Here’s the text for the 24 June 2024 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

Earlier this month I visited my family in Tennessee, and I was reminded yet again ­– what a load of chatterboxes we are. Zoe, you think I’m a yappy Yank? You should meet my kinfolk. If you run into my dad or my sister or my aunt at the supermarket, buckle up, y’all – they can talk for America. I’m pretty extroverted myself, but compared to them, I’m a monk.

Something I learned very early on from my family was how to communicate in a way that draws people in and makes ‘em feel comfortable. How to read a room and warm it up with charm. This can be a good thing. Friendliness, story-telling, a genuine clap on the back – it all goes a long way.

But here’s a confession: there can be a shadow side to that chatty charm. In our mission to influence and impress, it’s easy to become chameleons. To change roles or switch styles just to get noticed, to get likes, or to persuade – which is just another word for “manipulate”!

I co-host the podcast Hope & Anchor. We recently chatted with Amanda Lovett, one of the stars from series 1 of The Traitors. You might remember: she’s the “Welsh Dragon” whose wonderfully-deceptive scheming took her almost all-the-way to the final.

It turns out that playing-to-the-room is super-helpful for reality telly. But not-so-helpful for becoming a real human being.

At least for me.

For a long-time in my life, I was desperately trying to keep up appearances. Juggling so many scripts and identities that I didn’t know who I actually was. All those alter-egos hollowed me right out.

Thomas Merton, a 20^th-century monk, says: If you want to identify me, don’t ask me where I live, what food I like, how I wear my hair, but ask me what I’m living for – and then ask me what’s keeping me from living that way.

As a Christian and also a member of the 12-step recovery community, my journey is different from a monk’s. I’m not called to celibacy or a monastery. But like a monk, I am called to be one person, to be a true person.

Not a chameleon or a changing cast of characters, but the same person, the same Trey – wherever I am, whoever I’m with.

For me, that’s what integrity is. That’s what spirituality means. And that’s what I’m trying to living for. As Jesus says, to know the truth – about yourself, about what’s real – and to let that truth set you free.

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.

Here’s the text for the 10 June 2024 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

On a walk last summer, our four-year-old godson, Brecon, was excited to tell me about his recent discovery. He wanted to show me ­– as he put it – “where the snails live”. We weren’t in a garden or a farmer’s field but on the pavements of northwest-London. Brecon took my hand, and led me to a wall. “Look!” he said. He pointed to a crack in the bricks. I leaned over and saw the spiral-shells clustered there, and Brecon yelled out: “Wow!”

To be honest, I wasn’t feeling well at the time ­– I was in a cloud of depression that stuck around the whole summer. But Brecon’s glee in snail-spotting lifted my spirit. We got lost in laughter and a growing chorus of “Wows!”. And even though we fully expected to find more snails in each new crevice, we were somehow still surprised when we found them.

Brecon reminded me of Charles Darwin, famous for his 19^th-century theory of evolution. Darwin kept a journal during his scientific expeditions, and in it he wrote: “I expected to discover a great deal”. But even he wasn’t prepared for what he described as the “hurricane of delight and astonishment” that swirled through him with each new discovery.

For example, he saw an unusually-shaped butterfly and, using the creature’s Latin name, he scribbled: “Tresses like hair – beautiful lepidoptera – Silence – Hosanna!”

I love that. First, Darwin is struck silent by the beauty. Then he cries out “Hosanna!”­– an ancient religious word that basically means “Wow!”

Hosannas are strewn-through Darwin’s journals ­– a growing chorus of “Wows” that for me as a Christian, points to the harmony between spirituality and nature, between true science and true religion.

Theologian Rowan Williams says: the harmony and “immensity of the universe” inspire us to wonder “what kind of concentrated, unlimited energy is holding everything together in being?”

We don’t have to be religious to ponder that. We might not call that unlimited energy “God”. We might be agnostic or atheist. But when we’re gobsmacked by the glory of the Northern Lights, or bats-like-holy-angels on summer-nights, or when we kneel down to save a snail from commuters racing by – maybe we get freed-up a little. Unstuck a bit from ourselves, perhaps, when we’re struck by that beauty­­ – that energy – that universal love we’re not even sure we believe in.

So, thank you, Charles Darwin and, personally speaking, thank you, Jesus, for getting me unstuck, for declaring that every inch of the universe is holy ground. And thanks especially to my godson Brecon: for teaching me to cry out: Wow!

Here’s the text for the 5 February 2024 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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I’ve been running since my early-twenties. I started for the health benefits after my GP said I needed to lower my cholesterol. But I’ve stayed with it for the room it opens up in my brain, the peace it transfuses into my veins.

When I got sober, I joked that I’d traded alcohol for free drugs from God which running gave me access to.

For me, running’s not really about competing. In a parkrun or road-race, it’s more about the joy of being with others. Generally I’m not trying to beat anybody – except for that one guy in the Darth Vader costume who sprinted past me in the last leg of the London Marathon.

