My friend Lucas is having a tough time. Like many of us in our ‘middle years’ he finds himself ‘going through the motions’ of life and wondering what the hell it’s all about.  You go to work, pay the bills, pick up the kids from school, do the shopping, do the housework, watch television, go to bed – and then the next day you wake up and it starts all over again.

Not all of us can be (or want to be) someone who has demonstrably ‘changed the world’. But too often, we get to thinking that just living our lives isn’t enough. We think that, for our lives to be of any value, we should achieve something earth-shattering – and instead, we’re stuck in the frozen food aisle at Woolies wondering whether there’s enough in the bank to cover this week’s shopping.  It’s very easy to feel that, in comparison to some, we are leading very small lives; lives, perhaps, that are just not worth very much.

My brother died of a brain tumour a couple of years ago. He was nine years older than me, but I was always the ‘big sister’ and he was my ‘little brother’. Like Lucas, he struggled with his self-worth. He wanted to be rich – and, oh,  there were so many network marketing scams just waiting to exploit his ambitions. He wanted to invent something enormous. He had visions of grand engineering and architectural and maritime schemes that would revolutionise the way we live. He wanted to save the world. The fact that he didn’t really achieve any of these things made him, at times, angry, depressed, bewildered and sad.

When he looked in the mirror he didn’t see the same person I saw. I saw someone whose life was a success, he saw a failure.

I looked at him in comparison to me. I was single, childless and penniless. He had achieved everything I hadn’t.

Don’t get me wrong – it wasn’t all doom and gloom. I had a lovely relationship with my brother. He was, for the most part, happy and funny and loving and generous and he did appreciate his great good fortune in having a long and successful marriage, great kids and grand-kids, a loving family, a nice home and financial security.  He just wanted more.

The problem was (at least as I saw it) that wanting more compromised his ability to fully rejoice in what he already had. He was pining for ‘success‘, and failing to realise he already had far more real success than 99.99 per cent of the world’s population.

My brother didn’t waste his life, but he often felt as if he had. I’m trying to think how to put this. Perhaps it’s like being a hypochondriac. Imagine having all the advantages of good health, but never being able to fully enjoy it because you are constantly concerned that you’re really a physical wreck. Or perhaps it’s like having the kind of body dysmorphia that leads one to see their perfectly healthy sized body as morbidly obese.

When my brother died, I had just one overriding thought; that I wanted to honestly address his life-long concern that his life had not been a success. I’d never really managed to convince him of that, but I hoped I could use his death to to make those he left behind really think about the true ‘meaning of life. And no, Lucas,  it’s not 42; although it’s almost that simple.

Have you ever really listened to what people talk about at funerals?

When you’re lying in your coffin with your friends and family gathered to say their last goodbyes, do you really think someone’s going to pull out your bank statement and say, “Ah, Joe, what a fine fellow. Look, $2.5 million in the bank and another $3 million in shares!”

The fact is, when you die, the people who love you – the ones who really matter – aren’t going to give a rats arse about how much money you made or your brilliant career achievements. They’re going to talk about the most mundane and pedestrian of things – because they’re the things that matter.

“Remember the time he ….”

“Wasn’t the funny the day we ….”

“I loved how he always ….”

Ultimately, when your time is up, it turns out that what was important wasn’t the world-changing widget you invented, but the time you lost your boardies in the swimming pool at Aunty Maud’s 70th birthday party and had everyone in hysterics.  Like it or not, that’s the story that’s going to bring you immortality – and that’s a good thing!

When you go, when everything is stripped back to bare bones,  if you’ve lived a successful life your family is simply going to say: “We loved him, and he made us laugh.”

It’s taken me a while to be ready to do this, but I think now is the time. For Lucas, here is the eulogy I wrote for my brother.

To make this public has been a bit of a difficult decision. I feel honour-bound to say that as a devout Christian, my brother would not approve of this blog or the causes I support on it. I was always very cranky when he tried to drag me into his ‘schemes’ and I want to be careful not to draw him into mine.

So, to draw a respectful ‘distance’ between him and my activism, and to protect the privacy of his family I’ve removed identifying names from the eulogy.  Otherwise, it’s pretty much as it was spoken at his funeral.

