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One of my earliest memories of Charles is of our running down William St together, puffing and panting, my suitcase in tow. An entertaining sight: the wellbuilt lawyer in suit and tie, and the skinny schoolkid, arrived from Western Australia to meet him at the Owen Dixon Chambers, and then be taken to Spencer St Station and put on the train to Mooroopna, where the rest of the family were visiting friends. I had arrived late, the train was due in minutes. We made it – just – and he saw me on with a trademark grin and a message for Babette.   What stayed with me was real surprise that I had received from him never a word of the chastisement or sign of anger that I might have from an elder of my own family. I learned this way that, big man that he was, in so many ways, Charles was also a gentleman and a gentle man. Happy the gentle, for they shall have the earth for their heritage.

In moments of lucidity, and especially as we grow older, I think we all understand that life comes merely to pass, and the best making sense of it happens as a mapping of the journey towards death. Mapping, not morbidly, but in terms of features of the world we’d like to mark for others. And also, to mark for ourselves, so that we see “undrugged in evening light” as Chesterton says, life and its destination, “the decent inn of death.” We regret and resolve to make up for time wasted on small features – worries, small triumphs or defeats at work or play - while missing the offers of beauty and love.  Faith, if it is to be a gift, can focus this for us and put us in touch with a way of living that can be universally applied, and yet is as personal to each of us as his or her fingerprint.  This involves realising that each moment contains the indwelling of God, God’s reaching out to me, and through me, to others whom God loves. Through the centuries, the Church community has recalled us to what the beatitudes remind us of today, which the Second Vatican Council and successive popes have emphasised: that this call to holiness, to living life as an appreciation of the indwelling of God, is universal. It is a possibility not only for those who have removed themselves from the hurly burly of ordinary life, but also for those who have embraced that hurly burly. In each generation, invaluable indeed are people who believe in this ambition, who thrive on full engagement with their fellow humans, while keeping, as the Apostle says today,  eyes for “things that are invisible; for visible things last only for a time, and invisible things are eternal”.  Charles, I think, mapped his earthly journey with this earthy version of holiness. His dear Babette knows and shares it, and his dear children, myself, and my generation of his relatives, can be grateful of this map. As can we all.  Its signposts are the beatitudes, so well chosen by his family today: Jesus’ way of turning the world upside down, or turning the signposts around, as it were, to point beyond the visible.

Happy the pure in heart. Singleness of desire.  Or, as Jesus says elsewhere, to Martha, “You worry and fret about so many things, yet few are needed, indeed only one.” For Charles, that one was of course: Babette! --  the Indian beauty he met on that voyage through Bombay in 1953 . But it became a greater “one”: Babette’s Catholic faith,  which Charles was wooed to, initially by her, but finally by his own commitment to truth.  As he has said, what convinced him was logic, and had to be so, while what he called “the wonderful gift of faith” came later. Any of us can ask ourselves, regardless of faith or denomination: would I be willing to change my faith, my denomination, and, in that sense, my God? I suppose a glib reply might be, “Well, I have already have the truth, why should I be willing?” And each of us knows that that is not really the question at its essence. That essence, one which the best among us have been willing to pursue – Cardinal Newman in one sense, Mahatma Gandhi in another, Edith Stein in a third, the present pope in a fourth – is this: “Having some truth, dare I seek more, if it means abandoning that which I have, or think I have?”  It is not what results that this beatitude lauds – becoming Catholic, becoming Anglican, becoming Muslim. Something more precious is praised, as a map to holiness: an unwillingness to rest until I have found the one thing. Happy the pure in heart. I think Charles was pure in heart in this deepest of senses.

For Charles, this quest for purity of heart and purpose, this hunger and thirst for what is right, extended itself into his life-long fight, together with Babette, in the cause of protecting unborn life. What he meant to the pro-life pro-family movement is put very well in a tribute from Denise Cameron, president of Friends for Life. She says “Charles was a great supporter of his fellow  pro-lifers,  keenly interested and encouraging of all they did for  unborn children,  unselfish in the legal assistance, speeches and advice he gave over  many years. His wife Babette, the other half of a unique married  couple, once echoed the thoughts of us all   . . .  . that  in our struggle  against human cloning we could be tempted to make an  exception in the  case of Charles!”

