Mother Pat Celebrates
35 years as priest
Mother Pat Hames will celebrate the 35th anniversary of her ordination to the priesthood on Memorial Day. She will mark the day by preaching and presiding at the 9 o’clock Holy Eucharist service at St John’s.
It’s a milestone that coincides with Mother Pat’s tenth year living in Niantic. She had retired to Niantic after twenty years as the rector of St Mark’s, New Britain, serving before that as curate at Trinity, Newtown with the rector, Father Frank Dunn.
Thirty-five years ago, although women had recently won the right to be ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church, that change was still some way off elsewhere in the Anglican Communion. With her background in the exclusively male-led Church of England, Mother Pat’s decision to seek ordination as a priest made her something of a pioneer. She had to work hard to make it happen.
Mother Pat’s ordination service on May 25th, 1990
Pat was brought up in England, leaving school at the age of 15 to attend a Secretarial College and then to work at the Royal Air Force base in Brampton near Cambridge as a secretary. There, she met Bob Hames, serving in the United States’ Air Force’s Security Police. They were married, and after the birth of their first child, Robert, they moved to South Carolina.
Pat remembers the American South of the 1960s as a “culture shock”. At first the family attended an independent Baptist church, but after a chance meeting at the launderette (housed in the local chicken farm) they discovered the Episcopal Church - and has never left.
After Bob and the family were stationed to Germany Pat became increasingly active in the church. She worked closely with several Air Force chaplains and later worked for the Episcopal Bishop to the Armed Forces, Charles Burgreen. She became a lay minister authorized to distribute Holy Communion, and felt a growing sense of a call to ordained ministry.
Two particular events stand out in Pat’s memory. First, as a child she read of Gladys Aylward the British evangelical missionary. The story of her work in China inspired Pat to become a missionary. Then, during the Hames’ brief return to the United States in 1976, Pat encountered “a woman behind the altar” for the first time. The Reverend Beverley Messenger-Harris was a deacon allowed to celebrate a “Deacon’s Mass” at Zion Episcopal Church. (In 1977 she became the first woman to serve as a Rector in the Episcopal Church.) Seeing her presiding at a service was a pivotal moment when Pat felt an insistent call to ordination as a priest.
To qualify for divinity school, Pat needed a bachelor’s degree, and studied in classrooms on bases during new postings in Germany and received a degree in humanities from the University of Maryland. In 1985 – with her son Robert and daughter Julie in college - Pat began training at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University. She completed the three-year degree and was ordained deacon. She remembers thinking at the time, “I’m not young, and I’m not waiting for this any longer”.
After serving as a deacon at Trinity, Newtown, Pat was ordained priest there by Bishop Jeffrey Rowthorn in what she recalls as an atmosphere of joy and celebration. Bob, Robert and Julie were with her. Bishop Charles Burgreen was one of her sponsors. It was on May 25th , 1990, almost four years before the first women were ordained as priests in the Church of England.
The Hame’s family at Mother Pat’s ordination in 1990
Bishop Charles Burgreen was one of Mother Pat’s sponsors
Bishop Jeffrey Rowthorn at the 25th anniversary of Mother Pat’s ordination
Pat’s retirement to Niantic in 2015 marked the start of her ministry at Saint Anne’s Old Lyme where she worked with the Reverend Page Rogers. Her regular connection with St John’s began as she attended the Women’s Bible Study led by Faith Emerich. At Father Tony Dinoto’s request she later began leading that weekly gathering where she says she has come to know “some amazing women”.
St John’s struck her immediately as a friendly place. Her first impression was of a church that was lively to the point of being “noisy”, especially compared with others she had come to know in Connecticut. She was impressed with the congregation’s deep commitment to their shared community and care for each other. With Mother Jackie Cameron taking over as priest in charge, Mother Pat sees this as a moment of opportunity for St John’s.
When she preaches and presides this Memorial Day weekend, Mother Pat says she’ll be thinking of the many people in the church who inspired her, and remembering the joyful ceremony thirty-five years ago when she became an Episcopal priest.
​
​