreak.com/the-spiritual-break-gathering/

And to go ahead and join us, click the link below:

Register here for the next meeting 

You only have to register once, and the link will work every time.

Thanks in advance,

Michael

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 3 Comments

Have I Labeled Myself Into a Corner?

Have I Labeled Myself Into a Corner?

For many years, I introduced myself, quietly and without much thought, as the practical one. The businessman who happened to go on retreats. Not really a writer. Not a contemplative. Just someone who liked a good agenda and a well-run meeting, and who prayed on the side, the way you might keep a hobby in the garage.

I did not choose that label out of malice. It fit, or seemed to, for a long time. It explained why I was good in a boardroom and quiet in a chapel. It gave people a tidy place to put me, and it gave me a tidy place to put myself. The trouble is that a label, once it fits, starts doing something a description was never meant to do. It stops describing you and starts deciding what is allowed to happen to you next.

The Comfort of a Good Corner

There is real comfort in a label, and I do not want to pretend otherwise. Naming our patterns is not a small thing. Knowing that we are the anxious one, the peacemaker, the fixer, the introvert, the practical one, gives us a vocabulary for our own weather. It can be the beginning of real self-knowledge, and I have watched it help people enormously, myself included.

But a corner is still a corner, even when we built it ourselves and even when it is comfortable. The danger is not in noticing the pattern. The danger is in mistaking the pattern for the whole room. “I am the practical one” quietly becomes “I am not the kind of person who writes.” “I am not a natural leader” becomes “I do not get to try.” We reach for the label to explain ourselves, and somewhere along the way the label stops explaining and starts deciding.

The Ones We Hand Ourselves

We are quick to notice when someone else tries to label us, and quicker still to push back. Don’t put me in a box. You don’t know me well enough to say that. We defend the border of ourselves fiercely against other people’s descriptions.

We are far less vigilant about the labels we hand ourselves. I am too old for that now. I have never been the creative type. That is simply not who I am. These arrive so quietly, and so early, that by the time they are limiting us they no longer feel like a decision at all. They feel like a fact. Nobody argues with a fact.

I spent years believing, as a fact rather than a habit, that I was not the kind of person who put words on a page for others to read. It took a very patient nudge — first toward a journal nobody else would see, then toward a reflection I was too embarrassed to send, then toward this very practice you are reading right now — before I noticed the label might have simply been wrong. Not wrong the way an error is wrong. Wrong the way a coat two sizes too small is wrong. It had fit once. It no longer did. I had just kept wearing it.

Opening the Door Without a Label On It

Sacred Noticing asks something different here, and it is not what most self-improvement asks. It does not ask you to find a better label. It asks you to notice the moment you reach for one, and pause before you let it close a door.

Somewhere in the hallway of your life there is a door with no label on it. Not the door marked leader, or the one marked creative, or the one marked too late for that now. Just a plain door, unlabeled, that you have walked past a hundred times because every other door had a sign you already believed. What would it cost you to open it, just to see what is on the other side, before deciding it isn’t for you?

This is not an argument against self-knowledge. It is an argument against finality. You can know your patterns and still remain, underneath them, unfinished — which is a much better word than broken, and a far more honest one than complete.

A Different Set of Clothes

Franciscan spirituality has never had much patience for fixed identities. Francis himself traded the label of merchant’s son for nothing very impressive at all — beggar, fool, brother to lepers and wolves — and every one of those was a door without a sign on it when he first walked through. He did not know what he was becoming. He simply stopped defending the label he already had.

Maybe that is the real practice hiding inside this question. Not ever labeling ourselves, which is impossible and not even desirable. But holding the labels loosely enough that we can still be surprised by our own growth. Loosely enough to try on a different set of clothes, a different room, a different corner of the parish or the office or the family, without first checking whether it matches who we have always said we are.

The corner may be comfortable, but grace rarely knocks on doors we’ve already labeled closed.

 

 

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

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

“The Man with the Face of a Bin”: A Tale of One City

 

“The Man with the Face of a Bin”: A Tale of One City

I did not go looking for this headline. It found me, the way the best material always does, wedged between two stories. A man in a silver cape, wearing an actual rubbish bin as a helmet, had just come second in a British parliamentary by-election. I read it twice. Then I read his manifesto, which is where this stopped being a funny headline and started to become a homily of sorts.

