Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

Life Lessons from Ireland’s Single Track Roads

Single Track Road

When navigating a single-track road,

You don’t have to navigate,

just drive on,

hoping there is no oncoming traffic.

Most single-track roads are from the past,

The days of horse and cart,

Unsure how they passed by when confronted,

But it was probably a neighborly exchange.

No one lived far from each other,

And travel had to be done in daylight,

Otherwise, risking inadvertent off-road incidents,

that probably had repercussions.

The roads I drive today are in the west of Ireland,

Bounded by stone walls created by artists,

with painted green center lines,

Making any asphalt seem like brushstrokes in a painting.

As the video game continues,

As our greatest hope is to see no one,

An ironic thought in a landscape which sees few most days,

And to make it home before darkness.

When the single-track road dominates all.

The question remains,

How long can a single-track lane last?

It seems this one does not want to answer the question,

And merely persists to turn and twist; and twist and turn.

Giving up no visibility without a crow’s nest,

She drags us onward to the destination,

Like a conveyer belt,

She sweeps us up and down, from side to side.

Until the whoops and hollers soften,

To a sickly “are we there yet” from the youngsters in the rear,

Now looking for the air sickness bags,

We didn’t think we would need.

The single-track road goes on.

And what is the single-track road known as?

The one you have to travel each day,

Taking you to a destination you may like, or not.

How does that make you feel?

Can I find a turnaround, or a major road?

Where I could find another way out?

Or is it true?

That my life is a single-track road.

Which appears to be two-way, but there is no way out.


The Single Track Road: A Spiritual Reflection

The decision to take the single-track road is rarely made lightly, though we often forget this truth when we find ourselves committed to its narrow path. Standing at the junction where the main road continues straight and the smaller lane veers off into uncertainty, we often pause. Something calls us toward the unknown: perhaps the promise of solitude, the desire to escape the busyness of our ordinary lives, or simply the ancient human longing to discover what lies beyond the road well-traveled way.

In choosing, we are clear about our intentions. We desire something different. We seek the road less traveled, as Frost might say, though rarely considering what it means to travel a road from which there may be no easy return. The single-track road demands commitment in a way that contemporary life rarely asks of us. Once you begin, you must continue. There are no convenient exits, few places to turn around, or escape routes until the road itself offers them up.

I have been on such roads; both literally and metaphorically. The narrow lanes of western Ireland wind between high ancient stone walls, carrying you deep into landscapes that seem untouched by time. In addition, he interior roads we choose when we commit to a spiritual path, a relationship, a way of life that narrows our options and demands we keep moving forward even when the way becomes uncomfortable, even when we begin to question our original decision.

The irony is not lost on me that in seeking solitude and escape, we often find ourselves more trapped than before—though perhaps “trapped” is the wrong word. Perhaps “committed” is preferable. The single-track road teaches us about the difference between being stuck and being devoted, between having no choice and choosing to honor the choice we have already made.

There’s something profoundly spiritual about this experience of commitment without the safety net of easy retreat. It forces us to be present to where we are rather than constantly planning where we might go next. No looking back. When the road ahead twists and turns without revealing its conclusion, when visibility is limited and we cannot see what’s coming, we learn to trust the path itself—and perhaps more importantly, we learn to trust the wisdom that led us to choose this path in the first place.

The neighbors on those old roads understood something we’ve forgotten in our current world of endless options. They knew that encountering another traveler on a narrow way required a different kind of negotiation than passing someone on a highway. It demanded presence, patience, perhaps even conversation. The single-track road creates community in the most unlikely of circumstances, forcing us to acknowledge one another, to make space, to work together for the journey to continue. We have to interact, as we are both blocking each other’s paths. It forces dialogue.

In our spiritual lives, we often find ourselves on similar single-track roads. The decision to pray daily, to forgive someone who has hurt us deeply, to care for an aging parent, to remain faithful to a marriage through difficult seasons—these are choices that commit us to a path from which there is no easy exit. We may have begun with clear intentions, seeking something beyond the ordinary, but find ourselves wondering if we’ve chosen wisely when the road becomes demanding and the destination unclear.

The poem speaks to this reality with honest emotion. The nausea that comes from too much winding, the children in the back seat asking, “Are we there yet?” when we ourselves have lost sight of where we’re going. These are the moments when our spiritual journeys feel less like adventure and more like endurance tests, when what began as a choice starts to feel like fate.

