Month: February 2026

“The joy of the Lord”– a BBC Pause for Thought

/ Trey Hall / Leave a comment

Here’s the text for the 23 February 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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One of the things I love about The Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2 is how much laughter there is. From you, Scott Mills, from your guests and your team, from the whole family of listeners.

Maybe I resonate with it because I grew up in a family of jokesters. My uncle Jerry so properly funny he could have his own Netflix special.

My dad’s more old-school. Slapstick. Our extended family still talks about the time we were in a packed restaurant, on holiday, and my dad paraded from the loo with an epic streamer of toilet-paper tucked into the back of his shorts. My aunt was so mortified she slid under the table, but everybody else in the restaurant was crying with laughter.

Humour is how my family shows affection. It’s a complicated love language, though, and one result of that is: I can be a bit suspicious of people who don’t laugh very much. And I’m especially wary of people who can’t laugh at themselves. (Though I’ve been that guy, too, in defensive seasons of my life).

I once watched an interfaith panel whose main guests were Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. The moderator started with a sort of pompous question – one of those remarks designed to brag more than to explore.

After the question, there was this long silence –– and then Tutu started to giggle. And then the Dalai Lama started to giggle. Both of their faces crinkled up as they tried to contain it, but then they looked at each other – and absolutely lost it. Belly laughter for a solid thirty seconds. The audience was stunned quiet and had no idea how to react.

Finally Tutu caught his breath, wiped his eyes, and said to the moderator: “I’m so sorry, my dear, I’m so sorry. Ummm … what was the question, again?” And at that, the whole room erupted with laughter – including the moderator!

It wasn’t the laughter of shame, though, or of mockery; it was the laughter of freedom.

There’s a stereotype about religious people that we’re all are stoic, sour-faced sticks-in-the-mud. But I want my life to resonate with what the Bible calls “the joy of the Lord”, with the spirit of Jesus, who is so unconfined – and so unconfining – that uptight people in the Bible call him “a glutton and a drunk and a friend of sinners”.

I sense Jesus’s presence sometimes at comedy clubs when the crowd’s howling at something that’s hilarious because it’s true. Or in AA meetings when someone undergoes holy laughter after finally admitting the truth.

And I know his presence in church, too, when – whether I’m feeling uptight or unconfined or somewhere in between – I’m reminded that we are all loved by God and freed for joy.

“Spring clean of the soul” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 16 February 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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My husband Jonathan and I have very different food obsessions. His is cheese. If there’s Cheddar in the fridge, or Brie or Emmenthaler – it doesn’t matter the type, really – if it’s cheese, it calls to him. It whispers savory-nothings into his stomach.

Me? Cheese doesn’t woo me that much. But bring any kind of deep-fried, ultra-processed junk-food into my house, and good luck finding it later. Once that bag of snacks is open, I am powerless over its pull.

At least what Jonathan craves is actual food. The stuff I crave is basically a sludge of extruded starch paste, held together by salt and artificial fats. Totally fabricated, no nutritional value – and God do I love it.

In Copenhagen once, I noticed in a corner-shop that junk-snacks were displayed in a section marked “Not-Food”. That was the actual sign on the shelf: “Not-Food”. At least the Danes are honest: “Everything for sale here is edible, but it’s not really food.”

The season of Lent begins this week – an annual spring-cleaning of the soul, when, for 40 days, Christians experiment with abstaining from something that we regularly depend on for a fix. Some substance or habit or attitude we use for a hit of dopamine, like chocolate or shopping or porn or self-righteousness or social media. Something we use to change the way we feel, even if that thing ends up draining the life from us.

Compared to our Muslim siblings who, during Ramadan, fast completely from sun-up to sun-down, Lent is somewhat less involved, but it’s still not easy. Abstaining from just one simple thing can bring us right up against the deeper reason we’re tempted by it.

It was Lent in 2009 when I finally admitted I was powerless over alcohol and drugs. It was so painful to admit, but it was also such a relief. And with God’s help, it led to me stopping for good, and eventually, amazingly, to the craving itself being removed.

In the Bible, Jesus describes feeling tempted himself, which is also a huge relief to me. If the Son of God can be honest about his own temptations, then I can admit mine, too.

I believe the goal of true spirituality is not to heroically strengthen our willpower for an anxious life of compulsive avoidance, but to learn to let go of our fixes and relax more fully into God. To leave the “Not Food” aisle of our lives to get a taste for freedom and what’s really real.

“Closer to us than our self” – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 9 February 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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I got on the train recently during morning rush-hour — packed with hundreds of humans, my face pressed up against the doors. And at the next station, a young couple pushed on. There was absolutely no room; they shouldn’t’ve crammed in, but of course, they did. We’ve all been there — I get it.

But now we were extremely close. My face, maybe two inches from their faces. I could smell their eyebrows. I could see right into their pores. It was so uncomfortable, I closed my eyes. They started talking, I could feel their breathing.

And then, for the rest of my journey, they made out. They made out intensely. As if they were going on honeymoon rather than to work.

I could not believe it. It was so ridiculous I started laughing. Two inches from their lips, I started laughing — but that didn’t stop them. Finally, I escaped, at my station, and I did not say, “Y’all. Get a room!

I did say, with my acquired British sarcasm, “Thank you so much for sharing your morning with me.” The woman replied, totally sincere, “Oh, you’re welcome.”

If that couple’s listening: happy early Valentine’s Day. Long live your young love.

To be honest, though, their sloppy-snogging made me feel like a prude. Then I felt guilty for feeling like a prude and fulfilling that old stereotype that all religious people are buttoned-up, embarrassed by passion.

And not just religious people. There’s a stereotype that English people in general are constitutionally-averse to any kind of emotion – sexual, spiritual, political. “Keep it private”, people say. “Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve”.

One of my favorite images of Jesus is an icon where he exposes his heart – he opens up his chest to show it on fire with love. Maybe you’ve seen one in a church or museum. Jesus doesn’t just wear his heart on his sleeve, he hands it over to us, I believe. He’s offering himself to the world – as a brother, as a father, as a mother, as a lover. As a true friend, available now in flesh-and-blood.

The Christian theologian St Augustine wrote: In our heart of hearts, God is closer to us than we are to our self.

I love that. I believe that. A God so embarrassingly loving that she comes closer to us than our own breathing. So extravagantly generous that he hands over his heart to expand our hearts – on crowded trains, in cramped lives – so we can learn to love as God loves.