“From comparison to communion”– a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 15 June 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Gary Davies on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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I was on the train earlier this year coming back from an event I’d been speaking at, and I was feeling pretty good about myself. Some of that was a perfectly healthy, “job-well-done” feeling. But most of it, if I’m honest, was more in the vein of “Aren’t I a wonder to behold?” You know, your basic self-centeredness with a dollop of semi-skimmed egomania.

And you know how, on a train, when the light shifts outside, the windows inside can become mirrors? Well, that happened. There I was – feeling wonderfully self-absorbed – and the window suddenly turned into a mirror, and I caught a glimpse of myself. There was my rapidly-retreating hairline, the widening pores on my nose. And my mood shunted dramatically from pride to insecure vanity.

So I tried to remedy that with a bit of internal self-cheerleading: “Oh, but Trey, you’ve still got it: you’ve got lovely eyes”.

But then I noticed around my eyes a flock of crow’s feet. And another voice entered: “Why are you looking so worn? You should exercise more. You should eat cleaner, hydrate, buy a serum. Actually, you deserve more than that: a spa day, some new clothes will make you feel better. Treat yourself!”

This dramatic fleet of thoughts – judgement and charm, egomania and inferiority – took only about 15 seconds but left me depleted.

But then the light outside changed again. And as instantly as the window had become a mirror, it became a window again. And I wasn’t scanning myself anymore; I was gazing into the landscape outside of me. There was a park, and people walking on the paths, and kids playing, and dogs running. And the trees, and the sun beginning to set, and just life everywhere.

In a flash, I was relieved from the paralysis of praising myself or picking myself apart. This wave of peace washed into me from outside, and I was moved from comparison into communion.

The Christian theologian St. Augustine says that we all experience the temptation to turn inwards on ourselves. We become so curved inwards, so warped inwards, that we get trapped in our own reflection – and stuck thinking we’re the centre of the universe.

Personally, I don’t think God is all that interested in showing us a better version of ourselves in the mirror. But instead, I believe, God offers us the simple freedom of being turned outwards again: towards others, towards God even, and back into the real life surrounding us everywhere.

“We all share God’s good name”– a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 11 May 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Gary Davies on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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You know the old jokes that begin: “So, a priest, a rabbi, and an imam walk into a bar”?

Well, last year, I experienced something much better than that: a group of twenty actual Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faith leaders. We met regularly at Windsor Castle, brought together by the Faith in Leadership Programme.

We gathered to learn, to read each others’ scriptures together, and to treasure our differences. The hope was that we’d become better leaders – maybe even better humans – able to transform conflict and help heal our country.

Our conversations were always deep and challenging, but there was also so much laughter that, over time, we became friends.

The formal programme has now ended, but we stay in touch and occasionally meet up in different places: in Rome for a papal audience, at an iftar to break the Ramadan fast.

And last Monday, for dinner in Golders Green – the epicentre of Jewish life in Britain – where, just the week before, two Jewish people were stabbed in a violent expression of the rising antisemitism in our country.

Our group discussed writing a statement to condemn the attacks, which many have done and is so important. But someone said: let’s meet up and have a meal instead. A sign of friendship and solidarity in the midst of hatred.

And so we did. Jews, Muslims, Christians – together. We listened. We lamented. We had delicious Kosher shawarma. It probably didn’t change anything structurally, but it did feel like healing: this ordinary act of resistance and hope.

After dinner we walked along the high street, which was dotted with celebrations for a special day in the Jewish calendar. People lit bonfires and sang and danced and prayed. There was so much joy breaking into a season of so much sorrow – and it was moving to behold.

This week across Britain, several marches and protests are planned. Some, I believe, mean to be acts of great care and good conscience. Others, I fear, may leave our communities more frightened and divided than before.

As a Christian, I listen to what the Bible repeats again and again and again: that every person, every people, every family comes from one parent, God. We all share God’s good name and are meant to share life together. In big, national ways, yes – but also in small personal ways, like friends, eating together, around a table.

My prayer for our country this week and always is that our actions move us away from division towards belonging; away from hostility towards hope; away from death, into life.

“Jesus the Mother Swan”– a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 7 May 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Gary Davies on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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A bit of gossip for you. There’s a couple in our neighborhood that everybody’s been talking about lately.

