For All Saints’ this has been a year of incredible change. We’re a faith community which takes seriously the injunction to hold fast to what is good. We lovingly preserve and nurture a vibrant tradition of faith, the full Catholic faith in all the glory of its Anglican expression. Yet, of course, even we cannot escape change.

Preeminent amongst those changes is the death of our dear friend and priest associate, Fr. Tony Jarvis. In a day when the average Rector’s tenure is under five years, Fr. Jarvis’s forty-two years service amongst us is astounding. And it was offered as gift to us while working full time, as Headmaster of Roxbury Latin School and later while teaching at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and developing there a new program for Educational Leadership and Ministry. Even in those dark years between Fr. Bradford’s departure and my arrival, when Tony acceded to Bishop Shaw’s request that he be the Priest-in-Charge and guide All Saints’ through the troubled waters, he would accept no compensation for the gargantuan task he had undertaken.

Tony was certainly a man of strong opinions and of strong emotions. He knew what he believed and shared it freely, often bluntly. And he loved passionately: God, Our Lady, his family, his students, and us, his companions on this earthly pilgrimage. As a preacher, he both elucidated and motivated. Certainly part of his power in the pulpit was his willingness to admit his own weaknesses and struggles. He too was in the trenches, fighting, experiencing the wounds of battle.

Some years ago I started my Christmas Eve sermon by talking about the last days of a parishioner who had died just several days before. Whit Whitridge was a dear man, a stalwart of our weekday Masses. I told of some of those visits and giving Last Rites to him as he was surrounded by family. I then remarked that preaching about death and the Last Rites was certainly an unusual start to a Christmas Eve sermon. Following the Mass, a young man who had gone to Roxbury Latin came up and said to me it didn’t seem very unusual to him: it just sounded like I’d spent a lot of time around Fr. Jarvis. He went on to say that the Headmaster’s address at the beginning of each school year boiled down to three points: welcome back, remember you’re going to die; have a good year. Tony knew that this life is a gift, that our time here is limited, and that what we do with it matters. And he held out that call to strive for the good, the true, the beautiful, the holy.

“Firmly I believe and truly...” wrote John Henry Newman in The Dream of Gerontius. That fundamental confidence – not in himself, but in the one in whom he believed – could surely be said of Tony. And it is into the hands of that one in whom he believed, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, that we now entrust his soul, praying that God may do for him, and for all the faithful departed, better things than we can desire or pray for.

Yours,
Michael J. Godderz+