Month: September 2026

“Better off for all that we let in”– a BBC Pause for Thought

/ Trey Hall / Leave a comment

Here’s the text for the 14 September 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Sara Cox Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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The first CD I ever got, a Christmas gift in 1990, was by the American folk-rock band, Indigo Girls. I hadn’t known them before, but when I played the CD, their lyrics hooked right into my soul. And over time, their music became the soundtrack of my young life.

The first festival I ever went to, a few years later, was to hear them play live. I can still feel the energy pumping through us, thousands of young adults singing our hearts out in sunny rainy muddy fields, jumping and stretching our bodies to the stars, to the stage, to each other.

Meeting other kids as in love with their music as I was was a revelation, a homecoming.

I love that festival experience: when your own personal journey intersects with masses of other people whose journeys share the same tracks. Like everybody dancing in Stirling this weekend, united by the music of Lulu and Chaka Khan.

But for me, the miracle of a festival is way more than just loads of individuals having loads of individual experiences next to each other in the same field. The miracle is that Something Extraordinary might happen to us together: as a whole community, as one body, we might open up to some equal mystery.

When I’m lost in the music, the defensive lines I sometimes keep around my heart blur a bit. I feel more porous to others, more open and permeable to the transcendence I call God.

As a Christian, I think we humans spend way too much time imagining ourselves as tightly-defended, self-contained individuals. I believe in our hearts we’re made for relationship. Actually, it’s more than that: we *are* a relationship. We are invisibly connected to every person and all of life.

As the Indigo Girls sing it: “Don’t know where it all begins, don’t know where it all will end, we’re better off for all that we let in”.

I went to hear them play a few summers ago at another festival, Greenbelt, in the UK. And in another field, in another country, I found that community again. We weren’t young adults anymore: definitely more wrinkled. The music filled the air, some of us dancing, some of us sitting at the edges of the crowd, but all of us still pulsing with the connection and joy of Something Extraordinary.

“The Ongoing Classroom of Faith”– a BBC Pause for Thought

/ Trey Hall / Leave a comment

Here’s the text for the 7 September 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Sara Cox on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

School’s back in – kids are uniformed, parents relieved, uni students packing their bags. It reminds me of my first week in theology college – aka vicar school – 1997, aged 21.

Some of us new students got chatting in the queue to register for lectures – trying to get the best professors – and we realised we had more in common than vicaring aspirations. For example: a love of Seinfeld, and Friends, the hit TV shows of the day.

And so we decided to meet-up one night in somebody’’s student-flat, to watch telly together. And we had so much fun, we decided to do it every week. We’d all bring food to share, and while we laughed at George Costanza or Phoebe Buffay, we’d gossip and swap notes and share life. Over three years of theology school, we moved from watching Friends to being friends.

Such close friends, in fact, that when we graduated in 2000, we decided to keep meeting. Not every week, as we were flung across the world in different vocations – ministers, lecturers, activists, one very good politician. But every summer, now for more than a quarter-century, we’ve gathered for a week of holiday and proper-catching-up. Fourteen of us including partners, with an added bunch of thirteen beautiful kids, some of them at uni now themselves.

I’m a proper nerd – I’ve always loved school. But honestly, my favourite school? It’s these old friends, who can belly-laugh, and cut through the nonsense, and help me find the truth – all at the same time. We’ve experienced beautiful things together, hilarious things, terrible things. We’ve loved each other, and sometimes we’ve really fallen out. And when it would’ve been so much easier to let it all go, we’ve held on to each other, because we know we still have so much to learn.

Before Christianity was called Christianity, at its very beginning, it was called The Way. It was ever intended to be just a set of beliefs or values, or a mere ethical code – but a way of life, a school of living, together in union with God, with each other, and all Creation.

As the new school year begins, I’m grateful for all the teachers who’ve shaped me, but especially for these old friends and the ongoing classroom of faith we share.

I believe there are some lessons about God that only friends can teach.