But perhaps this is where the deepest learning happens—in that space between choice and surrender, between intention and acceptance. The single-track road we have chosen becomes a teacher, showing us what it means to be fully committed to a path even when we cannot control its direction or speed. It reveals to us the difference between the roads we take to get somewhere and the roads that take us somewhere we never expected to go.

In contemplative tradition, we speak of the “dark night of the soul”—those periods when the spiritual path feels barren, when prayer becomes difficult, when God seems absent. These are often single-track road experiences. We have committed to the journey of faith, but the road has become more challenging than we anticipated. We cannot easily turn back, yet we struggle to see why we chose this difficult route.

The wisdom of the single-track road is that it teaches us to value the journey itself rather than our ability to control it. When we cannot change direction easily, we learn to notice what is around us rather than constantly scanning for alternative routes. We discover that the stone walls constraining our movement are also works of art, that the painted green center lines make the asphalt seem like brushstrokes in a larger painting.

This is perhaps the most profound spiritual lesson the narrow road offers: that constraint can lead to a different kind of freedom, that limitation can create beauty, that choosing to stay on a difficult path can reveal wonders we would never have seen on the easier way.

The question the poem asks—”How long can a single-track road last?”—touches something deep in the human spirit. How long can we sustain commitment when the way is narrow and demanding? How long can we persist when visibility is limited and the destination uncertain? The poem offers no easy answers, and this too is part of potential wisdom.

Sometimes the single-track road is our life itself—not just a vacation route through the west of Ireland, but the path we find ourselves on day after day, leading to destinations we may like or not. The road that appears to be two-way but offers no real way out. This is the existential reality of human existence: we are all on a journey we did not entirely choose, heading toward a destination we cannot fully see, with limited ability to change course.

Yet we did make decisions that brought us here. We chose, at various junctions, to take paths that committed us to certain ways of living, loving, and believing. The spiritual task is not to regret these choices or to spend our energy looking for escape routes, but to honor the decisions we have made and to trust that they were made with wisdom, even if that wisdom is not always clear to us now. Sometimes the lack of wisdom in earlier decisions, informs future wisdom.

In the end, perhaps the most important realization is that we are not alone on this narrow road. Others have traveled here before us, leaving behind the stone walls that guide our way. Others will come after us, needing the path to be maintained and clear. And sometimes, if we are lucky, we encounter fellow travelers heading in the same direction, and we discover that what seemed like isolation was actually participation in an ancient and ongoing journey.

The single track road asks us to trust—trust the path, trust our original decision to take it, trust that it leads somewhere worth going, even if we cannot yet see where that might be. In this trust, we find not the freedom of endless options, but the deeper freedom of commitment honored, of choices respected, of paths walked with integrity and faith.

Sometimes the most spiritual thing we can do is simply to keep driving on the road we have chosen, hoping not for the absence of oncoming traffic, but for the grace to handle whatever encounters await us with wisdom, patience, and love.


Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham OFS

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The Forgotten Art of Seeing Each Other

The Forgotten Art of Seeing Each Other

I was at the coffee shop while on vacation in Europe yesterday when I overheard it again—that familiar refrain about “those people” taking what “we” deserve. The speaker wasn’t wealthy, and wasn’t particularly privileged in any visible way. Just someone who had learned to see scarcity where there might be abundance, competition where there could be community.

It made me think of a friend’s mother’s attitude. No matter how little she had, there was always room for one more. “We make the soup stretch,” she’d say, adding water and finding another vegetable. Not because she was a saint, but because she remembered what it meant to need that seat at someone’s table.

Somewhere along the way, many of us have forgotten this simple truth: we’re all just walking each other home. Every single one of us is vulnerable in our own ways, carrying invisible wounds, hoping for kindness when we stumble.

I think about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of struggle. How much easier it is to point at someone else—someone who looks different, speaks differently, arrived here differently—and say, “There’s the reason things are hard.” It’s the oldest sleight of hand: making us look at each other with suspicion instead of looking up at systems that benefit from our division.

Last month, I watched a man at the grocery store counting change for milk and bread. The woman behind him shifted impatiently, muttering about “people who don’t work.” She couldn’t see his construction worker’s boots, worn down at the heels. Couldn’t know he might have been laid off three weeks ago. We see what we expect to see, what we’ve been taught to see.

But here’s what breaks my heart: the woman muttering was buying the store brand everything, clipping coupons with worried fingers. She and the man with the change were in the same boat, just sitting in different seats, each convinced the other was somehow capsizing them.