Maybe it will help my dear friend Lucas, or maybe someone else, realise that what changes the world is not grand schemes and achievements, but little people, just like us, living and loving and learning and, most importantly, laughing together.

The greatest legacy that anyone can leave is joy.

Neither money, nor great works, nor brilliant inventions are a proper measure of a person’s worth.

When we come to the end of our lives, our value will be measured, not by our professional or material success, but by the love and the laughter we brought to the world.

Those are gifts which are not extinguished by death.

Joy is eternal. When a truly fine human being dies, they live on in the smiles and laughter their memory brings to all who knew them.

By this measure, my brother, was a truly fine human being .

My brother was a seeker.  He was always  seeking “success” and I think he always felt it eluded him.  Our mother summed it up in a letter she wrote to him some years ago:

“My tender, loving, son.  I like you because you are so vulnerable.  You care for the whole human race and find it difficult to accept there are those who are less than perfect.

Like your dad, you love to be loved and you return that love a thousand-fold.  I see the joy and pride your family brings to you and I know you are deeply devoted to them.

Although you have two married sons, to me, you are still my ‘little one’ who needs all the love and comfort life can bring.

You struggle so hard to find what you term ‘success’, but don’t realize you have gained this already as a wonderful, caring human being.”

I know his family will agree that, for all his seeking, my brother already had all the success that matters:

A loving wife whose devotion and care for him through some very difficult times, went far beyond the call of duty.

Two fine sons who, following his example, are devoted to their wives and children.

Two beautiful grandchildren, who will grow up with their own wonderful memories of times spent with Grandad.

And parents and siblings who adored him.

That kind of success is precious and rare.  And the legacy of my brother’s success is the love and laughter which his memory brings to us.

Mum smiles when she remembers him as a little boy.

She says, “He loved to help me at home and would regularly clean out the kitchen cupboards.  The trouble was, he was so meticulous, it would take most of the day.  After about half an hour he would say, “Cup of tea, Mummy?” and we’d sit and have our tea and cake and rest a while.

She also smiles tenderly when she remembers how sensitive he was.  She says, “I would suddenly realize things were too quiet and I’d think, “Where is he?”  After a hunt, I’d find him fast asleep rolled up in the mosquito net at the back of his bed.”

Mum says, “Obviously I’d said something to upset him and he’d hidden away to ‘lick his wounds’.  But a cuddle and a kiss soon fixed everything.”

Mum also recalls that, after my brother was posted to Western Australia for his navy training, she received a telegram saying:

“Starving!  Please send bread pudding!” (a family favourite).

She made the pudding and wrapped it up but she says, “When I paid the postage, I realized it would nearly have been cheaper to fly over with it myself than to pay the cost of sending a 4 kilo pudding by airmail from AirlieBeach to Western Australia!”

Perhaps the memory which most encapsulates my brother’s humour, endearing personality and ability to deal with adversity is the story of the haircut.

Feeling the heat in Darwin, my 14 year old brother took himself off to the barber and asked for a trim.  The villainous barber spun the chair around from the mirrors and gave him a crew-cut.  He was horrified when he saw himself in the mirror.  He slunk home, donned a baseball cap and curled up on the sofa in a fetal position, refusing to speak to anyone.

After a while, though, he started to see the funny side of it and, with the twinkle back in his eye, he removed his cap, pulled a face like a monkey, let his arms hang loose, and began loping around the living room, chattering and shrieking like a chimpanzee.  Poor thing! He received monkey themed birthday cards for the rest of his life.  His boys even bought him a pair of gorilla  slippers with eyes that lit up when he walked – and he wore them!

As a little girl, my brother was always by my side.  In Darwin, he famously took me out for a Sunday walk in my very best dress.  When we had not returned after an hour or two, Mum and Dad went looking for us – and found us picking over rubbish, looking for treasures,  at the local tip.

When he was diagnosed with brain cancer his strength and humour helped us all cope.  I remember him showing us a sketch that his doctor had done to show him where the tumour was in relation to his brain.  There had been some additions to the sketch, though – his oldest son had got hold of it, added ears and a tail and transformed it into a drawing of a mouse.  He thought that was hilarious.

