When I was clearing out my mother’s house after her death I found a notebook in which she’d written at the top of the first page: “Things to be grateful for.” Sadly the resolution to count her blessings soon seems to have lapsed, because there was only one entry and the rest of the page — in fact the rest of the notebook — was blank. Anyway, that single entry was one with which I totally identify. It was “People who make me laugh”

Rose Wild, column in The Times, 17 December

In my early days as a bishop I tried to inhabit a vacuum of opinion. I believed that this vacuum is the proper place for a bishop, the only place that a “symbol of unity” in the Church could possibly sit. Such a vacuum is certainly a good place to live if you want a quiet life: in space, no one can hear you scream

Paul Bayes, Bishop of Liverpool, Via Media blog, 23 December

Well, over the years things changed for me. As with so many others in the long history of the Church, events and wounded people approached me and I came to know them, and they changed me. . . So I have done my best to say what I think about a whole range of things, including one or two which are contended in today’s church. I’ve tried to speak for, to make room for, the lives of people for whom there was no room in the past

Ibid.

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