Month: March 2025

A Web of Connection & Light – a BBC Pause for Thought

/ Trey Hall / Leave a comment

Here’s the text for the 24 March 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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My husband and I moved to South London last summer. As we unpacked boxes, a spider crawled in through the window to welcome us. Everyone’s pretty-friendly in South London, but this spider was so friendly, she spun her web in the corner of our bathroom and stuck around.

Every day, she was there. We gazed at each other. I did some research and identified her species: Amaurobius Fenestralis in Latin. In English: a lace-weaver-spider.

I told a friend, who said: “if it were my house, that spider would be dead.” But even my husband, who’s not exactly pro-spider, acknowledged she’d already moved into our hearts.

Autumn came and she wove an egg sac, which she guarded until Christmas, when her babies were born. Ten little infants hatched and played on our ceiling for a few weeks, practising their lace-weaving-skills. And then one-by-one they disappeared, leaving our spider alone again.

A few weeks later, while I was shaving one day, I noticed she’d moved down the wall, to my eye-level.

We took each other in; we saw each other. And I sensed that her mortal life was ebbing. And sure enough, the next morning we found her dead, poor thing, lying on the window-sill.

I laid her fragile body onto a cotton pad, so she could lie-in-state, so we could pay our respects. And also because I heard a trustworthy preacher once swear that a dead spider on her window-sill had suddenly come back to life.

So as I mourned, I also commanded our spider: in the name of God, rise up. But there was no resurrection, not one I could see anyway.

Finally, we carried her into the garden and buried her underneath the hydrangeas. We gave thanks for the way she praised God in her particular-spidery-nature. I said a Christian graveside prayer: We commend you, sister spider, to Almighty God. We commit your body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

In the Bible, Jesus teaches about a lot of big things – forgiveness, justice, eternity. But as the old Gospel song goes: his eye is on the sparrow, too. Even the little things like our spider are precious in God’s sight. In fact, Jesus says: Whoever can be trusted with small things can also be trusted with big things.

So thank you, sister spider. And thank you, Jesus – for teaching me how woven-together we are in this life ­– and how in the next life, I believe, absolutely all of Nature will rise up again into a heavenly web of light and goodness like no eye has ever seen.

New Every Morning – a BBC Pause for Thought

/ Trey Hall / Leave a comment

Here’s the text for the 17 March 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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Last Christmas I visited my family in my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. My sister Brooke said: “Trey, my Christmas present for you this year is: we’re going on a pilgrimage together ­­– to the tattoo parlor.”

Brooke is a tattoo veteran: it was her fifth time getting inked. I, however, was a virgin: under-the-needle for my very first time – though I hear once you start, you can’t stop.

I almost got tattoed at uni. Over the course of one term, I came out as gay, had a beautifully-weird God-encounter, and ­– despite my parents’ protests­ – I swerved from reading medicine to reading theology. I wanted to celebrate all that ­– but I couldn’t figure out a tattoo that’d do the trick. I thought maybe a cross, and a man-breaking-free-from-chains, and a rainbow flag, and a bible verse.

But that all felt a bit much, so I didn’t go through with it. Not then nor during any of the other rites of passage over the next three decades: kissing a boy for the first time, getting ordained, getting married (not to the first boy I kissed), getting sober, moving to Britain, and on and on.

I turn fifty this year. And Brooke said, “it’s time for your tattoo, and we’re going together”.

She celebrated 12 years cancer-free by getting a lyric inked on her arm ­– “measure in love” ­ from the musical RENT.

I decided on three different words, now permanent on my wrist:

new every morning

It’s a mantra I started praying when I got sober. A clue that the best life is in the present moment. “One day at a time” we say in 12-step-recovery. New every morning, new every minute, new every single breath.

It’s also part of a Bible verse that reads: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. God’s mercies never come to an end: they are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness, O God.”

That is a statement of trust … and especially radical because it’s in the biblical book of Lamentations, this long-list of personal suffering, global injustice, the break-down of integrity. Lamentations was inked 2600 years ago but still rings true today. Basically: Things are royally messed up, God, but new every morning is your love.

Given my personal tendency to mess up, I need that assurance. I wake up, I clean my teeth, I see my tattoo and I remember – not only that I am new every morning, but, more importantly, I believe, God’s love is. Permanent, eternal, tattooed onto my skin, into my heart. Inscribed forever into the life of every single thing.