St Barnabas' Hattersley
SOME OF THE CLERGY I RECALL from my youth – Allen Sutcliffe, Edward Hartley Barnes, David Thomas Pugh Evans – served as incumbent in the same parish for 40 years or more. I’ve served as Vicar of five parishes in less than 30. And every once in a while I’ve enjoyed having just a glimpse of what it must have been like to live and work amongst parishioners known and loved intimately over an entire working lifetime.
Hattersley is in interregnum and awaits the appointment of a new priest. It has been my privilege, thirty years after my first encounter with the parish, to “help out a bit” on the occasional Sunday. Familiar faces are older and wiser, as affectionate and generous now, as then. Conversations left off thirty years ago are taken up again, in unscripted sermon and at after-service coffee, as though they’d begun yesterday – and enfolded in warmth I marvel at the miracle of the pastor’s being “home” even whilst “away from home”.
Parish life, for priest and people, and wherever it may be, is full of what former Vicar of Hattersley, W H Vanstone, called Love’s endeavour, love’s expense. Until, long years after we first set out on the journey, we take up old conversations again, with a gloriously mixed bag of saints-with-the-corners-rubbed-off, as though begun yesterday, in another new “home” where at last we understand that
the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time
T S Eliot – Four Quartets
