The Revd. Dr. D. Stuart Dunnan
Headmaster, Saint James School, Hagerstown, Maryland
October 13, 2018

Happy are they who dwell in thy house! *they will always be praising you.
Happy are the people whose strength is in you! *whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way.
Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs, *for early rains have covered it with pools of water.
They will climb from height to height, *and the God of gods will reveal himself in Zion. (Psalm 84.3-6)                       

In nomine Patris et Fillii et Spiritus Sancti

Two summers ago, I was summoned from my holiday in Maine to have lunch with Father Jarvis at the Faculty Club at Harvard. This was our usual custom, and I always enjoyed the opportunity to return to my alma mater, enter the sanctum sanctorum, and bask in the attention of the great man.

The visit was progressing as it normally did, and I was impressed to see how well Tony appeared, as I knew that his cancer had returned and that the prognosis was not a good one. He explained to me, as I am sure he did to many of you, that he had decided to take a very Victorian approach (no surprise there) and was taking a daily half dose of “laudanum.”

And then, he looked me straight in the eye with that fierce loving look that we all knew so well: “I would like you to preach my Requiem.”

Needless to say, I was humbled and honored and attempted a protest, but he had already made up his mind: “Look, you are me, just 20 years younger. I cannot think of a more appropriate person to do it.”

He was right of course: we both went to Harvard and then were educated in England (he at Cambridge and I at Oxford); we were both headmasters, and we were both celibate priests who loved our students as our own children but also enjoyed full and happy family lives, and we were both Anglo-Catholics, raised in “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints,” captured as young men by “the vision glorious,” and inspired by the loving example of eccentric priests who made so accessible the holiness of the saints of God. And, we were both anglophiles and royalists, Tories really, who prayed without hesitation for “the Queen’s most excellent majesty” in our college chapels at evensong.

But just when I was starting to get excited and beginning to think that I could talk about him, and coincidentally myself, to the very distinguished company that he would draw to this liturgy, he dispelled my fantasy and firmly reminded me of my duty: “I am also picking you because I do not want you to talk about me at all. I just want you to preach the Gospel.”

Now, here is a difference between us: he would have sworn and told me off if I had said such a thing, whereas I just meekly agreed with him and passively resolved to disobey him.

So, I will say a few words about Tony Jarvis because you are here grieving for him, and I am grieving for him too. I also suspect that he would want me to; he just would not want to admit it. This way the vanity is my responsibility and not his. I also want to speak about him because he was such an interesting and remarkable man, one of life’s great characters, and he had such a significant impact on so many lives: his students, his colleagues, his friends, his family, and his parishioners.

For starters, he saved and rebuilt two very significant institutions, his school, Roxbury Latin, and this parish of All Saints, and he was of tremendous help to many other schools, churches, colleges, seminaries, associations, and causes. His reach was wide, and he rarely said “no.” He was also greatly admired as a headmaster by other heads of school, serving as President of the Headmasters’ Association to name just one, and he was in great demand as a speaker. His signature challenge to know and love our students was famous and universally admired.

He had two other strongly held educational opinions which distinguished him from the prevailing “wisdom” of our time. He did not want to add new sports or academic subjects to the curriculum just because “the market” wanted them. After all, it did not so much matter what language you learned in school, the point was that you learned how to learn a language. Further, it was the life lessons and the deeper friendships of athletics that mattered, not the particular sport or program. Again, bucking the current trends, he was committed to the smaller size of Roxbury Latin and its lower tuition. He avoided “the bells and whistles” in order to keep his school accessible to the middle class, and he expected wealthier parents to give more to the Annual Fund to balance the budget.

But the real reason that I need to talk about Tony is that I would like to use the example of his life to preach the Gospel, just as he told me to do, because I think that the dialectic between his gifts and his calling, his humanity and his faith, will help those of you who knew him in his secular life to understand better how his faith inspired him, and those of you who knew him in his religious life to better appreciate the extent and significance of his influence beyond this parish, where he served with such longevity and devotion.

There is a story often told about John Keble’s funeral. For those of you who are unfamiliar with our tradition, John Keble was one of the three original leaders of the Oxford Movement which made a tremendous impact on a generation of undergraduates and on the whole Anglican Communion by reasserting the Catholic nature of the Church of England. True to his principles, however, Keble left his professorship and fame behind to live the life of a “simple” parish priest in the country. When he died, however, there was a huge gathering which overwhelmed his little village of Hursley, drawing the question from one of the farmers in his parish: “Why have all these great men come to see good Mr. Keble buried?”

So here is my question for you: why have you come to see Father Jarvis buried? The reason I would argue, is the same: his faith inspired his works.

Tony was, as we know, an incredibly talented man. He was extremely intelligent and wonderfully articulate and gifted with a very compelling and powerful personality. He was brave and decisive, tireless and energetic, and he was extraordinarily self-disciplined.

