family

“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.

“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.

___________

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.

“The Sea in my veins” – a BBC Pause for Thought

/ Trey Hall / Leave a comment

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

We’re recently back from a week in Norfolk, on a stretch of the coast so beautiful it could be a scene in a holiday snow-globe. Except instead of snow, stars and sunrises, seascapes and fields. And at this time of year, massive colonies of seals. Everything held together in an atmosphere of awe.

On the first morning, I ran along the dunes to see the grey seals, mottled and crooning on the sand, waiting for their babies to be born. That day I saw only one little white pup, maybe the first-fresh-born, held close by its mum.

But every day after that, there was growing crèche of cottony seal-babies. 125 by week’s end, with 3000 expected by January. I’d stop and gaze at the sheer exuberance of nature. So bold and, at the same time, so fragile: 40% of those babies won’t make it through winter. So terrible, so beautiful, so compelling that you half-expect David Attenborough to show up with a camera crew.

And Norfolk absorbed me in another way, too. Amidst all this new animal life were quiet reminders of human life and mortality. Walking the coastal path, stopping in seaside villages, I saw memorials everywhere. Names carved into monuments: young men, women, a generation, we will remember them. And simple plaques at beachfronts, on benches tied with flowers, giving thanks for loved ones who’ve crossed to the other shore.

For Nigel, who loved it here.

In memory of Mum, we miss you so much.

For Aisha, we’ll love you forever.

One of my favourite Bible passages is Psalm 148, which describes all Creation praising God—not just humans, but sun and moon, children and elders, sea creatures and ocean depths. All week-long in Norfolk, I felt drawn into this tidal movement of praise. I felt baptized again in the currents of the living and the dead. As the poet Thomas Traherne put it, I “felt the Sea itself flowing in [my] veins”.

For me, as a Christian, the reason for all this praise isn’t that everything is amazing all the time – it’s definitely not. For me, the reason for the praise is that God can be trusted to hold us together through terrible things and beautiful things. To hold everything together, actually: eons and generations, and me and you, and colonies of seal-pups, too. God somehow makes sure everything belongs.

In this cosmic sphere, we will live and we will die, and, I believe, we will be okay. All shall be well, everything held forever by the one God and Mother of us all.

A Time for Every Purpose – a BBC Pause for Thought

/ Trey Hall / Leave a comment

Here’s the text for the 9 June 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

I was at a baseball game one summer evening in 2006 when I got the call that my sister had given birth. My then-boyfriend and I were watching the Chicago Cubs play at Wrigley Field, alongside his parents, who were visiting from England.

I answered my mobile, and my dad yelled down the phone-line: Trey, you’ve got a niece and her name is Kenley!

I then yelled to my boyfriend, his parents, and all the folks around us we didn’t even know: I’ve got a niece! Her name is Kenley!

My boyfriend’s mom cried out: You’re an uncle!

And everybody cheered. The Cubs lost that night, but there was joy in the stands for a new life.

That baby niece is now 18-years-old. Kenley graduated high-school in May, she’s off to uni this autumn, and this week, she’s visiting me and my then-boyfriend-and-now-husband in London, before we travel to Rome for her graduation present. Kenley’s life is at the beginning, full of promise.

My then-boyfriend’s-mom who declared me an uncle at the Cubs game: she became my mother-in-law, Joy. And sadly, on Easter Sunday this year she received the unexpected diagnosis of advanced cancer. And last Bank Holiday, she died.

Kenley’s life is on the brink of opening into adulthood; Joy’s mortal life has ended, and opened, I believe, into the mystery of eternity.

There’s a line from the Bible, which was made into a famous song by the Byrds:

To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven:

a time to be born, a time to die,

a time to weep, a time to laugh,

a time to mourn, a time to dance.

What’s weird about this season for our family is that so many of those times and purposes are jumbled together in this moment: we’re packing holiday suitcases at same time as we’re ordering flowers for a funeral. We’re launching Kenley’s young adult life into the world now, at the same time as we’re offering Joy’s life to the world to come.

It’s really hard, and really bewildering. But also there’s so much beauty in this rise and fall of living and dying. Because I trust, as a Christian, that God somehow holds it all together – our young selves and old selves, our births and deaths, and everything in between.

I believe God knows us and loves us forever – and none of my seasons, or Joy’s or Kenley’s,  or yours, Scott – none of our seasons will ever be forgotten by God,

God’s great lineage of love – a BBC Pause for Thought

/ Trey Hall / Leave a comment

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.