thanksgiving

“We are, all of us, pilgrims” – a BBC Pause for Thought

/ Trey Hall / Leave a comment

Here’s the text for the 24 November 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

Last year we moved to the Docklands – part of the East End of London, that from medieval times was the world’s largest port. Boats moved cargo in and out of vast docks along the Thames.

Today most of these harbors have been filled in to create parks and housing, but you can still sense the history in the names of things. We live on the old whaling dock, and our local pub? It’s called the Moby Dick — with some of the best fish-and-chips in-town.

I was exploring the neighborhood one day at low-tide and noticed a stretch of sand and pebble. And a memorial to a voyage that started there in 1620, when 65 people boarded a ship sailing for what Europeans then called the New World. Need a hint? The pub next-door – it’s called the Mayflower.

This week, at Thanksgiving celebrations across the US, Americans will tell this story: of the Pilgrim mothers and fathers braving the seas for a new life, for a new home. Half of them perishing the first winter; the others surviving only through the compassion of the indigenous Americans, of the Wampanoag Nation.

This story is so central to American lore that we often romanticize the Pilgrims as heroic pioneers – or we stereotype them as colonial oppressors. I confess I’ve done both in my life. It’s so easy, but so lazy, to turn people from centuries ago into cartoons or villains.

But standing there on Rotherhithe Beach, I could see them as humans — children clinging to their parents as anchors lifted, prayers being whispered: for a safer life, for economic stability, for freedom to practice their faith without social hostility or government interference. These prayers feel to me like deeply human desires, both 400 years ago, and today.

We like our stories neat: good-or-bad, all-or-nothing. But real humans aren’t that simple: we’re a mixture of motives. We move, we migrate. We don’t stay in one place emotionally, or spiritually, or geographically. We change. As I stood on the pilgrims’ wharf that day, I heard people speaking in at least four different languages, and only one of them was Cockney. And I thought: we humans, we are all of us pilgrims.

In the Bible, I believe God makes a promise: “Let no foreigner say, ‘I am not welcome.’” God says “I will give them a home and a name better than ‘daughters and sons’”.

It’s a promise of belonging that flows across generations and nations and borders. My prayer this Thanksgiving is that God’s vision will happen here: on earth as it already is in heaven. Because in the end, I believe we are, all of us, pilgrims searching for the belonging of home.

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.