Great is thy Faithfulness

Gordon-Hurst Barrow+
January 5, 1915 - April 15, 2008

Fr. Barrow died a couple of weeks ago in Indianapolis, where he had spent the last several years near his son, also a priest,who lives there and helped him through his final years. He was 93 years old and had been a robust old man until a few years ago when he started falling and had to leave his Chelsea apartment for assisted living. He didn't say goodbye and I was left wondering where he went after that last dinner at the Oyster Bar a few years ago. He had called me one last time at work a few months later, wanting to go out for lunch one day, but I was busy and couldn't go, and he hung up in his usual fashion and didn't call again until one Saturday morning last fall when he had finally gotten a phone in his apartment in Indianapolis at the insistence of his children and he explained what had happened. He sounded very frail and had trouble putting things into words, but he seemed his old cranky indefatigible self, although grudgingly reconciled to life on a fast downhill tread. His daughter, Amanda, called me the Saturday after he died and we had a long talk about him. From all I had heard about her life and her art, I felt like I knew her although we have never met. She is organizing a memorial for him at St. Thomas', where he said a couple of weekday masses every week, so I look forward to that.

During our final talk I am thankful that I managed to express that I loved him and was grateful for all he had taught me and for all the wonderful masses and other meals we had shared over the years. I had served Saturday morning mass with him for several years back in the late 1980s/early 90s. After Mass in the Lady Chapel we said a decade of the Rosary sitting in the pews outside the Lady Chapel and then went and had coffee and pastries up in the Common Room or went somewhere for brunch. He loved to tell stories of his life, which were always interesting, and he loved to talk about his four children who all had interesting lives as well. His wife had died several years ago and he had moved to New York after retiring. He was also a good carpenter and one summer very generously built me a wonderful chickenwire and wood cage for my pet iguana, Iggy. Poor Iggy died a few years later after outgrowing the cage and getting way too big, tangling with the cats and eventually dying from eating their food, which I should have known was bad for a vegetarian like him.

Fr. Barrow was also very old fashioned and we eventually stopped speaking to each other for a few years over the women and gay clergy issues. I can't remember how we made up, but eventually we were back going out to dinner, his favorite activity along with going to the gym, which he did religiously almost every day, rising at 4:00am and getting to the gym right when it opened at 6:00. For several years we went to the same gym, at the Worldwide Plaza, and I would often see him there intrepidly working out.

Fr. Barrow was a very frugal man and lived in a bare-bones studio apartment furnished mostly with furniture and shelves he had made himself. I was only invited there once, when he decided to give me his vintage Raleigh bicycle, which was way too big for me but I took it anyway and made some use of it for many years. He kept books in his oven and only made coffee there, which he was passionate about, always taking great care in the brewing. He had trouble sleeping so he slept on the floor, but he refused to have a television or even a telephone for the last 20 years in New York. He woke up on September 12, 2001 and went down to the big post office near Penn Station where he would always get his mail as soon as it was put in the box. Finding the eerie dawn streets and the unimaginably closed post office he couldn't figure out what had happened until he asked a man wandering dazed and confused what was going on and he told him in an incredulous tone that New York had been attacked the day before and described having seen the first airplane going down Eighth Avenue.

For a few years Fr. Barrow slept on the floor of the Common Room at St. Ignatius on Friday night so he would be up early for Saturday mass. He loved to sit near the back of the north wall and meditate/doze, and when I arrived for mass I often found him sitting near the Centurion window where there was a tiny bit of heat seeping out of the radiator on the wall. It was freezing in the winter and blazing in the summer and there was no solution, he used to say. After he left, in the early 1990s when he cottoned on to the fact that we had gay and women clergy in our midst, the heating got better, thanks to Ted and Maurice, the rain gutter system was redone, and these days he would probably find it quite toasty, but back then it was very cold for a very long time and there were often cascades of water in that area. I think of him often when I sit back there myself on a sunny Saturday afternoon enjoying our newfound warmth after sealing up many holes in the south wall. And blessedly, tomorrow begins the restoration of the north wall which will undoubtedly seal up even more cracks. It will be a few months before we can enjoy that area again, but it will be wonderful to have the whole north wall, inside and outside, repointed and the windows recaulked and cleaned, as well as the Lady Chapel. Then we must find some more money to secure the roof over the Lady Chapel as well as over the apartment. It will be a busy summer.

Iggy in 1987