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.