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‘Imagine … the threshold between the inner and outer life of every human being as a door. When opened, this door leads to different rooms within one’s self, and to different paths outside.
Most often, the door opens easily, and what lies behind it is familiar and swiftly-found. Sometimes the door needs a push, before it opens to an unexpected new room or a surprising new path. On occasions there is a knock at the door – stepping through in response reveals a radical view and the start of a journey of transformation.’
Paul Bayes, a retired Anglican bishop who served as Bishop of Liverpool for eight years, offers this image of the door as a valuable way of adjusting to landscapes familiar and unfamiliar in our passage through life. It proved helpful for him as his own path turned in an unexpected and traumatic direction following retirement in 2022. His wife Kate developed a serious illness and died two years after their move to a new home; Paul discovered himself in a new environment – spiritually and theologically, emotionally and physically – and a need to adjust to a thinner, more testing air.
The Door is a book to help each of us navigate challenging landscapes without and within. It is comprised of fragments – of wisdom and reflection, of questions and wonder, and of the deep mysteries of God which can be found both in the desert and the public place. ‘The ideas and values implicit in this book have nourished me, and I still hope for a world in which they may nourish others,’ he writes. ‘So I offer the pieces here in the belief that they might reflect, in splintered fashion, aspects of the love of God.’
Paul Bayes was the eighth Bishop of Liverpool in the Church of England before his retirement in 2022. He was previously Bishop of Hertford.
