Following his retirement as Bishop of Liverpool in 2022, Paul Bayes and his wife Kate moved to a different part of the country. Kate developed a serious illness and died two years after the move. For Paul, the paths of life have taken a very different direction to what he had expected. ‘My lungs could not handle religion’s warm, humid, triumphant air any more. I found myself rediscovering my first love; a love for testing, and questioning, and wondering.’

The Door, based on the farewell sermon he preached to the Diocese of Liverpool, explores this new theological landscape through a series of profound and deeply moving reflections, that should prove helpful to all of us in times of increased grief and uncertainty. ‘I have come to believe more and more that God is to be found in the desert and in the public place, and that it is deceptively easy, and mistaken, to look for God in some middle place, some religious place, less transcendent and less immanent, availably supernatural, reliably available, unquestionably predictable, a middle place like a pocket where meaning and God can be tucked away and preserved.