Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 4 Comments

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.

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham

Head and Heart

I’ve recently been reading a book called The Heart of Trauma by Bonnie Badenoch. Bonnie is a therapist who has been dealing with trauma patients for several decades. She is a well-known expert in this field. She has a great capacity to identify with the technical aspects of therapy and its spiritual intersection. Something that is often missing from modern therapy. Many enter therapy expecting results in a short period of time, in the same way as we have come to expect results from getting our car fixed or medication that will cure us of our illnesses. The results of this strategy are not good. A recent study shows that empathy amongst many in society has declined by a massive 75%, as society becomes more focused on self-fulfilling needs versus helping others less fortunate.

When it comes to the brain, and in this case the heart, life is not so simple, as we all know. Miss Badenoch explains that some of the single-minded thinking that seems to dominate our world today, comes from my reliance on using the left hemisphere of our brain more than the right. Now without getting into the details of her book the interesting observation that I made, was the relationship between the implicit results-oriented left brain, and the explicit meaning of what is happening in our lives that the right brain controls.

There has been some debate in these circles for many years, that the left brain and the right brain thinking tends to dominate our personalities. The simplistic view we have been given is that the scientific aspect of our brain is the left-hand side, and the artistic side is the right-hand side. It turns out, just in the same way as our lives, that both sides are dependent on each other. In the same way that our heart often determines our decision-making process, in conjunction with our head, therefore making decisions that have some meanings built into them rather than just opinions or results.

This interdependence between our head and our heart is the core of the healing that Miss Badenoch and her clients search for together in her therapy groups. In the same way, as we are searching for meaning in our own lives, we cannot deal with problems in isolation, we have to search for meaning and understanding in order to be able to reach some semblance of peace as a result.

I guess my point in this reflection is that science is starting to recognize that our heart, our spirit, and our soul are a much more important compass for us to manage our way through our lives. And of course, with God at the center of all of those, we can be assured that the movement that we make toward peace and reconciliation will be better as a result of being guided by Him.

Copyright 2025 Reflection, audio and Image Michael J. Cunningham

Posted on by Michael J. Cunningham · 1 Comment

Lenten Thoughts

Lenten Thoughts

During Lent, we often focus on behaviors or things that we’d like to do less of and on virtues that we ought to practice more. These fall into the traditional categories we’re drawn towards during this sacred season: fasting, giving, and prayer.

Fasting can be abstaining from things that injure us or others. Giving might not be just sharing money or possessions but offering the goodness that’s within us. And, of course, we cannot forget prayer, which connects us to the divine source of all goodness.

When you think about it, most of our spiritual actions revolve around either doing something or not doing something. But today, I’d like to examine something else: what happens before action. As was mentioned recently in one of recent zoom retreats, the average human has somewhere in the vicinity of 60,000 thoughts per day. We don’t take action on or pay attention to many of them, but even if we act on just 5% of those thoughts, that’s still a considerable amount of activity during the course of a day.

But where do these thoughts come from, and what can we do about them? Let’s go back to John Cassian in the 3rd century. He journeyed to the desert, away from all the temptations and distractions that resided in the city, believing he might find peace there. But of course, it turned out to be the case that even in the desert, he found himself distracted—not by physical temptations, but by the thoughts associated with them. Others in that monastic tradition would call this the “monkey mind”—you can’t stop thinking, an endless stream of thoughts.

What Cassian discovered was profound: if you think about something long enough, if you dwell on a thought, it goes from being just a thought to becoming a desire. And then if you dwell on that desire, it amplifies until it becomes a passion. When something becomes a passion, you almost inevitably do something about it. And of course, depending on whether that’s on the right or wrong side of things, that can either turn out to be a vice or a virtue.

But whichever way it goes—vice or virtue—what follows is a deepening of that pattern. The action reinforces our goals, which reinforces our desires, which strengthens our passions, and the cycle continues. Many years later, modern psychology would describe this same pattern: think about doing something, do it, do it multiple times, and it tends to become a habit. The cycle works for both our destructive and constructive tendencies. And so, behavioral psychology is born.

Spiritual practices developed over the centuries, particularly centering prayer from the Cloud of Unknowing in the 13th century, focus heavily on not engaging with your thoughts. When thoughts come, they aren’t rare or unusual—they’re just part of being human. The practice isn’t to try to make your mind go blank but rather to let thoughts drift by. Rather like you’re standing on the shore and boats are passing by—eventually they will disappear from view. Eventually the thought will dissipate, and you’ll still be there in silent prayer.

During this Lenten season, I’d like to suggest something: try thinking about your thoughts before you respond to them. Before you act on an impulse, pause. Instead of going straight from thought to action, create a space, even if just a few moments, for serious listening to yourself.

You may find you begin to make a different kind of decision as soon as you pause. That pause introduces some level of discernment. It’s not necessarily asking, “What would Jesus do?” before you make that turn left, but it’s worth trying—for 24 hours, perhaps.

Many years ago, I wrote myself a note (I do that occasionally when I want to remind myself of something). This particular note was “Add 10 seconds just before responding.” Ten seconds can be a long time, but isn’t it interesting that the people who actually think about something before they respond seem to have a more measured, more interesting, or maybe more insightful and appropriate response than those who go straight from thought to mouth without any interference from the brain or the heart?

Something to think about for this Lenten day. Have a blessed weekend.

Add + Ten Seconds

Add ten seconds to each moment,

And my response would be better,

kinder, warmer, more forgiving,

than my first. 

But can I ever be as loving as He is to me?  

Reflection, image and poem Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham