Month: September 2024

“You have an amazing aura!” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 23 September 2024 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

A woman I didn’t know took my hand and said: “You have an amazing aura”.

It wasn’t a pick-up line at the pub or a mind-body-festival. It happened after a worship-service at the door of the church where I was the minister. The woman said she’d seen a purply-golden river flowing around me.

I said: “Was this during my sermon?” No,” she said. “No. Definitely not then”.

“It was when you prayed at the altar for the Spirit to pour out on us ­– and on the bread and wine – I saw currents of light flowing through everything.”   That prayer is from a ritual when Christians eat and drink together to experience, we believe, the real-life presence of Jesus.

Let’s just say I was skeptical of the woman’s vision. It seemed a bit woo-woo, but I sensed she wasn’t making it up. And to be honest, I was also jealous. I wanted to be able see unseen energy-fields, too.

I’ve always been a spiritually-curious kid. Enchanted by the idea of an invisible realm of infinite goodness overlapping our reality – with accessible portals into a grander life. As a child I would squint and try to see it. And through the fuzzy-filter of my eyelashes I could transform falling leaves into angels, stars-into-swirling-spiritual-kaleidoscopes. Everything connected by trace-lines-of-light.

I became a Christian as a teenager. When I opened the Bible, I read of people describing what I’d imagined. They called it different things: the unseen-Eternal, the Kingdom of Heaven, the glorious riches of the fullness of God. Not a haunted-realm, but an atmosphere of peace available to us now.

Something like this past summer, when the Northern Lights turned the skies into a miracle, something we can glimpse but those glimpses are just doorways into Something-Else so unimaginably radiant and good we can’t comprehend it.

But I believe we can spot it – not only at altars, but in the world as well. In the mornings, walking through the wood with my dog Iris, I feel it. A raven or a fox sees us, they hold our gaze, and I know there are hidden-trace-lines of light connecting us.

Or crowded onto the train in rush-hour, I sense it flowing through us. I wake up to the Hidden Beauty, the Real-Life-Truth that – whether we call it an aura or Nature or the Kingdom-of-Heaven, whether we feel it everyday or not – as one writer says: we are all walking around shining like sun.

Searching the rubble for life – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 16 September 2024 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

In our thirties, my friend Kimberly and I went on a Costa-Rican-holiday – beaches, rainforests, volcanos. Absolutely-stunning. A few days into our trip, though, Kimberly’s mom called and said: “Honey, I don’t know how to tell you this: your house burned down last night. Can you get home?”

Kimberly was in-shock, but somehow we packed, drove the jungle roads, and caught the only flight back that day. Around midnight we got to her house, which didn’t seem that damaged. The front-porch, the windows … covered-in-soot but intact. But then, we realised, the back-half of the house was almost-completely-gone. Like a volcano had erupted in the kitchen and consumed everything.

The next morning, friends and family gathered. We hugged, cried, and crawled through the rubble – searching for anything salvageable. Not much was. I remember her grandfather’s pottery collection in a heap of ruined shards.

We did find some valuables that Kimberly had desperately hoped to hold onto: her journals, picture-albums, and I’ll never forget when she opened a charred cupboard and yelled: “Yes! It’s a miracle! My Sex in the City DVDs are saved!”

Everyone burst into laughter.

Later we had a worship-service, in the garden: we moved bricks from the collapsed walls to build an altar. And people of different faiths and none crowded around it to pray and sing. Behind us, the burnt-out-shell of the house.

There’s a picture of some of us on that heart-breaking day, and in the picture we’re mostly smiling. Which seems ridiculous, but I remember it, and our smiles were real. We weren’t happy, of course, but we did feel an atmosphere of the goodness of friends – and the nearness of God. Which didn’t make the tragedy easy, especially for Kimberly. But that goodness, that nearness, that grace, did help her go into-the-pain-and-through-it instead of trying to shortcut-around-it.

A old Christian hymn says: O God, O Joy that seeks me through pain, I cannot close my heart to thee.

I don’t believe God sends us suffering. Some say “everything happens for a reason”. And I’m like: Yeah, but the reason’s not always God – sometimes it’s shoddy-wiring, a war-loving-dictator, or simply the fact that human-beings can be total muppets. Including me.

God doesn’t send tragedies, but God meets us in them, actually experiences our pain, and searches the heart-broken rubble with us for the life worth holding onto.

God’s great lineage of love – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 9 September 2024 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

Ten years ago I was living in Chicago and travelled to Memphis, my hometown, to visit my Grandma, who was dying. We sat on her sofa with a box of old photos ­– and picture by picture, we gossiped about our family tree.

There was an old-fashioned, sepia-toned photograph of a man, in a natty suit, on a street-corner. I asked: “Now who’s this handsome guy?” She said: “Well, that’s my grandfather, Frederick Schulz – so your great-great-grandfather, who immigrated from Germany in the 1800s.”

The photographer’s address was stamped on the picture-frame: it said 111 North Lasalle Street, Chicago, 1894. I said: “Grandma! That’s like a block from my flat – I walk by there every day! But I thought our family came from Kentucky, not Illinois?” “Eventually Kentucky,” she said, “but fresh off the boat, Frederick lived in Chicago.”

I honestly I hadn’t thought much about my great-great-grandpa until then, but that picture stoked a connection with him. Because of a common city: Chicago. And because of our common lineage: he’s been dead for more than a century now, but something of his blood ­­– his story, his life – makes me who I am.

I also feel connected to him because I’m a migrant, too. I’ve moved from Memphis to Chicago for work, and then across the ocean, to Britain, for love.

I saw a church banner once that said: The sign of God is that you’ll be led, where you did not expect to go. True for Frederick Schulz, and true for me.

The Bible contains some lengthy genealogies. So-and-so-begat-so-and-so-and-on-and-on-and-on. In my opinion, sort of boring … but when I think of my great-great-grandpa ­– or when I look at a picture of me and my beloved grandma, who’s been dead more than a decade now – those biblical family trees hit different.

I feel included in this great lineage of love. Included in generations of life-beyond-death. From God to Adam and Eve, as the story goes. To Isaac and Ishmael, to Mary, Joseph and Jesus – all the way to now, including ancestors whose names I’ll never know but who make me who I am.

For me, that ancient ancestry proclaims that before we human-beings had different religions and surnames and national borders, it was just us and God. I forget that sometimes – disconnected from modern migrants, people today, like Grandpa Schulz in 1894, boarding boats in search of a different life. But when I forget, the Bible reminds me: God has made us all one family, and will lead us, together, where we didn’t expect to go.