Further to the chapter on McArdles, this was published at the top of op-ed page on 27 December:

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A miraculous life full of meaning, purpose and value

Greg Sheridan

12:00AM December 27, 2018
102 Comments
This is the story of a young friend of mine, Brendan McArdle. He died in October, aged 27, having been consistently the happiest person I ever met. I didn’t know him well but whenever I saw him he radiated a happiness that was unmistakeable.

I have written about Brendan’s life before, in my book God is Good for You. That was before his death. Brendan was both a blessing and a challenge for his parents, Rod and Sheryl McArdle. It is particularly worth considering Brendan’s story at Christmas. For one of the most straightforward suggestions of Christmas is that the humblest person might be king.

Brendan was born with severe difficulties. He was premature and what the doctors call “ultra light”. He weighed a fraction more than 600g and was little more than the size of a man’s fist. Naturally the parents thought their son might not survive. They thought it was life or death for him. In some ways, the stakes were much more than that.

Six weeks after Brendan’s birth, the McArdles were given a devastating diagnosis. Brendan had been born with spastic quadriplegia. He would never see, for he suffered cortical blindness. He could not swallow and for all of his life would be fed by a tube though his stomach. He had no motor control and as the years went by the muscles in his arms and wrists tightened and their shape became more rigid and compressed.

He had some control over the movement of his head, although even his head always needed some support. These problems all became more pronounced as Brendan grew.

I should confess a bias here. Rod is an evangelical Anglican vicar and for the past 10 years has been a friend of mine. I met Brendan at Rod’s home and, although I’m not an Anglican, on a few occasions I attended services at Rod’s church and Brendan would be there, handsomely dressed and proudly seated in his wheelchair in the congregation.

Rod had a big career in private industry before he changed his life, studied theology and became an Anglican clergyman. But it is fair to say he has travelled a tough road. A little more than seven years ago, Sheryl died after a very hard battle with cancer.

The doctors never expected Brendan to live very long, but his fighting spirit, his own love of life and the devotion of his parents gave him what Rod believes was a rich life.

There is a strong body of opinion in our society that lives such as Brendan’s have little or no intrinsic worth. The atheist philosopher Peter Singer, a thoughtful, courteous man who has the great virtue of thinking his positions through to their logical conclusions (but whose views I find abhorrent), gave expression to this once radical idea in his international bestseller Animal Liberation. He wrote: “There will surely be non-human animals whose lives, by any standard, are more valuable than the lives of some humans. A chimpanzee, a dog or a pig, for instance, will have a higher degree of self-awareness and a greater capacity for meaningful relations with others than a severely retarded infant or someone in an advanced state of senility.”

I once asked Rod for his reaction to this philosophy. He said: “My response is one of deep sadness — sadness that the writer misses the intrinsic value of every person, irrespective of what any given society might deem to be their handicap. Their worth flows from each person being loved by their creator. The Lord sees every person as having the same intrinsic worth — and it is high worth.”

Rod believes Singer’s view of the value of lives of profoundly handicapped people is “so divorced from the reality of our son, Brendan. Everywhere he goes he is a beacon of light and love, and blesses all those who have the privilege of caring for and/or interacting with him.”

Brendan’s care was a 24/7 concern for Rod and his family. Through the years Rod and I conducted our friendship mostly over coffees in a few favourite cafes. There was no reason for our conversation to turn often to Brendan. We mostly spoke of theology, books, politics and international affairs.

But although Rod was never remotely on the lookout for sympathy, he would at times mention, incidentally, life with Brendan — the need to get up in the middle of the night to change Brendan’s position in his bed, needing to change Brendan’s nappy, the extra challenges of holiday time when Brendan’s daycare centre was shut.

There were periods of respite care. Until he was 18, Brendan could go to a special school and occasionally Rod and Sheryl might have a week away together. After Brendan was 18, with the very special organisation of dedicated carers, they once or twice managed as much as three weeks away.

Neither of them begrudged their devotion to their son. After Sheryl’s death, caring for Brendan was not only emotionally but physically challenging for Rod. He is in his 60s and, following professional government advice, early this year arranged for Brendan to move into a care facility. In this long journey Rod has nothing but praise and appreciation for the hospitals, schools and care centres that have dealt with Brendan.

In September, Brendan suffered a catastrophic respiratory episode, then was five weeks in hospital, dying. It was a gruelling time for the family. Though he would still smile when he heard a voice he recognised, Brendan was beyond medical recovery. His family organised a 24-hour vigil with him. This was for two reasons. He would accumulate phlegm in his throat and could die from a choking episode if unattended, and in even the best hospitals nurses are busy. But also the family didn’t want him to die alone.