If I’m competing against anybody, it’s myself. This obsession intensified in my thirties when I bought a sports watch that tracks my mileage, heart-rate, and especially my speed – which an exercise app then graphs. As I pushed myself for a faster and faster time, I loved watching the graph’s trend-line rise.

But as I approach my fifties, that trend-line’s started sagging and lately it’s pretty much plummeted.

Part of me fights that. When a young runner-friend of mine, Ali, started a regime of exercises recently to increase his pace, I heard this voice in my head: “Trey, if you train just as hard, for your 50^th birthday in 2025, you can defy the odds with your fastest-marathon-ever!”

I even consulted a coach who said he’d help me, but he also said: “When you started running 25 years ago, it was, you know … 25 years ago. You’re older now – that’s no bad thing. Is there anything wrong with slowing down?”

Underneath the ambitious part of me, another part of me felt relief.

We’re not all runners, of course, but probably we’ve all in some way felt the pressure of the world on our shoulders to get faster and grow stronger.

What I’m learning from Jesus, my real-life coach, is that sometimes it’s better to get slower and grow humbler. In the Bible, Jesus is always coaching people to come to him for rest, to slow down enough to look at the birds or talk to somebody.

In early sobriety, someone said “I wish you a slow recovery”. At first I didn’t understand what they meant but I’ve come to treasure that advice. I believe the good life isn’t about relentlessly pursuing better measurements, or being driven by the obsession of winning, but instead being freed to love the slow pace of living life as it actually comes.

Here’s the text for the 29 January 2024 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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A few springs ago my husband and I took a hiking holiday to Mt. Snowdon, also known by its ancient Welsh name, Yr Wyddfa. The first day we climbed to the summit was so warm and bright, we needed suncream.

But a few days later, the temperature dropped and a snowstorm churned in. Heavy clouds cloaked the mountain. We still hiked up, but with ice on the path, it took us twice as long.

Dramatic weather changes aren’t unusual, of course, in these islands, but encountering spring-sunshine and winter-snowstorm so close together on the same mountain – it caught me off-guard.

Last summer, a couple years after our Snowdonia trip, I was caught off-guard by another journey, when a dense depression descended on me, like an unforeseen weather-system. The week before I’d felt okay, but suddenly I was hit by a squall of negative thoughts, deep sadness, and a fatigue so oppressive I needed time-off-work and medical help. The depression waxed and waned but stayed around in some form for the entire summer. And then, as mysteriously as it had descended, it lifted. Where I’d felt foggy before, it was clear again.

People experience depression and anxiety in vastly different ways. And I’d never want to suggest my experience is just like others’. But what helped me through that painful terrain ­– alongside friends, church, and the good-old-NHS ­– was an ancient Christian image.

The Bible is filled with weird-sounding mountains: Sinai, Gilead, Beth-El, Olivet. Slopes where people meet unexpectedly with God. So sometimes Christians compare the spiritual journey to hiking a mountain.

And theologian Martin Laird says that an important part of that journey is learning to recognize how changeable our thoughts and feelings are. The emotional weather-systems around us are always in flux. And no matter how much we work-out or eat-right or meditate or declutter, we cannot control the weather.

What helped me in the maelstrom of depression was that insight: that I’m actually not the weather around me. I’m the mountain. Or better-put: God’s the mountain and when I’m fixed upon it, I’m secure, however I’m feeling, whatever the weather. When it’s rainy and miserable in my head, I remember: the weather will change. And when it’s blissfully sunny, I also need to remember, the weather will probably change.

I believe what’s most real about me is not my fleeting thoughts and feelings but the truth that I can never be separated from the everlasting love and elemental strength of God, who can be trusted in every forecast.

Here’s the text for the 22 January 2024 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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Zoe, when I was on your show the first time, I was sooooo nervous. I worried: would I mess up? Would you like me? What would people think of my weirdly-pitched American accent?

As I climbed the stairs to your studio that day, my heart was in my throat. But in the stairwell there’s a picture of Dolly Parton from a time she was here. And when I saw her smiling that smile, I felt God speak to my anxious heart, in the voice of Dolly herself: Honey, I created you. So you be you, and I’ll shine though, and you’ll be – just fine. And I was.

I thought of that experience last Friday because Dolly turned 78 yo. Dolly, honey, if you’re listening, Happy Birthday!

Dolly has always captivated me. Maybe ‘cause we’re both Tennesseans. Or because my parents played her records when I was young and her music’s been running through my veins ever since. Or maybe it’s because I think Dolly is the same person wherever she is – she’s simply being who she was created to be.

But mostly I love how Dolly Parton helps people feel the goodness flowing through life – the goodness in ourselves, the goodness way beyond ourselves. Her Glastonbury set in 2014 was a revival. People of different spiritualities and none, hands up in the air praising, or searching for something beyond themselves, because Dolly was pointing the way.