One of the distinguishing marks of his ministry in schools was the way his personal, pastoral relationships with his students continued after they graduated and after he “retired.” They still came to him when they were troubled or confused or just needed sound and loving advice, and he, of course, as busy as he always was, remained completely available to them. He had a wonderful capacity for friendship and a sincere and motivating desire to take care of people, to promote and support them both within and beyond the communities in which he served. This was his genius, if you will, and his great gift as an educator and a priest.

Tony was also, however, very human, which made him charming and funny, and a lot of fun when you were with him, but also a little bossy, and sometimes even controlling. He did not suffer fools, and he had a real temper, which could slip out with surprising intensity, but the fact that he could be fierce was a gift as headmaster, because it made him a force to be reckoned with, and his easy expression of anger could be a gift pastorally, as he was naturally sympathetic when you had been wronged, and he could be angry for you immediately and powerfully, and this reaction on his part was tremendously affirming and encouraging.

My point here is that he offered who he was, gifts and faults combined, wholly and whole-heartedly to others. In some ways his personality made this easy, and in some ways more difficult, but he just threw himself into the work of God, and he never flagged or stopped.

And because of his faith in the God of Love revealed to us in Jesus, his attention to the sacraments, his devotion to Our Lady and his desire, I believe, to be himself a saint, he combined his natural gifts with a life of complete and total service and a spiritual quest for humility. The service came to him naturally, as he was by nature generous and available, but the humility, I suspect, did not.

This is why Tony Jarvis was not just the Headmaster of Roxbury Latin School, although that was more than a full-time job; he was also a priest in this parish. And it is his ministry here which stayed with him well beyond his “retirement” from the school. Think of how he served the school, how he did his best to make it about the boys, and not himself, how he refused a large salary, although he could demand it, and how he celebrated and educated the community about the great history of the school and its past glories, obscuring the fact that he was the one who saved and rebuilt it. Consider how he went off to Eton to be the Proctor and not the Provost, a chaplain and not a headmaster, how he threw himself into Berkeley Seminary for one year and stayed for seven, commuting to New Haven, and holding that place together when he was battling a debilitating and relentless form of cancer. Consider how generous he was to so many other places and causes, including my own, in time and wisdom and treasure.

Priestly celibacy in the Anglican tradition is a choice, not a requirement, and there is no judgement on the part of those of us who choose celibacy against those who choose to marry; there are advantages to both. But the real gift of celibacy is a gift of availability and time – the chance to do two jobs instead of one and to be available to help in many other ways as well. Tony took full advantage of this with a constant and infectious enthusiasm and without any financial gain. This is why he was such a prodigious fundraiser; he was always the most generous himself.

Further, there is an emotional vulnerability to celibacy, a personal aloneness which allows the celibate to connect emotionally to more people and to connect more deeply. This was a gift in his ministry at the school especially, and at Eton, as teenage boys can so often feel alone and in need of understanding, but this was also a gift in all of his relationships with those he helped and loved.

Like Mary when she hears the greeting of the Archangel Gabriel and accepts her unexpected and terrifying role as the Mother of the Son of God, or Our Lord who dies so painfully for our sins on the Cross, we are called as Christians to offer ourselves with courage and humility to the loving and transforming purposes of God, to be like Christ, children of the Father to be used, broken, given by the Holy Spirit.

This then is the gift of vocation and of ministry which we can see in Tony, the gift of a life filled with meaning, inspired by service, and blessed with resilience in suffering, as he faced his final illness. True to form, he accepted his treatments and stayed with us for as long as he could, doing his best to be useful, but then embraced his death with no fear on his journey home to God.

So let me end by quoting Tony, first on suffering, and then on vocation, in the hope that what I have told you about his faith provides a better understanding of why he offered his life as bravely and as generously as he did, and why he had such a disproportionate impact on so many people, communities, and causes – all for the love of God.

My first quote is the final paragraph of the last talk in his collection, With Love and Prayers, “Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Badly:”

My beloved children, now and in the years ahead you will suffer and fail and know despair. My prayer for you is that when you experience such suffering you will dig deep and from your suffering build the spiritual muscle you will need to cope with life’s many difficulties, and that in your own suffering you will grow to understand with compassion the suffering of others. (p.344)

My second quote is the last paragraph in his talk “We Live in a Rapidly Changing World,” in which he commends to his students the epitaph that they should seek as the final statement of their lives, not “the epitaph of the many, of those who travel the conventional, easy road, . . . the epitaph of the self-indulged, the epitaph of the dull,” but of the “tiny number of . . . people who preserve and transform society:”

There is another way. It is the way of the few who want to do something great with their lives, who do not fear unpopularity, who dare to risk defeat and even death standing for what they believe in. This is the better way. This is the only path to the good life. This is the way of the few – the few who dare to care, who dare to try to make a difference. This way, I submit, is much more exciting, much more rewarding, and dare we say it, much more fun. (p.329)

Surely, this is Tony’s epitaph, and it can come as no surprise to any of us that he wrote it himself.

May his soul rest in peace, and may light perpetual shine upon him.