Just last year, he arrived at our Christmas-in-winter celebration with a fake tattoo on his head, drawn by his son, featuring a train-track inked over his surgical scar, complete with a jaunty train and the words, Polar Express.

During my last conversation with my brother, we talked about all the silly things we’d done together and he said, “We were always the best of friends.”

He is gone now, but what is important will never change.  I will still love him, and he will still make me laugh.  That is his legacy.

I hope when I go – and when you go – love and laughter will be the gifts we leave behind.  And what’s more, to  his children and grand-children – let your memories of him remind you of the real meaning of life, and live your lives in pursuit of what is really important.  When you die, if people talk about how much love and joy you brought to their lives, you have done your job.  You, like him, will have left the world a better place, and your life, like his, will have been a success.

 Chrys Stevenson

This week, bishops from the Victorian Catholic Church distributed 80,000 copies of a pastoral letter, condemning same-sex marriage. I have never read such a load of bigoted, small-minded, passive-aggressive drivel in all my life.

The letter reveals the Catholic Church in all its hatefulness, pettiness, out-dated, wrong-headed, unsupported thinking and purely evil desire to control the lives, not only of its followers, but all of us.

Who the hell are these bishops that they think they have a right to demand our government continue to discriminate against a group of Australians who desire nothing more than to be able to marry the person they love in a civil ceremony?

With this letter, the Victorian bishops have brought their church even further into disrepute. Australian Catholics should be ashamed to be associated with this cabal of pre-historic homophobes.

The smiling, paternalistic – yes, even smarmy – tone of the letter just makes its contents more vomitous.

Bishops, representing a church which demands the right to numerous exemptions from Australia’s discrimination (and tax!) laws – including the right only to appoint male priests –  have the hide to align themselves with the  ‘great value on human rights and protecting others from unjust discrimination’ which exemplify our Australian democracy. They do not consider that, in a democracy, every citizen is (or should be) considered equal.

The bishops then remind us that we are all  disgusting sinners who God, inexplicably, loves very much. This reveals the psychologically twisted position from which these people view their fellow human beings; the demeaning dogma which degrades every person to the role of ‘sinner’, therefore elevating the church (and its bishops) to the exalted position of the glorious redeemeers of humanity. It’s transparently about psychological mind-games, designed explicitly to give power to the church and make us low, filthy sinners feel grateful for their obscene wealth and power. Well, I just won’t play – and neither should you.

The bishops go on to assure us that their homophobic, discriminatory stance against gay marriage comes from a place of compassion and justice. My fat fanny, it does! It comes, very clearly, from a position of self-entitlement, delusion and a deep-seated hatred of those who express their sexuality in a way that threatens the moral authority of the church.

In her recent book, Dishonest to God: on keeping religion out of politics, Baroness Mary Warnock, a member of the British House of Lords rails against the tradition which presupposes the clergy has some kind of ‘moral expertise’ to which politicians should defer.  It’s ‘smoke and mirrors’, and snake-oil chicanery on a Wizard of Ozian scale.

The bishops believe that proponents of same-sex marriage seek to ‘alter the very nature of the human person’. No, we are seeking to accept the very nature of these human persons. We are seeking to treat them with love and compassion and give them the equality and justice they have so long been denied.

“We are all blessed by God with the gift of our sexuality,” the bishops intone. ” The design itself comes from the Creator of Life. We all have a responsibility to follow that design.”

Who says? Throughout human history there have been same-sex attracted people – many, many of them in the Catholic priesthood. If God so despises this small design modification, why does he allow it? What kind of sadist ‘designs’ men and women and then sets some up some who, at the deepest level of their being, are drawn to members of the same-sex – and then directs his church to vilify and discriminate against them? To paraphrase Stendahl, the only excuse for such a despicable God is that he does not exist.

The bishops eagerly share with us their ‘church’s’ concept of marriage. It is, of course, grossly inaccurate. It is reminiscent of those who look back to the halcyon days of the 1950s and 60s, remembering only the ‘Leave it to Beaver’ idealised world of the sitcom while ignoring the many social and political injustices that blighted that period of Western history.  Just so, the bishops completely ignore the history of marriage as a misogynistic property exchange of women; human cattle who were considered no better than chattels for the purpose of producing heirs. The bishops, of course, are entitled to their fairytales; but they are not entitled to  impose them on the rest of us.

