In April 2020, as the world locked down, Jen Cunnings—Minister of Children, Youth & Families at St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church in Vancouver—sat down in front of a camera to read a children's book aloud. What unfolded over five minutes was not a sermon about resilience or a how-to guide for managing anxiety, but something more radical: a meditation on what hope actually is when everything feels uncertain, paired with the specific daily practices that hold hope up when it feels impossible. Drawing from Lauren Thompson's Hope Is An Open Heart, Cunnings articulated a framework that refuses sentiment—hope as something you practice, return to, and embody in the body, not something you wait to feel. She modeled this through her own spiritual disciplines: a morning practice of naming hopes, an evening examen of gratitude and witness, and a closing blessing that integrated the work into peace. The offering was positioned with precision: not as a solution to crisis, but as a way to live with uncertainty rather than despite it. Hope, in this telling, is not something that arrives from elsewhere. It's woven into daily life, accessible through attention, and deepened through repetition.
When Cunnings reads Thompson's opening—"hope sometimes hope feels far away but hope is always there" (0:60)—she's making a promise grounded in reality, not fantasy. Hope, in this framework, isn't one thing. It's a collection of embodied moments, each one specific, each one rooted in the body and in relationship.
Thompson's definitions move through lived experience:
"Hope is the warmth of strong arms around you. Hope is sad tears flowing making room for joy. Hope is angry words bursting making room for understanding. Hope is scared words asking for help and finding that help is there. Hope is knowing that you are loved. Hope is knowing that you love others."
This refusal to transcend difficulty is what makes the work revolutionary. Hope doesn't ask you to feel better first. It recognizes that sadness, anger, and fear aren't obstacles to hope—they're pathways into it. When Thompson writes "hope is sad tears flowing making room for joy," she's not suggesting tears lead to automatic joy. She's saying that grief and love live together in the human heart, that the act of grieving itself can actually make space for something else to emerge. This is not false comfort. This is theological honesty.
Similarly, "hope is angry words bursting making room for understanding" doesn't diminish anger. It acknowledges that anger contains real information and energy, that expressing it directly—rather than suppressing it—can clear a path toward genuine connection and change. And "hope is scared words asking for help and finding that help is there" locates hope precisely at the moment of vulnerability: you name your fear, and in that naming discover that help is actually available. That's not wishful thinking. That's empirical. It's what actually happens when you ask for what you need.
Cunnings' voice delivering these lines (1:00-2:00) was patient, unhurried, as if she had all the time in the world for each definition to settle. She wasn't performing hope. She was demonstrating it: the willingness to sit with the full temperature of what it means to be alive and uncertain and loved all at once.
What Cunnings articulated next was the architecture that holds hope in place. She and her partner, Ian, have built two prayer disciplines into their daily life, and she offered them as a model—not as requirement, but as a possible structure other people might adopt.
The morning practice is elegant in its simplicity. "The morning prayer practice is simply to offer to God what our hopes are" (3:15-3:30). There's no liturgical formula, no script to memorize or perform correctly. The practice is the naming itself—the turning of conscious attention toward what you hope for, what matters to you, what you're reaching toward in the day ahead. Cunnings notes: "Sometimes it's one, sometimes it's a bucketful." In a world of uncertainty, sometimes hope is singular and focused. Sometimes it arrives as abundance, multiple hopes crowding in, competing for attention. The practice honors both versions of hope.
This matters because naming is an act of consciousness and intention. When you speak a hope aloud—or write it down, or offer it in silence—you're not generating a feeling from nothing. You're creating an intentional orientation toward what's true and valuable. You're saying: this is what I value today. This is what I'm asking for. This is what matters to me. In April 2020, when much was out of control, this small act of naming could have been as basic as hoping for health, connection, or simply finding peace within the day. The naming practice gives the mind something to reach toward.
By evening, a different but complementary practice unfolds. Cunnings and Ian engage in what she calls "the examine" (3:50-4:20), a spiritual discipline rooted in Ignatian contemplative tradition. The practice involves looking back over the day—all of it—and naming specific things:
- What you have been grateful for, no matter how small
- Where you have seen God (or grace, or goodness) working in your own life and in the lives of others
- The moments that have been "bumpy"—the disappointments, the failures, the missteps
For those bumpy moments, she explains, they "ask for forgiveness and we give thanks. Like just give thanks." (4:35-4:38). This is the surprising turn. It's not gratitude for suffering. It's gratitude within suffering—the belief that even difficulty contains learning, that even missteps teach something true, that even moments you'd rather forget can become medicine if you can hold them without judgment. This is spiritual maturity, not spiritual bypassing. It requires that you actually name what was hard, actually ask for forgiveness (from yourself, from others, from God), and then somehow say yes to the whole day anyway.
