With Love and Prayers, by F. Washington Jarvis.
New York: David R. Godine, 2000.
$25 - 368 pages.

Since 1645, Boston’s Roxbury Latin School has educated young men to “fit students for public service both in Church and Commonwealth.” Roxbury’s current catalog maintains that this idea of service is a goal of the school. The catalog states “it is ... the end towards which a boy uses his intellectual training that is our principal concern. We care, most of all, what kind of person a boy is.”

The man who helped write that statement, Roxbury headmaster F. Washington Jarvis, has now written it large in With Love And Prayers. Here is a collection of addresses aimed not just at the young people whom Jarvis has guided through Roxbury Latin, but also at young people everywhere. Filled with what the publisher calls “uncommon common sense,” these addresses will inspire, guide, and comfort teenagers; they will also instruct many adults as well.

Even a casual reader may see why Jarvis appeals to the young. First, he delivers his messages antecdotally, which is to say he uses stories - often personal stories of students or friends - to underscore his main points. Jarvis is a master of the anecdote, some of which he tells at his own expense. Many young people will see themselves in his miniature tales of teens struggling with life.

Jarvis also gains the attention of the young because of his sense of justice, fair play, and especially, personal responsibility. In nearly every talk included in this book, Jarvis makes it clear to his young charges they must begin taking responsibility for their lives, they must lay claim to their own destiny.
Moreover, he urges his students to become risk-takers, to avoid self-absorption, to be tough, to act with faith, vision, and courage. By laying down such challenges to the young, by addressing them on such topics as “Lies Teenagers Are Told,” Jarvis - who speaks, I might add, like a great coach who coincidentally had graduated from Oxford University - gains both the attention and the respect of his listeners.

Jarvis is also popular with his students, I suspect, because of his ability to encourage them to look to the stars. Again and again he reminds students to count their blessings, to face up to their difficulties, to strive for excellence. Jarvis is an idealist, but one who is acutely aware of all the flaws of our human nature. He is also a believer in both God and in mankind, and sees in human beings the nobility and beauty that some other observers might miss. Here Jarvis writes of one of his students:

“Nine Septembers ago, the captain of our football team returned to school with his classmates: Billy McDonald, Class of 1980. The previous May he had been diagnosed as having an inoperable malignant tumor on his heart. Through the early months of the summer they had tortured him - almost to death - with a new killer chemotherapy and radiation treatments. This blond-haired 6’2” Adonis went from 200 pounds down to 108 pounds, and all his hair fell out ... Through the ensuing months, the frequent returns to the hospital, he never said, “Why me?”

“I was with him when he died in March of his senior year. His sense of humor, his concern for others remained with him right to his last agonizing breath .... Death didn’t beat Billy at all, not in any way at all. Much as he wanted to live, he did not cower in the face of death. Disease and suffering did their utmost to reduce him, to bring him down, to destroy him. But Billy faced those forces of destruction and used them as an opportunity for greatness and for heroism. And he died with dignity and courage. He may have lost, but he won.”

With Love And Prayers has so many quotable quotes and so many fine anecdotes that readers may annoy those around them by constantly wanting to read aloud from these pages. Jarvis has given us an inspirational guide which should find a permanent home on our shelves, a book which demands to be read, absorbed, and then read again.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars bookstore on Main Street in Waynesville.)

 

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