When Pat Kiley was a child, running around getting into mischief with the children of All Saints’ former rector, Harry Pritchett, and his wife, Allison, little did she know that would lead to a decades’ long relationship with the church.
Pat grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, and attended St. Thomas Church, where Harry was rector and Pat’s mother was the first woman in Alabama to ever sit on a vestry. Pat didn’t know when she and Sonny and Margaret (the Pritchett’s oldest children) were ducking out of Sunday school to sneak fresh cracked egg biscuits at the Krystal right across the street from the church that decades later, after a host of jobs including teen lifeguard, newspaper proofreader, and office manager for an accounting firm that Harry Pritchett would call her asking her to come to All Saints’.
Thank goodness for us, Pat accepted that call and agreed to come be Ann Woodall’s parish life assistant. Pat is a Renaissance woman of many talents so it’s no surprise she started doing a little bit of everything for All Saints’ before she became Geoffrey Hoare’s assistant in 2000. While Pat was parish life assistant, she helped plan events, as well as being the parish registrar and worked with stewardship and finance committees. When asked Pat to recount something unexpected she had to do in her job, she said one day it was clear there was a dead rat in the shrubbery somewhere and the sextons looked and looked and couldn’t find it. Pat went outside, and within seconds, located the culprit and was donned “Head Rat Sniffer Outer” by the staff, proving as Pat says, “It’s never been a boring job.”
Honoring Pat for her retirement after almost 27 years at All Saints’, we remember the moment at Simon’s installation when Bishop Rob Wright swept his hands towards the pew where Pat was sitting and said, “We all know who All Saints’ really is here: Pat Kiley, who has been with three rectors.”
She knows the heart of the church. I asked Pat to tell us some things about this heart so that we can have the gift of her legacy. I wanted to know if there was a particular epoch that stands out to her, and she stated, “Each generation outdoes the last.” She talked about the “cauldron of energy” she felt being a part of this amazing community with its incredible brain power and dynamic generosity. She said, “All Saints’ has always put its best foot forward, and it is the community of All Saints’ that keeps it alive and vital. The thing that I have heard from the lips of hundreds of people over the years is that it feels like home.”
There are so many different people and events that stand out in her memory like the 100 years Celebration and so many more that Pat couldn’t possibly mention them all so I asked Pat instead of memories to leave us with a message, and she said with a hitch in her voice, “It is so hard to say goodbye, and I want them to know that.”
She is not the only one who will have a hard time saying goodbye. Simon says, “‘I would not have made it through these past four and half years without Pat Kiley’s wise counsel, calming voice of experience, and wicked sense of humor. As rector, her leaving feels like the training wheels are coming off! All of me will miss you, Pat.”
Although we will miss her dearly, we can know that she will be busy and happy in her new home in Gadsden, Alabama, gardening, cooking, and making cocktails. Pat and her sister Cindy and Cindy’s husband Mike will be loving on Pat’s grandnieces and nephews: Ann Caroline, Madeline, Thomas and Lucy who are all under three years old and four of the soon to be seven grandnieces and nephews. Not only will she have all these babies to love on, but Pat’s brother Joe and his wife Gloria will also be moving to Gadsden when Joe retires so it will be a big retirement family reunion all the time. As Pat and her siblings offer much needed back up for the kids, we are certain that Pat will pause in the middle of the small child hustle and bustle and think fondly of All Saints’. She can rest assured that we will never, ever forget her and the incredible legacy she has given to the church. Her work to support and encourage community in Christ goes on, enlivened by her gifts.
On Thursday, December 16, 2021, we held a grand party to celebrate Pat's retirement.