The idea that marriage is (or ever was) about religion is laughable. It was ever about property, and power, and possession and lust, and keeping the wealth safe within kinship groups. Just like the church which seeks so desperately to keep control of it, marriage was always more about money than religion.

In modern day Australia, marriage has long since been divorced from religion. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, civil marriages have outnumbered religious ceremonies since 1999. Although marriage is increasingly popular in Australia, church weddings are increasingly unpopular.

The Bishops may reflect on why the vast majority of Australians now choose not to sanctify their union in a church. Could it be – let’s take a wild stab here – that most Australians don’t believe getting married has anything to do with God, or the church, or a bunch of outdated, narrow-minded, purse-lipped bigots in frocks? Can it be that most couples would prefer their marriage to be about love, and don’t want it tainted by the small-minded, petty hatred that emanates daily from the churches?

The bishops believe that marriage is all about breeding. Yet, Alan Hayes, of the Australian Institute of Family Studies confirms that, in the last 30 years there has been ‘nothing short of a revolution’ in the institutions of marriage and family with a ‘surge’ of babies (more than a third) born outside of wedlock in 2008. In America, the figure is 40 per cent. Nearly 80 per cent of Australians who get married have lived together first – and often had their children prior to the wedding.

This is particularly prevalent in Gen Y, says Rebecca Huntley, from Ipsos Mackay Research. Home-ownership and kids come first. The wedding comes later.

“For their parents’ generation a wedding was the licence to buy a house and have the children.”

For Gen Y, it’s the opposite and a wedding has no religious significance whatsoever – it’s a big party with 150 friends.

What the Bishops fail to fathom is that they have already lost control of marriage. The horse has bolted. Modern marriage has nothing – nothing – to do with their outdated preconceptions.  They may as well chase moonbeams.

“Children are best nurtured by a mother and father,” say the bishops – as if that simple statement definitively proves their argument.

I learned a new word this week – ipsedixitism. Ipsedixitism is a dogmatic statement which assumes that no supporting evidence is needed.  It assumes that the assertion will be taken ‘on faith’.  It doesn’t mean a statement is true, it means the propagandist assumes that if they say it, nobody will bother checking the evidence. But, not being under the thumb of the Catholic bishops,  I have checked the evidence and it shows that children do best in stable, peaceful families among people who love and nurture them. There is no credible evidence that children ‘do best’ when nurtured by a mother and a father. In fact the scholarship shows that children brought up by same-sex couples do every bit as well as children raised by heterosexual couples.  There is one quite notable difference though:  children raised by same-sex couples tend to be more tolerant of difference.  Perhaps the Catholic Church would be a respected and thriving institution today if more of its leaders had been raised by gay couples.

“Gay marriage’ is impossible,” say the bishops.

Well, no – it’s very possible. It’s a bit like saying gay sex is wrong because the ‘bits’ don’t fit together.  In fact, gay couples seem to get their ‘bits’ to fit together very well!

Gay marriage is now as inevitable as civil rights and Aboriginal citizenship were in the 1960s.  Why? Because there are more good, kind, tolerant, compassionate, loving, intelligent and reasonable people in the world than there are Catholic bishops. And the bishops can stick their fingers in their ears and hold their collective breaths until their heads explode. It’s not going to change the fact that gay marriage is going to happen – eventually – whether they like it or not. They may as well try to stand in front of a freight train. In fact, that idea is increasingly appealing.

Perhaps the bishops can take some advice from Frank Zappa:  “Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be.”

The bishops deny that ‘discrimination against other’s human rights’ is implicit in their edict – which transparently attempts to do exactly that.

“Nor does it mean we fail to understand the complex nature of human sexual identity and desire,” they insist, while totally ignoring every piece of credible research which confirms that sexual identity is neither chosen nor changeable.

“It implies no lack of respect for people who identify as ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’.”