When did we start believing that compassion was a limited resource? That helping someone else somehow diminishes us? My Irish mother would have called it “the stranger’s blessing”—the idea that what we offer to others returns to us in ways we can’t predict or control. Not karma exactly, but an understanding that we’re all part of the same fabric. Pull one thread, and eventually, you feel the tug.

I remember volunteering at a food bank where a well-dressed woman came in, tears streaming. “I never thought I’d be here,” she whispered. The volunteer next to me—who I knew had been a client himself two years earlier—simply said, “None of us did. But here we are, taking care of each other.” That’s the truth we keep forgetting: we’re all just one illness, one layoff, one unexpected crisis from needing that outstretched hand.

The real privilege isn’t wealth—though that helps. It’s the privilege of forgetting our shared vulnerability. Of believing we’ve earned our safety through merit alone, rather than recognizing the thousand graces and helping hands that brought us to this moment.

There’s a poem by Rumi that says, “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” What if we traded our certainty about who deserves what for curiosity about each other’s stories? What if we replaced judgment with wonder at how anyone manages to keep going in this difficult world?

I don’t mean to sound naive. The fears are real—costs keep rising, and the future feels uncertain. But when has turning against each other ever made any of us safer? When has closing our hearts actually protected them?

Sometimes I practice a simple exercise: when I catch myself thinking “those people,” I pause and substitute “us.” Those people struggling to find work become us struggling to find work. Those people seeking safety become us seeking safety. It’s a small shift, but it changes everything. Suddenly, I’m not defending some fortress of deservedness. I’m simply recognizing fellow travelers on a difficult road.

The mystics knew something we’ve forgotten: we are each other. Not metaphorically, but actually. Your suffering is mine, your joy is mine, because we’re all notes in the same song. When we refuse to care for each other, we’re not protecting ourselves—we’re diminishing the very thing that makes us human.

So maybe today, when we hear that familiar chorus about who deserves what, we can remember my friend’s mother’s kitchen table. How there was always room for one more, not because resources were infinite, but because isolation was the real poverty. How the soup got thinner but the laughter got richer. How everyone who sat there knew they might be the one needing that seat tomorrow.

We’re all more fragile than we pretend. We’re all more connected than we admit. And in the end, as someone wise once said, we have nothing if we don’t have love. Not the greeting card kind, but the tough, daily choice to see each other as worth protecting, worth helping, worth believing in.

The stranger at the gate isn’t stealing your bread. They’re reminding you that we’re all strangers somewhere, all guests at tables we didn’t set, all dependent on kindness we didn’t earn.

That’s not weakness. That’s the beginning of wisdom. It’s belonging.



Reflection Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham

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Detachment

A Greater Love: A Reflection on Detachment

The old man sits alone in the coffee shop, weathered hands wrapped around a mug whose contents have long since gone cold. For months, since his wife died, he has been trying to pray; trying to feel close to God; striving to manufacture some sense of the divine presence that might fill the hollowness inside him.

But this morning, something shifts. He stops trying.

What the barista doesn’t know—how could she?—is that in this moment of surrender, even if driven in desperation, the man becomes what he was always meant to be: not someone grasping after God, but someone whom God moves through. Desperate clutching falls away. The desire to control his spiritual experience, to measure his progress, to feel something—all of it; simply dissolves.

Meister Eckhart, the medieval mystic, knew this secret: that our very desire for closeness to God, when we try to manage it, becomes a barrier. Love cannot be captured, measured, or held like water in our fists. Love is God’s grace communicated, flowing freely as we breathe through our lungs, as blood travels through arteries. The moment we try to grasp it, to direct it, to prove we possess it, we interrupt the very current we long to experience.

The man’s hands rest open on the table. In this profound detachment, something Eckhart called “breakthrough” is happening—a movement toward what he named the Grund, the ground. It is not a place to be reached but the fundamental ground of being that was always already there, waiting to be uncovered beneath layers of grasping, trying, and spiritual ambition.

Here, in this deepest of places, the man discovers what the mystic knew: there is a ground, a place, where God and soul meet, a place where all distinctions dissolve. He is no longer praying to God but discovering that God prays in him, breathes in him, beats in the very heart of his being. In this detachment—this deliberate separation from his own spiritual desires—he becomes the clear instrument he was designed to be, but more than that; he touches the place where he and God are one.

