In the Ascendant

ALONE among Christianity’s great feasts, Ascension Day always falls on a Thursday – and thus on a school day. Back at Timothy Hackworth Junior Mixed, we were always allowed time off to attend church. It’s amazing how many kids found God on the sixth Thursday after Easter (and lost him again by lunchtime).

This year it was celebrated at an open-air evening service in the grounds of the resplendently ruined Easby Abbey, near Richmond, a sort of Ascension island amid the North Yorkshire countryside.

Though early rain has given away to evening sun – at least one priest present supposes the change “miraculous”

– most of the 150 or so in attendance wear anoraks or carry umbrellas.

Though a warm May breeze replaces a mighty rushing wind – that’s Pentecost, tomorrow – the Reverend Stephen Adesanya (of whom more shortly) is zipped to the voice box. Another chap wears one of those ubiquitous high-vis yellow jackets. Only the photographer’s in shirt sleeves. Hardy lads, these photographers.

Easby was founded by the White Canons, a Premonstratensian order, around 1152 and abandoned when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries.

Though periodically attacked by the marauding Scots, the abbey is reckoned also to have been badly damaged by our own boys when billeted there on the way to the Battle of Nevilles Cross in 1346.

That so much of it survives is a tribute to the builders, though English Heritage may have had a hand in it, too.

The service is organised by the Richmond deanery of the Church of England. Quite possibly, supposes the splendid Richmond historian Jane Hatcher, it’s the first Anglican service ever held there.

The White Canons were a hospitable lot, says Jane – “a bit like the motorway service stations of today”

– who not only spread their largesse like Swaledale butter but may have been the pioneers of sheltered accommodation.

“Granny farming,” says Jane, and indicates where the flats may have been. In those days there were no stair lifts, though.

The deanery, believed to be the biggest in the Church of England, stretches from Croft to the Cumbrian border. Stan Haworth, the area dean, leads the service while carrying a walking stick – not something with which to beat the recalcitrant but the result of a back problem.

“I’m limping like a logo,” he says, memorably.

In his sermon, on joyfulness, Stan recalls that Ascension Day had also been special at his public school in Liverpool, all 700 boys expected to attend St Barnabas’s parish church and thereafter confident of a halfholiday.

No one ever asked for one at Timothy Hackworth.

It’s a lovely, lively service, led by the Reverend Lesley Cheetham, formerly a priest in Halifax – “a church like a cathedral” – who now has charge of Easby and surrounding rural parishes.

Particularly she’s keen to heighten the profile of the nearby St Agatha’s church, its origins thought to predate the abbey. “There are so many treasures there, such a little jewel, such enthusiastic people,” she says.

There, too, is her fiance, the Reverend Geoff Spedding, who’s just become a priest in an adjoining group of parishes and will live there until their marriage.

One chap’s positively leaping around – it may be liturgical, it may be muscle spasms, it may be something undreamed of, even in the Order for Common Worship.

Stephen Adesanya spends much of the service with at least one hand in his pocket; both where possible.

A Nigerian, he has been instituted the previous evening as priest-incharge of a great phalanx of parishes around Romaldkirk and Bowes, in Teesdale. Formerly an engineer, he’d found Christ (he says) while working in the former Yugoslavia.

Ordained in 1990, he became an archdeacon in Nigeria and was a priest in the Elephant and Castle area of London – to help make the journey yet more improbable – before venturing north.

He’s friendly, confident, broad beaming, accompanied by the admirable Peter Lind-Jackson, retired Vicar of Barnard Castle and former stalwart of the Durham diocesan clergy cricket team.

Peter recalls a match, covered by the Backtrack column, in which he’d scored 40-odd before retiring to listen to Schubert in his car. “Clergy cricketers are terrible sportsmen,” he adds.

Stephen isn’t a cricketer, though he’s willing to learn. Teesdale – really welcoming, he says – will offer steep hills and learning curves. “It’s warmer than Yugoslavia,” he says.

The offertory hymn’s Alleluia Sing to Jesus, the collection taken by the chap in the high-vis jacket. We should have seen him coming.

Afterwards there’s Crown Him with Many Crowns, a picnic – some of it left over from Stephen’s institution (and very nice, too).

Stan Haworth talks of how usually they meet as small congregations in scattered villages, of how encouraging it’s been for everyone to come together, offers the hope that they might do it again next year. No longer a chance to bunk off school, but Ascension Day on the up.