Cathedral of St Stephen
9 September 2025
Isaiah 52:7; Philippians 3:20-21; Luke 12:35-40
In 1926 Ernest Hemingway wrote a letter to Scott Fitzgerald in which he coined the phrase “grace under pressure”. He didn’t have John Chalmers in mind, but it’s hard to think of a better description of John: grace under pressure. For Hemingway it described courage, though he himself never used the word. He preferred the more earthy “guts”; and when he was asked what he meant by “guts” he replied simply, “Grace under pressure”.
John Chalmers certainly knew pressure, really from the day of his birth when he emerged with feet deformed. As a result, he wore irons on both feet for twelve years. Sport was out of the question, with swimming the one exception. John took to it like a duck to water, and for thirty-five years he swam two kilometres every day. He thought this would stave off further health problems, but it didn’t. In later life, he had five operations in the early months of his retirement; and we have followed his long, slow decline with Parkinson’s disease. Pain was his constant companion. Each week for thirteen years, I have received a report on the health of priests; and John Chalmers’ name has often been near the top of the list. The wonder was that John held on for so long. That took a certain kind of tenacity, courage, guts.
The greater wonder is that none of this pressure destroyed or diminished him: it should’ve but it didn’t. In fact, mysteriously, it created John as the man and priest he became. He lived the mystery of the Lord’s Cross. He refused to allow disability to define him or defeat him. He was led to a point where he could say with the prophet Isaiah, “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who announce the good news of peace”. In time he came to discover the beauty even of his disabled feet; and that discovery freed him to announce “the good news of peace” far and wide, but especially to those who were most broken.
Every human being has to learn to live with disability, since each of us is disabled in one way or another, some more obviously like John, others less so. But John taught us all how to discover good news in the midst of what seems bad news, beauty in the midst of what may seem ugly. In one of her poems, Alice Walker writes this:
I will keep
Broken things:
In my house
There
Remains
An
Honored
Shelf
On which
I will
Keep
Broken
Things.
Their beauty
Is
They
Need
Not
Ever
Be
Fixed.
They tried to fix John’s feet. But it never really worked, and John discovered in time that they didn’t have to be fixed. He discovered that his feet were strangely beautiful on the mountains of his life; and that’s why he became one who announced “the good news of peace”, when anger, resentment and self-pity could have taken hold. That’s why he has a unique place on the “honored shelf” of the Archdiocese of Brisbane.
Between the irons on his feet and the shaking of Parkinson’s, John led an extraordinarily productive life. He served memorably as priest and pastor at Beaudesert, Salisbury, Wooloowin and Zillmere. He studied to the highest level in the USA, focusing in his doctoral work on the theme of Power, Authority and Leadership. He was appointed to the teaching faculty of Banyo seminary, where he was eventually the Rector. He served as chaplain to the Mater Mothers Hospital, where his kindness has never been forgotten. Then for years he was Director of Centacare Pastoral Ministries, helping to guide the entire agency to a deeper sense of mission. In all of this, John showed himself a man who understood that true power shows itself in powerlessness, that true authority is the opposite of authoritarianism, and that true leadership is found in service. That may not have been the focus of his doctoral work, but it was the focus of his life.
As we bid farewell, we ask how a man so disabled through life could become so productive. The answer is grace, grace under pressure. This was not just his personal grace, which was striking enough. It was above all the grace of Jesus Christ who, according to St Paul, “will transfigure this wretched body of ours into copies of his own glorious body”. John must at times have grieved quietly over his body. But that was never seen or heard, because he put his faith in the transfiguring power of Christ, which enabled him to discover in his own wretched body the glorious body of the Risen Lord. The glory shone through the brokenness. As Leonard Cohen has it, “There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in”. And the light of Easter certainly got into John’s life. “Light your lamps”, says Jesus in the Gospel we have heard; and the light of Easter lit a lamp for John that never ceased to burn, dispelling the darkness till the day he died and lighting his way now beyond death.
John was ready to recognise and greet the Lord Jesus whenever and however he came. He was the servant with the lighted lamp who could see the Lord coming even in the darkness of disability. This takes a kind of night-vision that sees the Lord present where others see only the darkness. John came to know the truth of what Pope Francis writes in Evangelii Gaudium, that “whenever we take a step towards Jesus, we come to realise that he is already there, waiting for us with open arms” (3), ready to walk with us at our pace. In the love that flowed through John, people came to know “something new about God” (Evangelii Gaudium, 272). They came to know the eternal newness of Easter.
Now as he passes through the darkness of death into the light that never fails, all the pressures fall away and there is only the grace. There is only the glorious body. Jesus is there waiting for him with open arms, scars shining like the sun. There will be no more need for tenacity, courage or guts. The love alone will remain and the joy it brings. “Our homeland is in heaven”, St Paul says to the Philippians; and we pray that the boy from New Farm now finds his way home to heaven, not shuffling or stumbling or even swimming, but running and leaping and dancing into the fulness of the love that filled his life. Eternal rest give to John, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace. Amen.