And then something remarkable happens. The barista, approaching his table, feels inexplicably lighter in spirit. The man says nothing, yet in his stillness, in his transparency, she encounters something she has no words for. Divine love is transmitting itself through his very presence—not love that he has generated or earned, but love that simply is, flowing from that deepest ground where God dwells. He has found his way to what Meister Eckhart called the little castle in the soul, the place that was never lost, only hidden beneath the noise of wanting and seeking.

This is what the mystics discovered: there is a ground beneath all grounds, a place deeper than desire, deeper than grief, deeper even than love as we understand it. In this Grund, between each heartbeat lives the very pulse of God. When we stop interrupting this sacred circulation with our grasping, our trying, our need to control the flow, others begin to feel and see not us, but the divine ground that sustains all being, beating within us, and through us; and as us.

The barista wipes down tables with unusual tenderness today. A customer who has been rude to her for weeks suddenly offers an apology. The elderly man leaves quietly, and his absence is somehow as grace-filled as his presence was—because the love that moved through him continues moving, rippling outward through every person he touched with his transparent being.

Later, alone in his apartment, the man sits in a silence that has become sacred not because he has achieved something, but because he has stopped trying to achieve anything at all. He has moved through detachment into what Eckhart felt or knew was always already there—the Grund, the ground where God and soul are one. Prayer has become his breath, his heartbeat, his very existence, not as practice but as recognition of what was never absent.

In letting go of his desire for spiritual experience, he has discovered that he is spiritual experience itself—not as an accomplishment, but as his fundamental nature. He has learned what Eckhart taught: that in the deepest ground of being, there is no separation between the lover and Beloved, between the one who seeks and the One who is always already found. We are designed to be a clear window through which this ground shines forth, not stained glass that colors the light with our own efforts.

The divine love that flows from this place needs no one to direct it, no one to prove it exists. It flows as naturally as rivers flow toward the sea, and in that freedom, both the one who has ceased grasping and all who encounter him discover they are being held by the very ground of existence itself—the love that is not an emotion or achievement, but the fundamental reality from which all life springs.


Copyright Image and Reflection Michael J. Cunningham 2025

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Beyond Boundaries: The Franciscan Heart as Bridge

Beyond Boundaries: The Franciscan Heart as Bridge

There’s a question that surfaces often in our rapidly changing spiritual landscape: “How do we connect across the growing chasm between traditional faith and the increasing percentage of our neighbors who’ve stepped away from institutional religion?”

I’ve discovered that the answer isn’t found in arguments or apologetics. It’s found in something far simpler and more profound: the recognition that we’re all walking the same path, just using different maps.

Consider this … You woke up this morning carrying something—perhaps worry about a loved one, stress from work pressures, or the weight of a world that feels increasingly divided. You breathed. You hoped. You reached out, in whatever way you could, toward something larger than yourself. Whether you call that reaching “prayer,” “intention,” or simply “getting through the day,” the movement is the same. The longing is identical.

This is where the Franciscan heart becomes a bridge.

When Francis embraced the leper outside Assisi, he wasn’t checking the man’s religious credentials. He was responding to suffering with love. When Clare opened her doors to women seeking meaning beyond the confines of medieval marriage, she wasn’t conducting theological interviews. She was creating a space for authentic spiritual seeking.

At our beloved San Damiano Retreat in Northern California, this ancient Franciscan wisdom intersects with our current contemporary world. Our mission statement reads simply: “to provide a hospitable place of spiritual renewal for people of all faiths.” And our retreat offerings Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction to programs on building resilient relationships—demonstrate what this looks like in practice.

Someone recently stopped by my office at the retreat and reflected on the following. “What strikes me most about the San Damiano approach is this gentle clarification: “We are Franciscan Catholics and our retreat themes reflect our faith tradition. The retreats are open to all people of good will, regardless of religious affiliation.” There’s no disguising, no bait-and-switch. Just honest hospitality that says, “This is who they are, and there’s room for you here too.”

Think about what this means. A stressed-out executive, perhaps someone who hasn’t set foot in a church for years, can attend an eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program and begin to discover that same present-moment awareness that the mystics have cultivated for centuries. A couple struggling in their marriage can find tools for deeper connection through a weekend retreat that honors psychological wisdom and spiritual tradition. Someone carrying grief can find healing in community without having to first sort out their beliefs about afterlife or theology.

The beautiful truth is that Franciscan values—radical love, care for creation, attention to the marginalized, and embrace of simplicity—aren’t just religious positions. They’re human necessities. When we offer programs focused on these universal needs, we’re not watering down our tradition. We’re distilling it to its essence.

