Here’s the text for the 24 June 2024 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

Earlier this month I visited my family in Tennessee, and I was reminded yet again ­– what a load of chatterboxes we are. Zoe, you think I’m a yappy Yank? You should meet my kinfolk. If you run into my dad or my sister or my aunt at the supermarket, buckle up, y’all – they can talk for America. I’m pretty extroverted myself, but compared to them, I’m a monk.

Something I learned very early on from my family was how to communicate in a way that draws people in and makes ‘em feel comfortable. How to read a room and warm it up with charm. This can be a good thing. Friendliness, story-telling, a genuine clap on the back – it all goes a long way.

But here’s a confession: there can be a shadow side to that chatty charm. In our mission to influence and impress, it’s easy to become chameleons. To change roles or switch styles just to get noticed, to get likes, or to persuade – which is just another word for “manipulate”!

I co-host the podcast Hope & Anchor. We recently chatted with Amanda Lovett, one of the stars from series 1 of The Traitors. You might remember: she’s the “Welsh Dragon” whose wonderfully-deceptive scheming took her almost all-the-way to the final.

It turns out that playing-to-the-room is super-helpful for reality telly. But not-so-helpful for becoming a real human being.

At least for me.

For a long-time in my life, I was desperately trying to keep up appearances. Juggling so many scripts and identities that I didn’t know who I actually was. All those alter-egos hollowed me right out.

Thomas Merton, a 20^th-century monk, says: If you want to identify me, don’t ask me where I live, what food I like, how I wear my hair, but ask me what I’m living for – and then ask me what’s keeping me from living that way.

As a Christian and also a member of the 12-step recovery community, my journey is different from a monk’s. I’m not called to celibacy or a monastery. But like a monk, I am called to be one person, to be a true person.

Not a chameleon or a changing cast of characters, but the same person, the same Trey – wherever I am, whoever I’m with.

For me, that’s what integrity is. That’s what spirituality means. And that’s what I’m trying to living for. As Jesus says, to know the truth – about yourself, about what’s real – and to let that truth set you free.

Here’s the text for the 17 June 2024 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

A few Augusts ago, on holiday in Chicago, I joined an early-morning ritual on Lake Michigan called Friday Swim Club. It had started unintentionally earlier that summer when a few friends dived into the water after a bike-ride. The next Friday they invited others to join, those friends invited others, and three months later, when I arrived to the harbor, more than 1000 people had gathered to jump in.

At 6:30 am.

Zoe, some were ready for a fashion shoot. Swanky-swimsuits, six-pack-abs, make-up, manscaping. Loads of cocky-parading.

Others, though, hid behind their towels ­– insecure, perhaps – covering-up scars or stretch-marks, curves or lack-thereof. Anxious about having too much of something, or not-enough of something else.

I’ve got mixed feelings about my body. Especially in summertime, when social-media fills with images of so-called-beach-bodies. On one level, it’s enticing: I’m a sexual being, I get it. But mostly it’s exhausting: how these images train us to compare ourselves and declare our bodies inadequate. To watch ourselves so judgmentally that we grab for fad-products, diets, compulsive-exercise. More like addiction than wellness.

I believe God is universal love but ALSO was born with a physical body, as a real human-being called Jesus. The Bible says “In Jesus, all the fullness of God was embodied”. But the Bible DOESN’T say what Jesus’s body looks like. We make assumptions, but no-one knows. Is he plain, spotty, hairy, disabled, a Vogue model? His stereotypical attractiveness – or unattractiveness ­– doesn’t matter: it’s his courage and love that liberate.

I recently interviewed Radio2’s own Reverend Kate Bottley ­– about how body-positivity is fab, but body-neutrality is even better. How accepting our bog-standard bodies can be an act of freedom.

My favorite part of Friday Swim Club wasn’t the swimsuit-parade ­– it was jumping into the water. There were too many people to go in all-at-once, so we queued up, 100 at a time, the cocky and insecure altogether. We yelled 3-2-1 and flung ourselves in — which was amazing, but the best part was seeing others jump.

Wave after wave, people leapt from the pier, with screams of relief, like kids again, freed from the posing and self-consciousness.

For a miraculous moment, into the air, into the water, we weren’t watching ourselves for a change. We’d forgotten ourselves. And it felt like freedom. And embodied joy.

Here’s the text for the 10 June 2024 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

On a walk last summer, our four-year-old godson, Brecon, was excited to tell me about his recent discovery. He wanted to show me ­– as he put it – “where the snails live”. We weren’t in a garden or a farmer’s field but on the pavements of northwest-London. Brecon took my hand, and led me to a wall. “Look!” he said. He pointed to a crack in the bricks. I leaned over and saw the spiral-shells clustered there, and Brecon yelled out: “Wow!”

To be honest, I wasn’t feeling well at the time ­– I was in a cloud of depression that stuck around the whole summer. But Brecon’s glee in snail-spotting lifted my spirit. We got lost in laughter and a growing chorus of “Wows!”. And even though we fully expected to find more snails in each new crevice, we were somehow still surprised when we found them.

Brecon reminded me of Charles Darwin, famous for his 19^th-century theory of evolution. Darwin kept a journal during his scientific expeditions, and in it he wrote: “I expected to discover a great deal”. But even he wasn’t prepared for what he described as the “hurricane of delight and astonishment” that swirled through him with each new discovery.

For example, he saw an unusually-shaped butterfly and, using the creature’s Latin name, he scribbled: “Tresses like hair – beautiful lepidoptera – Silence – Hosanna!”

I love that. First, Darwin is struck silent by the beauty. Then he cries out “Hosanna!”­– an ancient religious word that basically means “Wow!”

Hosannas are strewn-through Darwin’s journals ­– a growing chorus of “Wows” that for me as a Christian, points to the harmony between spirituality and nature, between true science and true religion.

Theologian Rowan Williams says: the harmony and “immensity of the universe” inspire us to wonder “what kind of concentrated, unlimited energy is holding everything together in being?”

We don’t have to be religious to ponder that. We might not call that unlimited energy “God”. We might be agnostic or atheist. But when we’re gobsmacked by the glory of the Northern Lights, or bats-like-holy-angels on summer-nights, or when we kneel down to save a snail from commuters racing by – maybe we get freed-up a little. Unstuck a bit from ourselves, perhaps, when we’re struck by that beauty­­ – that energy – that universal love we’re not even sure we believe in.

So, thank you, Charles Darwin and, personally speaking, thank you, Jesus, for getting me unstuck, for declaring that every inch of the universe is holy ground. And thanks especially to my godson Brecon: for teaching me to cry out: Wow!