A pair of swans in the local pond.

Last year, very sadly, they lost all their children to avian flu. So this year we’ve really been rooting for them.

In March they built their nest under a little bridge. And eventually there was one perfect egg – but the next day it was gone, stolen perhaps by a fox. But the next day there was another egg – and from then on, Mama Swan hunkered down and never left her nest.

Cycling to work, I’d stop to greet her, or out for a jog. Others did, too: kids on the way to school, tourists, locals. Eventually the council had to put up barriers to give her some peace from her fans.

Last Wednesday evening, I noticed her posture had changed: her wings spread out like feathery canopies. I wondered, I waited, and when she shuffled, I saw them: four babies, another one pecking through, and four still-unhatched eggs.

“Oh, my goodness!” I said outloud. Someone stopped, I pointed, and soon a clutch of us were there on the bridge, lost in wonder. And doing something English strangers don’t usually do: talking with each other.

One woman – we realised we lived on the same street. “Hey, we’re neighbors!” she said. A teenager stopped, temporarily transfixed. A security guard came over with tears in his eyes.

The next morning, they were all there: nine babies and two proud parents. I told my fellow swan-fan-onlookers something I’d learned from Sir David Attenborough: Swans lay eggs on different days, but the baby cygnets coordinate through their eggshell barriers to hatch together on the same day.

“Wow!” said a woman on her phone. “My mum in Swansea says to tell that swan, she’s a star!”

In the Bible, Jesus says: How often I’ve wanted to gather you like a mother hen gathers her children under her wings.

We live in a vulnerable and fragile world – and the danger we face is real. Foxes need to raise their babies, too. It’s nature. And sadly, we’re never short of human tyrants who unnaturally thrive on violence and domination.

According to Jesus, God is not a tyrant, but a mother swan – who doesn’t guarantee us safety but definitely promises us love. God who, I believe, gathers cygnets and humans under her wings, reminding us that we’re not strangers, but neighbours. That we belong not only to God but to each other, and all creation.

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“The difficult freedom of being human”– a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 27 April 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Gary Davies on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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I’m a decent preacher – I don’t generally put people to sleep – but a few times in 25 years of sermons, I have unintentionally provoked someone to walk out.

Once when I accidentally cussed in the pulpit.

Once during LGBTQ Pride when I joked that God loves straight folks, too – not just the gays – and that despite loads of evidence to the contrary, it is possible to be both heterosexual and Christian.

But I was really surprised when someone quite dramatically stormed out after I suggested that Christians should embrace the biblical practice of confession: to regularly come clean with a trusted friend or pastor about how we’ve screwed up.

After the service, I approached the offended person and said: “Did something hit a nerve?”

They said: “Oh yeah, when you told me I had to tell my sins to someone other than God”.

I felt tempted to respond: “Would you like to confess something to me now?”

But I did not say that. Because I know personally how scary and unappealing confession sounds.

I got sober through The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Step Four suggests we write down a moral inventory of our entire life. Then Step Five suggests we read that inventory out loud, admitting “to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”

When I first heard that, I thought: Uh-uh. No way.

But I have come to believe: that if we haven’t shared the honest truth with another person, we probably haven’t really told God – and we certainly haven’t accepted it ourselves.

On my podcast, Spill the Spirituality, I recently chatted with Harry Clark, Traitors winner. His new documentary follows his rediscovery of faith, including his attempt to meet up with the Pope at the Vatican. (Spoiler: he did!)

But Harry told me his most transformational spiritual experience wasn’t meeting Pope Leo, but going to confession for the first time as an adult – describing his mess, in detail, in the loving presence of another person.

I get that. In my Fifth Step, I had a lot to confess. It was very painful, but my deepest feeling was relief, even joy. The person I shared it with said: “Well done. You have now joined the human race”.

Which reminded me of Jesus’s words after receiving confessions. He says: “Take heart, friend.” “Go in peace.”

When I feel the temptation to walk out on the truth, may God help me to stay put, take heart, and practise the difficult freedom of being human.

“It is solved by journeying”– a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 20 April 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Gary Davies on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

Every spring, the BBC television series Pilgrimage follows seven celebrities of different faiths, trekking together towards a spiritual place like Istanbul or Rome, or this year: the holy island of Lindisfarne.