Consider the many Contemplative Walks offered at San Damiano. Visitors practice “recognizing the sacred light of Christ in all things” while walking slowly through gardens on ancestral territory. Here, Christian mysticism, indigenous wisdom, and ecological awareness converge. Participants don’t need to believe in Christ to experience the sacred light that permeates creation. They simply need to slow down enough to notice it.

This is evangelization in its truest sense—not persuasion but invitation, not conversion to doctrine but introduction to a way of seeing. The person seeking stress relief discovers the path to contemplative prayer. The couple learning communication skills encounters the mystery of love that transcends human understanding. The grieving parent finds themselves held by a community that knows something about resurrection, even if they’ve never articulated it that way.

As I enter my third year at San Damiano, I am still deeply moved by the Franciscan commitment to financial accessibility: “We are committed to providing access regardless of financial circumstances.” This isn’t just good social policy—it’s profoundly Franciscan. It says that spiritual nourishment isn’t a luxury good for those who can afford it but a basic human need that requires no credentials, financial or theological.

In our polarized time, this kind of radical hospitality becomes prophetic. While others build walls between sacred and secular, traditional and progressive, believer and seeker, the Franciscan charism creates doorways. It says: Your questions are welcome here. Your doubt is not a disqualification. Your different path doesn’t make you a stranger.

What if we stopped asking, “How can we get them to believe what we believe?” and started asking, “How can we serve what you are already seeking?” What if we recognized that the person struggling with addiction, the executive burned out from corporate culture, the parent overwhelmed by modern life’s demands, are all engaged in spiritual work, whether they name it that way or not?

Programs like “Your Story, Your Legacy” honor the deep human need to make meaning of our lives and leave something worthwhile behind. This isn’t Christian work or secular work—it’s soul work. It’s the work of becoming fully human.

The thirty-five percent who’ve stepped away from traditional religious institutions haven’t stopped being spiritual. They’ve stopped believing that institutional religion holds the only keys to transcendence. The Franciscan response isn’t to argue with this conclusion, but to demonstrate through our actions that institutions can be containers for the sacred rather than gatekeepers of it.

When we create spaces where people can encounter truth without having to sign doctrinal statements, experience love without religious prerequisites, practice compassion without theological explanations, we’re not abandoning our tradition. We’re embodying its deepest wisdom.

The path you’re walking—whether you call it Christian discipleship or mindful living or simply trying to be a good human—passes through the same territories: suffering and healing, loneliness and connection, fear and love, despair and hope. The Franciscan heart recognizes these territories as sacred geography, regardless of the spiritual vocabulary we use to navigate them.

This is what true hospitality looks like: not the tolerance that says “I’ll put up with your differences,” but the recognition that says “your seeking and my seeking spring from the same source.”

In the end, what binds us together isn’t shared doctrine but shared humanity. What calls us forward isn’t the same creed but the same longing for meaning, connection, and love.

The bridge we’re building isn’t between us and them. It’s between the false divisions we’ve created and the unity that was always already there, waiting for us to notice it.

What would happen if we simply started there?


Copyright 2025 Image and Reflection Michael J. Cunningham OFS

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

Here’s hoping

Many of the mystics, particularly those who were great proponents of contemplative prayer, seemed to be able to keep a tight rein on the relationship between Hope and Desire.

They seem to be continually reminding themselves and others how important is is to keep our “selfish” desires as much as possible out of the way. It is almost as if for us to “see” spiritual or theological Hope when our personal desires get in the way.

There is a direct relationship between this effect and how contemplative prayer affects our prayer life. As we consent to allow God’s presence to seep through us in Grace by praying without agenda or particular need, we can see and feel the effect on our true selves. The feeling of peace and change in our disposition becomes evident over time. Even at times, we might feel this is not easily perceived by ourselves but is often recognized by others.

Desire can obscure true Hope, the Hope that comes from God and replace it with our own version of Hope. One which talks to us about the “next” thing we need in our lives, the new possession, perhaps a new car, job or other objective.

Desires of course, come in other forms as well. We want to have problems resolved, perhaps in relationships with others, something I always try and attune to, even if I am unsuccessful some of the time.

Separating my personal, self-centered Desire from Hope is perhaps the most assured way of allowing God’s Grace and Hope, honest Hope to appear on the horizon.

It’s a complex question, and at times, I think our personal desires and God’s are fully coincidental. However, more often than not, His plans for us will seep out into the world more completely, if we allow God to do work within, and through us. It is not by accident we are called to be “an instrument of peace” in the world.