The result of these two practices is what Cunnings describes plainly: "These prayer practices help center us and ground us so even in these tough times we're able to find a sense of peace and a sense of hope" (4:42-4:55). The emphasis on able is crucial. She's not claiming you'll feel hopeful all the time. She's saying the practices create pathways—like worn grooves in wood—that let you access hope when you return to them.
Thompson's book insists on a truth that's easy to forget: "Hope is remembering that you are not alone. Many others feel just the way you do and many others care" (2:20-2:35). Even in physical isolation—especially during April 2020—this recognition could shift something in the nervous system. Your sadness is not unique. Your fear is not a private failure. Others feel exactly what you feel. Others wish you well.
This isn't sentimental group-think. It's a theological statement about the nature of the human condition. Isolation teaches us that we're alone. But presence—whether physical, spiritual, or imaginative—teaches us that we're held within a larger web of feeling. When Cunnings reads these words to a camera, they travel through the internet to people sitting alone in their homes. The book becomes a voice in the darkness. The practice becomes communal even across distance.
This matters for the morning and evening practices too. Cunnings practices them with a partner. The naming of hopes becomes a conversation. The evening examen becomes witness—you're not just reflecting privately; you're speaking your gratitude and your bumpy moments aloud to someone else. They do the same. Something about being heard in your hope and in your difficulty makes both more real, more embodied, more available.
Thompson's framework circles back to the title's central image: "Hope is a heart that is open to the world around you" (2:45-3:00). This openness isn't naïve or unguarded. It comes after acknowledging the full spectrum of difficulty. It comes after naming sadness, anger, fear, asking for help. Having felt all of that, having found help there, having been remembered and held—then the heart can open.
She continues with what might be the most active definition of hope in the entire book: "Hope is knowing that things change and that we can help things to change for the better" (3:10-3:20). This is agency. This is the recognition that you're not passive in the face of difficulty. Your choices matter. Your willingness to stay engaged matters. Your small actions contribute to larger shifts. You are not a victim waiting for rescue. You are a participant in the unfolding of change.
The open heart, then, is paradoxical: soft enough to feel the full spectrum of human experience—grief, anger, love, connection—and strong enough to act toward what's better. Both at once.
Cunnings closes with a blessing from Tracy Smith's Prayers for Faithful Families, and the shift is tangible. She invites listeners to move from understanding into embodiment: "Invite you to get comfy. You might close your eyes. You might stretch out on the floor but be comfy as you listen to these words" (4:60-5:10).
The blessing itself is a careful progression through body and spirit:
"Deep peace to you, my child. Deep peace. Peace in your body, peace in your mind, peace in your spirit. As you breathe in deeply, breathe in peace. As you breathe in deeply, breathe in peace. May the worries in your mind seem far, far away. And may you know God's love for you and your family's love too. Deep peace to you, my child. Deep peace."
This is not abstract encouragement. It's specific: peace in your body (anchoring in sensation), peace in your mind (settling thought), peace in your spirit (touching the deepest part of you that knows itself as alive). The instruction to breathe in peace, repeated twice, doesn't ask you to generate peace through effort. It asks you to recognize peace as something available on every breath—the most basic, most reliable, most present thing the body can do. The image of worries seeming "far, far away" isn't denial. It's perspective: you don't erase the worry, but you create distance from it, enough distance to remember love—God's love and your family's love—is also real.
The practices Cunnings modeled are not locked behind theology or religious language. Any person can name what they hope for in the morning, religious or not. Any person can look back in the evening and ask: What am I grateful for? Where did I notice good things? What was difficult? What can I forgive myself for? Any person can sit quietly and imagine peace moving through their body with each breath.
The deeper offering is this: hope isn't something you achieve or earn. It's something you practice. You return to it every morning by naming it. You return to it every evening by witnessing what's true—the difficulty, the beauty, the grace, all of it held together. You return to it in each moment by staying open, by asking for help when you need it, by remembering you're loved and capable of loving others. You return to it through your breath, which is always there, always available, always a pathway back to peace.
In a world of uncertainty—whether it's a pandemic, a personal crisis, or the ordinary difficulty of being alive—this is the spiritual technology Cunnings offers: not false reassurance or toxic positivity, but a daily practice that reminds you that hope isn't far away at all. It's already there, woven into warmth and tears and anger and connection, waiting to unfold. You just have to turn toward it, name it, practice it, and stay open to its presence.
