faith

Gratitude Lists – a BBC Pause for Thought

/ Trey Hall / Leave a comment

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

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Last Thursday in America was Thanksgiving Day, when families and friends travel great distances simply to eat together. I love Thanksgiving because it’s not super-commercialized. It’s like Christmas, but without the price of entry. You don’t have to buy anybody anything. The only gift expected is sitting down for a common meal.

Which doesn’t always feel like a gift ­­– family dynamics can play out, especially this year when families, like mine, are divided by their votes in the recent election.

But Americans have developed a remedy for that, at least a temporary one: the practice of counting our blessings. It’s Thanksgiving tradition to go around the table, naming something we’re thankful for. Everybody participates, from your cantankerous-great-uncle to your fringy-cringy-cousin.        And also you.      It’s a beautiful thing.

The first year we lived in the UK, me and my English husband hosted Thanksgiving for our British friends. Jonathan cooked a turkey, prepared my grandma’s homemade-stuffing, baked a pumpkin-pie.

My contribution was inviting guests to express their thankfulness. The Brits didn’t see it coming. I said: As we tuck in, can everybody share a gratitude?

Immediately there were eye-rolls, a silent-but-visceral resistance. My friend Ash, a brilliant theologian but also a-bit-of-a-clown, said: How very American.

I said: Ash, it’s my party, let’s start with you: what are you thankful for? He responded in a Jack-Whitehall-kind-of-way: I’m thankful for these mashed potatoes.

Hannah, Ash’s wife, said: Ash, come on! And then she shared a sincere gratitude. And to my astonishment, everyone followed suit, offering thanksgiving for unexpected love, a clear diagnosis, a second chance. By the time we made it round the table, there were even a few tears for all the gratitude. Ash even made a second-attempt.

Of course, giving-thanks transcends national boundaries. And it’s the heart of many spiritual communities.

Christian writer Frederick Buechner says gratitude is about acknowledging the things we “can only be given” – things “we can’t bring about ourselves any more than we can bring about our own birth.”

In Alcoholics Anonymous, some folks write a gratitude list in the mornings. We find naming concrete things to be helpful: thanks for the breath in my lungs, for sobriety, for the coffee in my cup. Gratitude doesn’t fix our problems, but it does increase our freedom to take each day as it comes.

So whatever your country-of-origin, your spirituality or none: Happy Thanksgiving. May we count our blessings and be truly grateful.

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.