His name is Count Binface. He is, by his own account, an intergalactic space warrior, leader of the Recyclons, from the planet Sigma IX. He has stood for election against two sitting Prime Ministers and lost to both, stood for Mayor of London and lost that too, and on the thirteenth of August stood in Clacton against Nigel Farage (a well-known British politician) and lost again — this time with 9,455 votes to Farage’s 22,239. In electoral terms that is a drubbing. In every other term, nearly ten thousand people in one of the most fought-over patches of England looked at a man dressed as a household waste container and decided he had the better idea.

Reading the Manifesto Out Loud, With a Straight Face

Try it sometime. Here is an actual, documented Count Binface policy platform: cap the price of a croissant at £1.10. (Around $1.45) Cap a 99 ice cream at 99 pence. Cap a kebab at £2. Tie every government minister’s salary to a nurse’s salary for the next hundred years. Strip MPs of their subsidized Parliament-canteen food and drink. Build at least one affordable house.

Read that last one again. Not a thousand houses. Not a bold ten-year plan with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. At least one. He has said, in interviews, with a completely straight face, that he is confident he can hit that target, if not surpass it. It is the single strangest housing policy in modern British politics, and it is also, I would argue, the most honest one on offer — because it does not pretend to be more than it is.

Compassion, Filed Under Comedy

Binface has pledged to hand over the royal palaces — except the one the King still needs — and the seized homes of Russian oligarchs to people who currently have nowhere to sleep. Whatever surplus his campaigns raise, he sends to Shelter, the housing charity, rather than keeping it. This is a joke candidate quietly outperforming a great many non-joke candidates on the single question that most defines whether a society is caring for the people at its edges.

I am not going to stand here and tell you a man in a bin helmet is doing Franciscan charity. But I will say that the instinct underneath the joke, house the person who has no house, and don’t make a production of your own generosity while you do it, is the same instinct that has animated every genuinely compassionate movement in Christian history. Including the one that started with a rich man’s son giving away his father’s cloth in a piazza. (St Francis of Assisi). Count Binface just tells the joke first so the compassion can sneak in the side door while everyone is still laughing.

Humility Is Also a Policy Position

Notice what almost no other politician does: Count Binface makes fun of himself before anyone else gets the chance. He runs as a joke, campaigns as a joke, and loses as a joke, on purpose, every single time. There is no spin team explaining why second place was actually a victory. There is no dignified photograph pretending the silver bin is a crown. Self-deprecation is not a small trick. It is the discipline of refusing to think more of yourself than the moment warrants — which happens to be a fairly good working definition of humility, and a startlingly rare quality in the one wearing a suit and standing at a podium.

Affordability as a Form of Care

The croissant cap gets the headline but pause on what it is actually about. A price cap on small daily pleasures — coffee-shop pastries, ice cream from a van, a kebab on the way home — is a joke wrapped around a real observation: that the cost of ordinary life has crept up on people faster than their wages have, and nobody in a blue suit wants to say so plainly, because plainly is not how you get re-elected. Binface says it in the shape of a pastry, and the room laughs, and then the room goes quiet for a second, because everyone in it has felt that exact squeeze at the check-out.

Tying ministers’ pay to nurses’ pay works the same way. It is a punchline built on a real question: whose labor do we actually value, and does our economy tell the truth about it? A hundred years is an absurd timeframe on purpose. The absurdity is the delivery mechanism. The question underneath it is not absurd at all.

Care for Each Other, One Ridiculous Line Item at a Time

Strip out the space warrior and the Recyclons, and what is left is a platform obsessed, almost embarrassingly, with whether ordinary people are being looked after — housed, fed, paid fairly, protected from a cost of living that keeps rising faster than anyone’s patience. That is not a Franciscan biography. It is a Franciscan instinct: care for the person in front of you, be honest about what you actually have to give, and don’t dress up your own importance while you’re giving it.

A Tale of One City

Clacton will forget the vote count by Christmas. It will remember the bin. Not because the bin was holy — I want to be clear, nobody is canonizing a man from planet Sigma IX — but because the bin got people to take seriously, for one afternoon, what the man in the blue suit could not get them to take seriously. That is not sainthood. That is just a good aim.