Rod is an orthodox Christian who believes in healing. At Brendan’s funeral service he preached that Brendan had himself been healed in his body. That he lived for 27 years was itself a miracle. He responded so strongly to church services, yelling with joy at the time of Amen, that Rod believes Brendan “was a spiritual powerhouse”. No efforts of his own, or of anyone else, were wasted on Brendan, in Rod’s view. Brendan repaid it over and over. Brendan’s life had meaning, purpose and value.

Rod also believes in the physical resurrection, the resurrection eventually of all people in their physical bodies, but these bodies will be transformed. As he and Sheryl told Brendan over and over: “There are no wheelchairs in heaven.”

With many comments, mostly positive, including this:
Catherine

Thank you, Greg.

It it might be due to generosity of spirit at this time of year, but it’s interesting to see the overall contrast in comments on your article compared to the one written by Jennifer Oriel earlier in the year (on children with Down syndrome, and the widespread expectation within society of selective abortion of these individuals). The comments there were a real eye-opener in terms of the generally held view that such individuals (frequently less-disabled than in Brendan’s case) are a terrible and unnecessary burden on society/ families, and should never be here in the first place.

As for Pamela’s view (below- which is widely held), the taxpayer burden would surely justify moving on to the elimination of all those with significant disabilities (eg those with spinal cord injuries). And those with dementia. And then perhaps to the frail elderly and the infirm in general. So much money is expended on the treatment of those with chronic disease who are not “productive”!

Which is precisely what took place in mid-20th century Germany, in a project overseen by the state, which many families willingly co-operated with.

It’s worth remembering the detached and assertive “courteousness” of many of the authorities overseeing death camps in an advanced country, just 80 years ago. Perhaps the “courteous” reference in your article (re Singer) should be in brackets, and the “abhorrent” placed more prominently?

Evil presently courteously is a reminder, after all, that the Fuhrer (and Mussolini) at least made the trains run on time.

Brendan's story is very moving.

And part of what Rod must have known so personally is that to give is to be truly human (he and Sheryl gave their all for Brendan, and he gave back so much).

It is not truly human to only have relationships to get. The Creator's image is totally marred in us when we only want to get.

Wow! I heard of Greg's book just three days ago. It's now a 'must' buy. Catherine's comments re 'courtesy' and 'abhorrence' are spot on.

Greg Sheridan's book is a brave attempt to capture the predicament of Christians living in the early 21st century. But it is riddled with a central contradiction which turns out, in retrospect, to be the same contradiction that stymied the predecessors to Greg's ecclesial-political position in Australian life, the National Civil Council of BA Santamaria, and before it the Catholic Action movements that followed World War One. These movements sought to deepen the immersion of the Christian faith in Australian culture and build up its institutional presence, while at the same time adopting a practice that was almost exclusive statist (that is, focussing on the agency of the state and on political movements whose aim is to capture the state). Thus the NCC published countless documents on developing rural communities and worker and consumer co-operatives to counter the proletarianisation and secularisation of society in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, but in practice it put the bulk of its energy into the most narrow forms of politics (lobby politicians, creating political parties, and engaging in what we would now call the 'culture wars') as distinct from shaping the institutional character of civil society.

Greg Sheridan's book, and his life, embody this contradiction. While he has been employed by fellow NCC admirer at The Australian, Paul Kelly, for thirty years now, Greg's journalism has been thinly-disguised political activism. It has been exclusively state-centred (focussed on the actions of politicians, their parties, their governments, but never on the agency of civil society or of citizens in communities, enterprises, or social institutions). This is manifest in every article and commentary piece Greg has written for The Australian over a 30 year period.

In this sense, Greg's advocacy of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option is curious, and is surely based on a deep misunderstanding of Dreher's argument. Dreher urges the rebuilding of Christian communities and institutions as a counter to the rabid secularism in the West, (much like Santamaria did in the 1930s and 1940s) but Dreher appears to actually mean it. Trying to counter the liberal capture of Washington is a lost cause, says Dreher, therefore cut your losses and start rebuilding grassroots communities. Greg Sheridan doesn't get this - he is still immersed in the Canberra swamp, reporting its tides on a daily basis for a newspaper that describes itself as a 'campaigning newspaper' oriented to capturing Canberra and influencing its elites.

The gap between these two orientations (capture of the state and the building of grassroots communities) is vast. This is not to say that both can't be done, or at least attempted, but as always we should judge the work of others by their practice and not their words. By this yardstick, Greg's work is still immersed in the world of his youth: his practice is statist through and through. Building communities from the ground up is indeed hard work - too hard it would seem for many who profess to like the idea.