Happy too, are the peacemakers. Can a trial lawyer map peacemaking? The  lawyers whom Jesus confronts in his preaching are not peacemakers but trouble makers, out to trip and trap.  While peacemaking is clearly not this, neither is it simply pacificism: peacemaking at any price.  In both the  Old and New Testaments, peacemaking demands a fight for justice, especially on behalf of those against whom the odds of life have been tipped. The church has called this a preferential love for the poor. Charles will be remembered for defending, time and again, people with very slim chances. Many of you would have heard of the occasion when a client charged with murder would, had Charles let him, have withdrawn in midtrial his original plea of insanity.  Charles persuaded the judge to let the jury decide on the legitimacy of the withdrawal; they decided that the man was indeed insane, and by dint of this not guilty. Here is peacemaking effected through that fight for justice in which a neighbour is loved at that most vulnerable of moments – when he or she cannot love themselves.  Happy the peacemakers, for they shall be called God’s children.

Happy they who mourn. Each member of Charles’ family here today -- Babette, who has indeed had the extended mourning of caring for him so lovingly and at times to exhaustion in these past three years when the cancer recurred; his brother David and sister Shan, his children Cathy, Rowie, Prue, Nick, Michael, Geoffrey, Derek and Lisa; their spouses and loved ones, his grandchildren – each of them joins us all in mourning. But mourning which, painful as it is, can reach for the blessedness of which Jesus speaks.  I have heard a biblical scholar say that the word used for “Happy” or “Blessed” in the beatitudes means something like “Congratulations!” – a strange tribute to pay to mourners. But here it surely means, “Congratulations on feeling something which ought to be felt, and the feeling of which is a consequence of having loved much, and having been much loved.”

And at the end, perhaps, the first and in some ways encompassing beatitude: Happy the poor in spirit.  Those who visited Charles in his last months found him reading and praising a fascinatingly named book, “Seek to be Unknown”. The title is from advice found in Thomas à Kempis: “Seek to be unknown and esteemed as nothing.” The author is a Fr. W.J. Boswell,  described on the back cover as “an unknown parish priest”, who, by his testimony “wants his parishioners to see through him to God.” In these past last few days, Babette lent me the book to read, and it was hard to put down. Fr Boswell’s stories about his own experiences are witty and unselfconscious. In many ways they reminded me of Charles’ humour, which Prudence has recalled so well.  I’ve never had a conversation with him in which his eyes did not at some point twinkle with laughter at an absurdity he had noticed, or an outright joke he remembered. He was an extraordinarily intelligent man, but not all such men have been able to surrender self-seriousness or grandiosity. I don’t think it is exaggerating to see in this a poverty of spirit for our time, a mapping of the journey with a correct scale and perspective.  Boswell is like Charles in this also, that in his observations about great saints, his own zest for the faith shines through. But most of all, Charles would, I think, on this last mapping of his journey, been drawn to Boswell’s focus on a surrender of personal glory in favour of God’s work and Christ’s companionship. Indeed when Boswell speaks of Christ, one can see Charles making the testimony his own (p. 154) “The friendship of Christ is everything.  There are no short cuts to perfection; we all have to tread the pilgrim’s way. Yet there is a huge difference between treading that path alone or with a friend.   Christ knew what a colossal difference friendship can make – and he offered us that friendship . . . . No wonder Thomas a Kempis was insistent on friendship with Christ as the key to holiness.”

Charles, we know that you were no less insistent on that friendship than these two writers whom you cherished.  As we say au revoir, we are confident you have had that friendship, and indeed live in it now.

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                                                                                                            John Martis SJ

Member Organisation, World Council for Life and Family

NGO in Special Consultative Status with ECOSOC of the UN