Sometimes the truest way to be taken seriously is to stop asking to be taken seriously.

 

 

 

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

The Hand Off

The Hand-Off

There is a precise moment in a relay race where everything hangs in the balance. It isn’t the gun that starts the runners, and it isn’t the tape at the finish. It is the exchange zone — that short, marked stretch of track where two runners occupy the same space for a few strides, and a wooden baton passes from one hand to another.

Passed too early, the momentum stalls. Thrown carelessly, it drops, and the race is over before either runner realizes what happened. A clean hand-off requires the passer to match the receiver’s pace, to run alongside them for a moment before letting go, and to release the weight at exactly the right second — not before the other hand is ready, not after the moment has passed.

I have not run a real relay race since high school days. But I have dropped a baton more times than I can count, and every one of those drops happened at my kitchen table; not on a track.

The Baton We Carry

Think about the last time you offered a piece of advice nobody asked for. Shared a heavy insight with your spouse in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday. Dropped an opinion into a room that had been, until that moment, quiet. In each of those moments, you were holding a baton — an idea, an interpretation, a piece of truth you were carrying and someone else was not yet carrying.

The question worth asking is not whether the truth was true. It usually was. The question is:

How did you hand it off?

Too often, we don’t hand things off. We drop them off. We sometimes throw our insights the way you’d throw a stone across a yard — expecting the other person to catch it cleanly, regardless of how fast they were already running, regardless of how full their hands already were. We say what we came to say, exactly how we wanted to say it, and then we walk away, satisfied that we were honest. And being honest was enough.

The room tells the truth about what just happened, even when we don’t. A cloud descends. The other person is left fumbling — blindsided, judged, suddenly carrying a weight they didn’t agree to hold. The baton is on the ground, and somehow, it’s their fault for not catching it.

Reading the Weather

I learned this the slow way, which is to say I learned it by watching my own words land wrong more times than I’d like to admit. My instinct, especially with the people I love most, has always been to say the true thing quickly — as if speed were a form of honesty, as if the sooner I handed it over, the more it would count as care. It doesn’t. My wife Sally has taught me, gently and not so gently, that the timing of a truth is not a separate issue from the truth itself. It is part of it.

This is where Sacred Noticing does its quiet work. Before I open my hand, (to pass that baton) I have learned to notice — not the content of what I want to say, but the person standing in front of me. What is their weather right now? Are their hands already full? Have they just walked in from a long day, a hard call, a grief I don’t know about yet? A sacred hand-off begins before a single word is spoken. It begins with noticing and a pause that asks:

Is this person ready to receive what I am carrying?

That combination of noticing and pause changes everything downstream. It is the difference between speaking at someone and running alongside them for a few strides first.

The Open Palm

When the moment is actually right — and sometimes it is, sometimes the weather is clear and the hands are open — a clean hand-off feels almost nothing like a “dumping or throwing” I described earlier. It feels like a gift being offered rather than a verdict being delivered. You match their pace. You offer the thought softly, palm open rather than fist closed. And then — this is the hard part, the part I still have to practice — you let it go.

You do not micromanage how they hold it. They have it now. You do not require them to run the race the way you would run it, at your speed, toward your finish line. You offer what you were carrying, and you let them carry it forward in whatever way it needs to be carried. That release is not indifference. It is trust — the same trust a runner has to place in the stranger-shaped hands reaching back toward them mid-stride.

Notice. Pause. Respond. The same three movements that shape every act of Sacred Noticing shape the hand-off too. Notice their pace before you decide yours. Pause before the release, long enough to ask whether this is your moment or only your urgency. Respond by opening your hand rather than throwing your stone.

A Practice for the Week

The next time you feel the familiar pull to hand someone a sudden thought — an insight, a correction, a piece of wisdom you’re certain they need — try pausing for a single breath first. Look at the person actually in front of you, not the one in your head. Match their stride for a moment before you let go of anything.

You may find, as I so often do, that the truth you were carrying is still true a few minutes later. It usually is. What changes is not the baton. What changes is whether it lands in an open hand or on the ground between you.

A hand-off is not about how badly you need to let something go. It is about whether the person across from you is ready to hold it.


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