Now I’m no celebrity but, BBC, if you ever need a punter, give us a shout.

I’m not expecting producers to call anytime soon. So last week, I went on my own pilgrimage, without a camera crew, to an ancient monastery off the coast of Wales, on Caldey Island, where Christian monks have prayed for 1500 years.

The island is accessible only by boat – and only weather-permitting. And storms had thwarted crossings since Easter, but by the grace of monastic insider-information, I managed to stowaway on a morning mail boat that braved the waves.

Reaching the shore was like diving off the edge-of-the-world – a gateway into heaven. And not just because of lovely-old, barnacled monks chanting in the abbey. The whole landscape was bathed in currents of peacefulness, something I long for in my everyday life – but don’t fully experience, because I’m battling armies of distractions, or my awful addiction, sometimes, of watching myself perform a life instead of living mine.

Hiking the island cliffs, I saw a colony of seals on the beach far below. And then I noticed a rope-ladder hanging over the cliff-edge. More rope than ladder, actually – and not a risk assessment in sight.

At first, I felt a surge of fear, but then I heard a voice: “Mate, it’s a pilgrimage. Dive in!” And so I did, practically abseiling down the brambly cliff-face.

I landed on the beach, and immediately the seals startled, and honked and scooted dramatically into the sea. I thought: God, I’m like that sometimes. Anxious, reactive, so quickly-offended. The first sensation of fear, I rush, I shake, I snark with resentment.

But over the next hour as I sat, quiet, on the beach, the seals bobbed back to shore and then out of the water, cautiously welcoming my presence. As we all relaxed, I even felt welcomed by them. Seal pups started to play almost at my feet, and I felt a surge, not of anxiety, but of spiritual joy.

There’s an old Latin saying, from St. Augustine. Solvitur ambulando. Which translates, in paraphrase: “It is solved by journeying”.

I believe that’s how God works. By journeying alongside all of us – celebrities, monks, pilgrims, punters. Shifting our fear with love. Calming our anxiety with peace. And healing our loneliness – by being the truth that connects every created thing.

“No one is left behind”– a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 2 March 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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We moved to the UK ten years ago. From Chicago—where I’d spent my adult life and had a close group of friends—to Birmingham, where I knew precisely no one, and couldn’t even understand the accents!

Up to that point, most of my friendships had been forged because we’d been through something big together. We’d survived university or got sober or started a church from scratch. When you undergo something tough-and-beautiful with people, true friendship can emerge.

Lots of these rites-of-passage, though, happen in the first half of life. So when I arrived in Brum, aged 40, there wasn’t a natural stage-of-life experience to hook into. I felt disconnected, sometimes isolated. Making friends isn’t straightforward at any age, but it’s even trickier as we get older.

So I decided to join a running club. I’m a long-time runner, but still I worried: Would I fit in? Would I be slower than everyone else? Did I really want to sweat and stink around people I’d never met?

But I went anyway, and the Birmingham Swifts welcomed me on a run and even invited me to the pub afterwards. Because of them, I’ll forever associate Brummie and Black Country accents with laughter and kindness.

The Swifts had designed something ingenious to make sure no one got left-behind. They didn’t separate us into “fast” and “slow” groups. Instead, we ran at different paces – but along the route there were several connection points. When you reached one, you’d turn around and run back to the last person, and then circle back ahead again. Only when everyone made it to the connection point did we run the next leg. You ran at your own pace – but still with everyone else.

Because of that wise, inclusive approach, I made new friends. Not through a dramatic rite-of-passage, but through ordinary conversations, shared streets and sweat. I found real friendship with real people. Which is, I believe, what we’re all after. Way beyond counting likes on social-media, we want to know others – and be known – in detail.

Sometimes people imagine God as a distant cosmic force – benevolent but aloof, unknowable.

Jesus teaches us something quite different: “I no longer call you servants,” he says to his followers, “I call you friends.” Jesus shows me the God who actually likes us, because he knows what it is to be us, sweating and stinking and celebrating along the tough-and-beautiful course of life. A God who is knowable, who makes us her friends. And so always turns back for us, so nobody – absolutely nobody – is left behind.

