This is the edited text of the homily given by Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP for the pontifical Mass of Christian Burial for Monsignor John Usher, AM at St Patrick’s Catholic Church, Mortlake, 27 September 2024.
At the end of the Great Depression, social scientists enlisted a group of 268 sophomore students at Harvard, including the young John F. Kennedy, to be part of a longitudinal study aimed at better understanding happiness. The researchers traced the lives of the participants for nearly eighty years, collecting a cornucopia of data on their physical and mental health, and adding new members to the study, including some children of the original cohort. In all 1300 lives were examined in granular detail as their subjects went through all the highs and lows of health, careers and relationships. In terms of length and breadth, it’s one of the most comprehensive studies of human beings ever attempted.
Among the most significant findings of the study was the importance of relationships. Whilst health and wealth play their part, it’s the quality of human connections that makes the biggest difference to how happy people are; indeed, close relationships—more than fame, money or vigour—are what make people happy, protect them from life’s discontents, and help delay mental and physical decline. For those aged over 50, relational health is a better predictor of wellbeing than cholesterol or social class; and a lack of meaningful relationships can be as dangerous as poverty, alcoholism or smoking.
In today’s Gospel (Mt 5:1-12) there’s an expectant hush on the hilltop as the Master sits, as if in the professor’s chair, and the crowd strains to hear Him. We get Jesus’ blueprint for the good life, the happy-making life, blessedness. But His prescriptions are as paradoxical and unnerving for 21st century hearers as they were for the first. Surely happiness requires being comfortably off, not poor in spirit or resources; being content with your lot, rather than mourning and weeping about it; having influence and control, not meekness and persecution; being justly treated rather than hungry for justice… and so on. But as if pre-empting the Harvard Study, Jesus turns worldly wisdom on its head: happiness is about relationships and values, much more than comfort, status or genetics. While some of these things can provide fleeting joys or ground deeper goals, they are not themselves the secret to the good life.
How, then, do we become truly μακάριος, blessed, fortunate? Well, in the Beatitudes and the whole Sermon on the Mount, Christ identifies certain virtuous dispositions as crucial: humility, purity, justice, courage, prayerfulness, mercy, faith and hope. He beatifies the most unlikely candidates: the humble, needy and reviled, those who hear the word of God and keep it, those who give, forgive and spend themselves completely in the service of God and humanity. In other words, those who are like Him, the truly Blessed One!
No one should pretend this comes naturally or easily to us. In fact, we can only have such happiness with the help of others, especially God and His Church. As the Harvard study proved twenty centuries later, connection is key. But not just any old liaison. Only an encounter with the one, true God, with His incarnate and risen Son, with the consoling Spirit of them both, will enable such a demanding happiness. Only that will instil the profoundest of loves, agape, unconditional charity—a love St Paul reminds us today (Rom 8:31-39) conquers even death.
It is, as I said, a demanding love, that draws us out of ourselves and into service of others. The mission to bring God’s love to the peripheries of the community, to the disadvantaged and vulnerable, the victims and survivors, ran like a watermark through the life and ministry of Monsignor John Usher. I recall when we were preparing to deliver World Youth Day in 2008 that a man who was sleeping rough approached Jack here at his presbytery; to John’s surprise the man didn’t want money or food but entry to the Final Mass of WYD. As Vicar-General Jack was able to offer more than the man had bargained for: front row seating plus entry to the VIP hospitality tent! This man was, in John’s view of the world, exactly the right person to be hosted there.
Now we might hope that many of those little ones whom John helped are at the gates of heaven pleading with St Peter that John be admitted to the VIP tent. For in our collect we prayed that John be raised on the last day to rejoice in God’s presence forever, but also that he be admitted immediately to the joyful company of the saints.
Jack was once described in a newspaper as a “chain-smoking priest with a passion for social justice and the races”—which only captures a part of the man. Today his admirers have placed a book of poetry, a vinyl record, a pack of cards and a Tigers’ scarf out as signals of other human interests they were blessed to share with him. All are foretastes of that eschatological banquet promised today by Isaiah and the Psalmist (Isa 25:6-9; Ps 22).
Alongside his chalice, the Usher Report on out-of-home care and the civil honour, these tell the story of a richly lived life, of a man who was, first and foremost, a lover of God and His people, a priest filled with the compassion of Christ, a Christian who sought to live out the beatitudes as keys to a truly happy life. When he retired to lesser duties, John thanked his parishioners for making his time at Mortlake one of “supernatural joy”. That impish grin that earned him the nickname ‘Happy’ from the Seven Dwarfs never left him. He now carries his beatific smile to the Lord he served so well.
Eternal rest grant unto Jack O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace. Amen.