Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,
In 1904, two young men began serving together as acolytes here at St. Thomas’s. One of them, Gerald Larkin, was the son of Peter Larkin, founder of the Salada Tea Company, and was destined one day to succeed his father. The other, Cecil Stuart, was destined for the priesthood, and would one day return to Huron Street as our rector for twenty-five years. I like to imagine the two of them in the sacristy being instructed by a senior acolyte in the care and feeding of our thurible. (Some things at Smoky Tom’s never change.) What neither of them could have imagined is that a friendship begun at the altar would last their whole lives long, and thanks to their legacies, would continue to shape this parish and this neighbourhood for more than a century.
Gerald never went to university. His father saw no need: the boy would learn the tea business on the job. But Cecil went to Trinity College, and because Cecil went there, Gerald came to love it too. (You might say he lived somewhat vicariously through the future clergyman.) In time Trinity would count Gerald as its single greatest benefactor. The chapel on Hoskin Avenue, consecrated in 1955, was his gift, and the academic building on Devonshire Place bears his name. Here at St. Thomas’s, Gerald sat on the finance committee during Fr. Stuart’s rectorship and quietly covered any shortfall out of his own pocket. His memorial plaque on the north wall of the church calls him “a faithful Christian who in his lifetime enriched this Church with many gifts and with splendid generosity made provision for its future.” That provision still sustains the corpus of our investments known as the Larkin Trust & Endowment, and in 1969 the parish and the college honoured the two friends by establishing the Larkin-Stuart Lectures, which we co-sponsor with Trinity to this day.
Decades after Gerald’s death, another acolyte answered a similar call. Nigel Wright was born in Hamilton and adopted by parents of modest means who raised him in Burlington and taught him to work hard. As a young man he thought of becoming a priest or an academic. Instead he trained as a lawyer and spent nearly three decades at Onex, rising to co-head of its flagship private equity group and overseeing some of the country’s largest buyouts, from Cineplex to Spirit AeroSystems, before moving to the firm’s London office. Onex’s founder, Gerry Schwartz, remembered him as humble and selfless. Here he was simply Nigel: acolyte, subdeacon, and Rector’s Warden. As our parish history, Household of God, recounts, with Michael Rowland, he dreamed up “Dine Away the Deficit,” and hosted one of the first dinners at his home in the Annex, barbecuing in a downpour. He supported our Friday Food Ministry, and he cared deeply about making this church accessible to all. Even after he moved to London, he came home every Christmas Eve to serve as subdeacon at Midnight Mass. While it will be some time until his estate is settled, we now know that Nigel also “in his lifetime enriched this Church with many gifts and with splendid generosity made provision for its future.” If you come to our special Vestry meeting on Sunday November 15th following a combined High Mass at 10:30 a.m., you will learn more about how that provision will help to ensure our future in combination with your continued faithful stewardship.
St. Thomas’s is blessed that since our founding in 1874, we have had many benefactors whose love for the church was so generous and so far-sighted that it continues to carry the parish through generations they will never see. In the twentieth century, Gerald Larkin was one of them. In the twenty-first century, Nigel Wright is one of them, and I trust there will be many others who, both in life and in death, are committed to the sustainability of a flourishing and vibrant parish, including many who will never be, nor would want to be, famous. In the case of Gerald and Nigel, both were men of business who never forgot that they were first of all servers at the altar. Both worried about the parish’s deficit and did something about it. Neither married nor had children of his own. The Accessibility Atrium, which was Nigel’s final philanthropic project in this life, will open our doors to people who have never been able to cross our threshold, and his generosity will help ensure there is a living, praying parish on the other side of those doors for generations to come.
In this month of All Saints and All Souls, Ecclesiasticus invites us to “sing the praises of famous men, our ancestors in their generations” (Sirach 44:1). Of such people, the author of that book says that “their wealth will remain with their descendants, and their inheritance with their children’s children” (44:11), and of those whose names were never praised, that their righteous deeds “have not been forgotten” (44:10). Gerald and Nigel had no descendants of their own. So they chose some, including us. They made this parish their family and its future their inheritance, and we, and those who come after us, are their children’s children.
Most of us will never underwrite a college chapel or help finance the building of an atrium. But the heart of this story isn’t fame or fortune. It’s friendship and faithfulness, and the decision to let love outlast us. That is within the reach of every one of us. If you have ever wondered how you might remember St. Thomas’s, or any charity you love, in your will or in other ways, I warmly encourage you to join our Stewardship Committee’s Charitable Giving Seminar on Zoom on Monday, November 23, from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. The committee is chaired by Michael Rowland, who once cooked up that plan with Nigel to dine away the deficit, and registration details may be found elsewhere in The Thurible and parish notices. You don’t need to be a Gerald Larkin or a Nigel Wright to leave a legacy; bequests of every size are what carry a parish from one century into the next. The widow’s mite is as important to our life of stewardship as the named gift. So if you would like to talk it over privately, without trumpeting anything, my door is always open.
Yours in Christ’s service,
Nathan J.A. Humphrey+
VIII Rector