The hell it doesn’t. The whole tone of the letter is condescending, belittling and dehumanising. Then, then, they have the hubris to follow with a quote which hearkens back to the old chestnut, “I’m not homophobic – some of my best friends are gay.”

Truly, at that point I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or just stick my fingers down my throat for a damn good purging.

The bishops want us to think they’re saving the world: “our concern is for the future of our whole society.”

Well, bishops, given the support for same-sex marriage may I politely suggest that most of society is asking you to ‘sod off’.

The only ‘ramifications’ of same-sex marriage is that the church will be seen to be more and more hateful, discriminatory and out of date that it ever was. And, I’d venture to say, the decline and fall of the Holy Roman Church could only improve society. The Church is a rotting, hateful, diseased and corrupt carcass that should have been put out of its misery and buried in Gehenna years ago.

The Catholic Church has ruined far more lives than same-sex marriage ever will.  It has tortured, it has robbed, it has killed and murdered, and it has wrought untold psychological damage upon its adherents. It has taken children (both indigenous and causasian) from their mothers.  It has cruelly imposed life-long celibacy upon naive young men entering the priesthood. For many, this has locked them into sexual immaturity and led to the hebephilia which results in the widespread sexual abuse of so many innocent children.  What’s more, this institution which now seeks to preach the immorality of homosexuality, has been complicit in covering up these abuses, protecting the perpetrators and manipulating its finances to ensure the Church does not have to pay fair compensation.

The Catholic Church has preached against condom use in AIDS-torn countries – imposing untold suffering and death upon millions. It has ruled against contraception, condemning Catholic women in developing nations to risk their lives and financial stability by having large families they have no hope of supporting in order to conform with church teaching.

And now the bishops of this ghastly institution have the unmitigated gall, the heart-stopping hypocrisy,  to suggest that same-sex marriage will have negative social consequences!

“Hypocrite! First take the beam out of thine own eye, and then you will see clearly how to take the splinter from your brother’s eye.”

The bishops conclude their homophobic rant by suggesting that, “Catholics, as responsible citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia, have a duty to remind their political representatives that much is at stake for the common good in this debate.”

I would suggest that, as responsible citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia, Catholics have a responsibility to tell their bishops to ‘shut the fuck up’.

Chrys Stevenson

Post script:  I will agree with the bishops on one point.  It is important that decent, loving, fair-thinking Australians complete the on-line survey set up by the Federal Government at their website: www.aph.gov.au/marriage. The closing date for responses is Friday, 20 April 2012.

The bishops helpfully explain:   “The survey contains three statements with which you can agree or disagree. It then asks if you support the proposed changes to the two separate Bills, to which you answer yes or no. If you choose you can simply answer these few questions in less than one minute. The survey also provides space (maximum of 250 words) for you to explain your views.”

If you have not yet completed this survey, please, for the sake of human decency, take a moment to do so.

Related Posts

Breaking News:  Church leaders back calls for same-sex marriage bills

“TWENTY faith leaders have signed a letter urging people to declare their support for same sex marriage to two federal parliamentary inquiries on the issue.

The move follows six Victorian Catholic bishops writing to their parishioners to tell them allowing gay couples to marry would be a ”grave mistake” and would undermine the institution of marriage.”

You may also like to read the following blog posts.

Mike Stuchbery: The Catholic Same-Sex Marriage Letter Decoded

Bruce Llama: Pastoral Letter from Australian Catholic Bishops

Russell Blackford: Chrys Stevenson flays a pastoral letter from Catholic bishops

And from my dear friends Michael Barnett and Gregory Storer:

Ipsedixitism

As so many have taken a liking to this unusual word, I feel honour bound to reveal the source of my inspiration. While researching my recent speech for Dying with Dignity NSW, I found it an a scholarly work on euthanasia law in Europe, in which John Griffiths, a professor of sociology of law, vents his frustration at the “[i]mprecision, exaggeration, suggestion and innuendo, misinterpretation and misrepresentation, ideological ipsedixitism, and downright lying and slander (not to speak of bad manners) …” typical of the [religious] arguments against voluntary euthanasia. It’s a damning assessment, especially when the vast majority of the ‘ipsedixitists’ speak from a position of religious faith.