And Lord in heaven she. Is. funny. Parkinson asked her once where she got her signature look. And she talked about walking as a child with her mother in their poor mountain town, and they saw a fabulously-dressed woman with high-heels, red lipstick, peroxide-blonde hair piled-up high.  Dolly hadn’t known it was the town prostitute, a sex-worker in the village.  And she said: “Mama, who’s that? She’s beautiful.” Her mother snapped back: “Honey, she ain’t nothing but trash!” And Dolly said: “Oh Mama, that’s what I wanna be: I wanna be trash!”

I love that story. Dolly saw that woman in a way that others didn’t: as a human being – not trash, but treasure.

So Dolly’s been called the Queen of Country, but I think a better title for her is “saint”.

In the Christian faith, saints aren’t just dead people churches are named after. A saint is anybody, really, who sees like God sees, who loves like Jesus loves, who helps others see and love in a bigger way. Saints point fingers – but not to judge, instead to reveal hidden treasure.

Now, I have no influence in the official process of canonizing saints. I’ll leave that to the Pope. But whether we identify as sinners or saints or both, let’s raise our cups today to the unofficial Saint Dolly Parton and let’s also raise our cups to the goodness flowing through everything.

Here’s the text for the 6 March 2023 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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February was LGBTQ+ History Month – and I thought about Pride Parades from over the years. My first was Nashville, Tennessee, just after I came out in 1995. Not exactly ancient history, but things were different then. Only about 200 of us gathered to walk through the city-centre. I remember passing by the bar, Hooters: in one window the waitresses cheered us on. In the next window, the drinkers offered us a colourful display of rude gestures.

Another memorable Pride was 2010. I was helping start a new church in Chicago. And one of our first events was marching together in a parade packed with 2 million people. Our fledgling congregation included gay and straight and trans folks, but most of us had never been so public before about our faith.

We were nervous as we queued to march. But we believed God had given us a message we had to share: that God is for all people. And so edgy as we were, off we marched with rainbow flags, a cross held high, and postcards we gave out, printed with different versions of that message:

LGBTQ or Straight: you are loved.

Believer or Doubter: you are loved.

Tattoos or Suits, HIV-positive or HIV-negative, Cubs fan or Sox fan, you are loved.

That last one ­– Cubs fan or Sox fan – is the American equivalent of saying something as scandalous as ‘God loves Liverpool *and* Man United’.

As we passed out those postcards, we talked to people, we hugged and high-fived people, we paused and prayed with people. And something beautiful happened along the way. We had imagined ourselves blessing the crowds with a message of love, but we realized really quickly: we were being blessed by the crowds even more. Fueled by their energy, our nervous band of inclusive evangelists came alive like a joyous flashmob.

When we reached the end of the parade, one of the straight guys in our church said to me: “Pastor, that was the most fun I’ve had in my entire life. Please can we go back and do it all over again?”

Desmond Tutu often preached: God’s love meets us right where we are – but never leaves us there.

I believe God has always been that way. The same God – of history, of today, and the world to come – is God for all people. LGBTQ+ and straight, socialists and conservatives, football fans and Hooters waitresses. The list goes on and on. It’s a divine scandal – God’s love bringing us all together and showing us the way to something totally new.

Here’s the text for the 27 Feburary 2023 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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I sat down on the Tube and as it left the station, I caught a glimpse in the window of my ever-expanding forehead marked with a smudge of dirt. It was Ash Wednesday, when some Christians ponder what we humans are made of. And in case we’ve forgotten, we go to church to receive a reminder: a cross of glorious mud traced right onto our faces.

At the next station on my Tube journey, the doors opened and a young Muslim guy got on. He sat in the seat just to the left of me and opened his Quran, the holy book of Islam. He held it on his lap and prayed quietly, whispering verses from the scriptures. He was almost singing them. It was beautiful.

And then, at the next station, the doors opened and – I promise I’m not making this up, y’all – a young Jewish guy got on, dressed in a long suit and traditional black hat. He sat just to the right of me, and he leaned forward, he held his face in his hands, his sidelocks tassling over his fingers.

The three of us sat there next to each other, and I felt like I was part of the beginning of a joke – “So, a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew get onto a train….”

But more than a joke, I felt like I was the recipient of a blessing – one of those rare times in life when you get the luck or the grace of being in the right place at the right time. You did nothing to ask for it or plan it – it just happens. And when it happened to me that Ash Wednesday night, I felt a deep joy – a comfort, actually – that I get to be part of this beautiful crowd called humanity.

The blessing wasn’t just the guys to my left and right: the whole packed-out train felt like a gift – people on their phones, kids twirling on the poles, folks of different spiritualities, atheists and agnostics, too. People different in every way, but all of us held together.

The philosopher Sartre said: Hell is other people. And don’t get me wrong: I can go there, too. When relationships are twisted, when politics are warped, when someone cuts me off in traffic. But that rush-hour on the Tube, other people seemed like Heaven. All of us connected, whether we were conscious of it or not, by the glorious, unearned gift of being human.