“The joy of the Lord”– a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 23 February 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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One of the things I love about The Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2 is how much laughter there is. From you, Scott Mills, from your guests and your team, from the whole family of listeners.

Maybe I resonate with it because I grew up in a family of jokesters. My uncle Jerry so properly funny he could have his own Netflix special.

My dad’s more old-school. Slapstick. Our extended family still talks about the time we were in a packed restaurant, on holiday, and my dad paraded from the loo with an epic streamer of toilet-paper tucked into the back of his shorts. My aunt was so mortified she slid under the table, but everybody else in the restaurant was crying with laughter.

Humour is how my family shows affection. It’s a complicated love language, though, and one result of that is: I can be a bit suspicious of people who don’t laugh very much. And I’m especially wary of people who can’t laugh at themselves. (Though I’ve been that guy, too, in defensive seasons of my life).

I once watched an interfaith panel whose main guests were Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. The moderator started with a sort of pompous question – one of those remarks designed to brag more than to explore.

After the question, there was this long silence –– and then Tutu started to giggle. And then the Dalai Lama started to giggle. Both of their faces crinkled up as they tried to contain it, but then they looked at each other – and absolutely lost it. Belly laughter for a solid thirty seconds. The audience was stunned quiet and had no idea how to react.

Finally Tutu caught his breath, wiped his eyes, and said to the moderator: “I’m so sorry, my dear, I’m so sorry. Ummm … what was the question, again?” And at that, the whole room erupted with laughter – including the moderator!

It wasn’t the laughter of shame, though, or of mockery; it was the laughter of freedom.

There’s a stereotype about religious people that we’re all are stoic, sour-faced sticks-in-the-mud. But I want my life to resonate with what the Bible calls “the joy of the Lord”, with the spirit of Jesus, who is so unconfined – and so unconfining – that uptight people in the Bible call him “a glutton and a drunk and a friend of sinners”.

I sense Jesus’s presence sometimes at comedy clubs when the crowd’s howling at something that’s hilarious because it’s true. Or in AA meetings when someone undergoes holy laughter after finally admitting the truth.

And I know his presence in church, too, when – whether I’m feeling uptight or unconfined or somewhere in between – I’m reminded that we are all loved by God and freed for joy.

“Spring clean of the soul” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 16 February 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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My husband Jonathan and I have very different food obsessions. His is cheese. If there’s Cheddar in the fridge, or Brie or Emmenthaler – it doesn’t matter the type, really – if it’s cheese, it calls to him. It whispers savory-nothings into his stomach.

Me? Cheese doesn’t woo me that much. But bring any kind of deep-fried, ultra-processed junk-food into my house, and good luck finding it later. Once that bag of snacks is open, I am powerless over its pull.

At least what Jonathan craves is actual food. The stuff I crave is basically a sludge of extruded starch paste, held together by salt and artificial fats. Totally fabricated, no nutritional value – and God do I love it.

In Copenhagen once, I noticed in a corner-shop that junk-snacks were displayed in a section marked “Not-Food”. That was the actual sign on the shelf: “Not-Food”. At least the Danes are honest: “Everything for sale here is edible, but it’s not really food.”

The season of Lent begins this week – an annual spring-cleaning of the soul, when, for 40 days, Christians experiment with abstaining from something that we regularly depend on for a fix. Some substance or habit or attitude we use for a hit of dopamine, like chocolate or shopping or porn or self-righteousness or social media. Something we use to change the way we feel, even if that thing ends up draining the life from us.

Compared to our Muslim siblings who, during Ramadan, fast completely from sun-up to sun-down, Lent is somewhat less involved, but it’s still not easy. Abstaining from just one simple thing can bring us right up against the deeper reason we’re tempted by it.

It was Lent in 2009 when I finally admitted I was powerless over alcohol and drugs. It was so painful to admit, but it was also such a relief. And with God’s help, it led to me stopping for good, and eventually, amazingly, to the craving itself being removed.

In the Bible, Jesus describes feeling tempted himself, which is also a huge relief to me. If the Son of God can be honest about his own temptations, then I can admit mine, too.

I believe the goal of true spirituality is not to heroically strengthen our willpower for an anxious life of compulsive avoidance, but to learn to let go of our fixes and relax more fully into God. To leave the “Not Food” aisle of our lives to get a taste for freedom and what’s really real.

