Here’s the text for the 26 Feb 2021 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Early Breakfast Show with Jane Middlemiss on BBC Radio 2. You can listen to the audio clip here on the BBC website.

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The Real Me is sort of a weird person, and so I know this is a bit unusual: I see a spiritual director every month. She’s a mixture of therapist, mystic, personal trainer, and general straight-shooter.

For example, she tells me how much God loves me, but in the next breath, how full of rubbish I can be at the same time. The real me is apparently wonderful and also quite a mess.  

But welcome to being human! This is us – we’re a mix of things that don’t seem to go together but actually do. We’re courageous and yet we colossally screw up. We’re luminous but a mere pixel in the universe. Beautiful and broken ­­– not either/or but both/and. And life is about navigating these double-truths. 

I remember experiencing this in my mid-twenties on a gay cruise in the Caribbean. A cruise is not my general idea of a good time, but my then-boyfriend, a jazz singer, was playing a concert on board and I went along for free. Free is my idea of a good time.  

It was a week of sun, cocktail parties, and dancing until dawn on the Lido deck.

One afternoon at the pool, I got chatting to a woman who turned out to be the chaplain on board. When she discovered I was a minister, too, she asked me to help with the worship service that day, which was Ash Wednesday.  

Ash Wednesday’s the first day in the season of Lent, which began last week ­– a time when Christians remember what it means to be real.

And to get started, we mark our foreheads with dirt crosses and, though we’re still alive, we hear the words: remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. It’s one of those weird double-truths: You’re going to die, but you’ll be okay. 

Later that evening hundreds of folks gathered in the ship’s rooftop bar and we put ashes on each other’s faces. I remember old men in wheelchairs, two women partnered for 60 years, and loads of fresh-faced university students with their whole lives before them. All of us crowded in to mark the glorious weirdness of being human, the truth we’re all facing in these pandemic days: we’re going to die, and here’s to life. 

The worship service in the bar flowed onto the dance floor that night. Our bodies pulsing in the light of the moon, you could still see the ashes on people’s faces, shining in the dark.