“Closer to us than our self” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 9 February 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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I got on the train recently during morning rush-hour — packed with hundreds of humans, my face pressed up against the doors. And at the next station, a young couple pushed on. There was absolutely no room; they shouldn’t’ve crammed in, but of course, they did. We’ve all been there — I get it.

But now we were extremely close. My face, maybe two inches from their faces. I could smell their eyebrows. I could see right into their pores. It was so uncomfortable, I closed my eyes. They started talking, I could feel their breathing.

And then, for the rest of my journey, they made out. They made out intensely. As if they were going on honeymoon rather than to work.

I could not believe it. It was so ridiculous I started laughing. Two inches from their lips, I started laughing — but that didn’t stop them. Finally, I escaped, at my station, and I did not say, “Y’all. Get a room!

I did say, with my acquired British sarcasm, “Thank you so much for sharing your morning with me.” The woman replied, totally sincere, “Oh, you’re welcome.”

If that couple’s listening: happy early Valentine’s Day. Long live your young love.

To be honest, though, their sloppy-snogging made me feel like a prude. Then I felt guilty for feeling like a prude and fulfilling that old stereotype that all religious people are buttoned-up, embarrassed by passion.

And not just religious people. There’s a stereotype that English people in general are constitutionally-averse to any kind of emotion – sexual, spiritual, political. “Keep it private”, people say. “Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve”.

One of my favorite images of Jesus is an icon where he exposes his heart – he opens up his chest to show it on fire with love. Maybe you’ve seen one in a church or museum. Jesus doesn’t just wear his heart on his sleeve, he hands it over to us, I believe. He’s offering himself to the world – as a brother, as a father, as a mother, as a lover. As a true friend, available now in flesh-and-blood.

The Christian theologian St Augustine wrote: In our heart of hearts, God is closer to us than we are to our self.

I love that. I believe that. A God so embarrassingly loving that she comes closer to us than our own breathing. So extravagantly generous that he hands over his heart to expand our hearts – on crowded trains, in cramped lives – so we can learn to love as God loves.

“Mother(s) of God!” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 8 December 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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When I got sober, I became friends with loads of people I had nothing in common with. Except we all shared the same addiction, and – though it seemed impossible to me at the time – we’d all found the same solution in the rooms of recovery.

One of those friends is someone I’ll call Mary. She was in her sixties at the time, worked a thankless job, but as a side-hustle she was trying to start a yoga studio. I don’t know your stereotype of a yoga teacher, but I’m certain Mary isn’t it. Cantankerous, uptight, a wonderfully-outrageous cusser – not a “namaste” on her lips – and a chain-smoker. So, unsurprisingly, her yoga studio was going nowhere. It felt impossible, and she was really down about it.

There’s another Mary I’m thinking about – who’s famous in Christianity for being the mother of Jesus. Nine months before this Mary starred in the first nativity, an angel flew through her window one day while she was doing Wordle and asked her to birth God into the world. That’s basically how the Bible tells it. Mary says: “that’s impossible, look at me: I’m no-one’s stereotype for the mother of God”. The angel says: “Nothing’s impossible with God”. And Mary says: “Well, then, let it be”.

The other Mary, after a year trying to birth her yoga studio, she gave up. Soon after her friend’s husband had a massive stroke that left him half-paralyzed and unable to speak. Mary visited them in hospital and her friend said: “Maybe you could try some yoga with him?” She was reluctant but helped him breathe deeply and stretch for the first time in months.

He was really quiet, and Mary was really self-conscious. After a while she said: “This must be so boring for you – you’d probably like to stop”. He shook his head, started to tear up, and lifted his hand to his heart in gratitude.

And that was the beginning of Mary’s unexpected yoga studio: wounded people, recovering people in rehabs and hospitals, experiencing the grace of their bodies – led by a foul-mouthed, chain-smoking alcoholic who didn’t look like a yoga teacher, but absolutely was one, because nothing is impossible with God.

The 13th-century theologian Meister Eckhart said: “We are all meant to be mothers of God, because God is always needing to be born”. Not just with the Marys — but in all of us. And I’ve come to believe that the people who think “that’s impossible — it can’t be me!” are the very ones God chooses to bring love into the world.