I would like to start with the famous quote from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery.

“What is a rite?” asked the Little Prince.
“Those also are actions too often neglected,” said the fox. They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours.”

It was a member of the Humanist and Rationalist Societies, and the first person ever honoured as Humanist of the Year, Lionel Murphy, who took a stand for Humanists and ceremony. Lionel Murphy was Attorney-General of Australia in the Whitlam Labor Government (late 1972 to 1974).

Murphy was rightly appalled at the indignity and the humiliation heaped on non-believers, especially in marriage ceremonies at the state Registry Offices. He had a dream that he could get a body of people together, who would share his vision and bring dignity (a word he used often) back into the lives of secular people through ceremony. He did it on his own. The appointment of the first marriage celebrant, the lovely Lois D’Arcy, was opposed by his own staff, the Public Service, and the Labor Party. But Murphy was convinced he was onto something good. One night, he sneaked into his own office, and, against all advice, typed the first letter of appointment. He then found an envelope and stamp – and posted it. The horse had bolted.

The Marriage Celebrant programme was an overnight and enormous success. I was the seventeenth Marriage Celebrant appointed. I have always felt an enormous sense of recognition and privilege that he appointed me the first secretary of the organisation he started – the Association of Civil Marriage Celebrants of Australia. He charged his initial team with improving the quality and standard of ceremony for nonbelievers.

But changing the mindset of Humanists proved a difficult task.

Most Humanists doggedly insisted on confusing ceremony with religion.

They were pleased with marriage celebrants as “an alternative” – but most saw no social, psychological, or cultural value in ceremony whatsoever. They only thought of it as a ”legal” alternative.

I remember exasperatingly explaining to Humanist friends that Graduation ceremonies were important to people, and they were secular. But I was not very good then at explaining why the ceremony was valuable. The standard reply was – you had your degree ( a letter in the mail informed you), why do you have to be told a second time? All ceremonies were considered hangovers of religious “froth and bubble”. But I had two intelligent allies, Rosslyn Ives and Ray Dahlitz, who opposed the notion of “Humanist Celebrants” and who, with me, supported Murphy.

There are six published books written about Murphy – not one mentions Murphy’s establishment of the celebrant programme! Yet it is arguable that no Labor innovation altered the social paradigm more than this one. Even the wonderful biography by Dr Jenny Hocking, does not give us a mention. But Murphy, one of the busiest Attorney-Generals in Australian history, was intensely interested in the ceremonies his hand- picked team was delivering. He would suddenly turn up at a marriage of Carol Ditchburn (Astbury), Jill-Ellen Fuller, or Junie Morosi, thrilling the couple and the guests. He sent a telegram of congratulations to all the couples originally married by celebrants.

My most iconic memory was that of the then President of the Rationalist Society, Dr Bill Cooke. When Lionel Murphy attended one of his marriages, at which I was also present, he said to Bill, “Bill, put some poetry into it !”

To which Bill Cooke replied, “What Lionel, poetry – in a civil ceremony?”

“Why not, Bill, why not?”

Lionel Murphy was far ahead of his time. He understood that secular ceremonies could have as much beauty, substance, meaning and power as any church ceremony ever could have. These days the core of really good celebrants are well aware of music, personal stories, poetry, prose, symbolism, setting, and rehearsals. They are aware of the enhancing technology now available – notably PA systems and quality music players. They now know how to co-create and deliver the best secular ceremonies ever experienced in Western culture. I say that advisedly. Other Western countries, thirty five years after Murphy’s “road map”, are still looking askance at how Australia is so far ahead of the rest of the Western world.

What I would love my fellow Humanists to take on board is that ceremonies are a human construct. They are extremely important at the human level. Mankind has created ceremonies to say important, very important, things to each other.

In ceremony, we say things that we cannot well say outside of ceremony.

We give each other recognition and status (Graduation, National Honours), we express love and devotion (Marriage Ceremonies, Renewal of Vows), we mark and honour achievements (Retirement ceremonies, Funeral ceremonies). What many of us do not realise is that ceremony is the place where we express, reinforce, and transmit values. When the religions attack us, they usually stick to the word “values”. But we have the best values! Two million people, from all points of the planet, personally attended the Inauguration ceremony of Barack Obama. It was, basically, a secular ceremony. It even contained, as my Humanist friend Charles Foley pointed out, the “atheists hymn”.

Tis the gift to be simple.
‘Tis the gift to be simple,
‘tis the gift to be free,
‘tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
and when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘twill be in the valley of love and delight. When true simplicity is gained
to bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed, to turn, turn, will be our delight
till by turning, turning we come round right.

In this ceremony Obama acknowledged unbelievers as part of the American society. Shock. It was a value statement and it had enormous power BECAUSE it was done in the context of ceremony. Humanists and Freethinkers all over the world were overjoyed with his remark. Guess what folks, we are part of society too!

The main criticism of Humanists, I hear, is that we come across as a group more obsessed with being anti- religious than being pro-human. We also come across as heady, intellectual, and cerebral. In other words – not emotionally satisfying or compelling. I believe this is the reason why we cannot attract young people.

I believe one important reason why we are not emotionally compelling, is that we have downgraded, even disparaged and denigrated, ceremony in our lives – as part of an anti-religious stance.

Lionel Murphy turned the world of ceremony on its head. On the Lionel Murphy principle, ceremony must be created from the people up and not from the higher authority down. So we, with our clients, have the opportunity to co-create the best and most effective ceremonies the world has ever conceived.

Coupled with this is the opportunity to express our own spirituality. I recall the time when I first advocated the term secular spirituality. My circle of friends almost ate me alive – accusing me of a contradiction in terms. But when spirituality is defined, as it should be, in terms of values, high ideals, laudable ambitions, movements for the greater good of the world, we Humanists are some of the most genuinely spiritual people in the world.

As Humanists, our psychological state, our social and personal conscience, is not sullied by invented supernatural stances, or unsustainable references to supernatural forces, but based on our real beliefs and our rational analyses. Apropos of this proposition, I need to point out there are a lot of “Christian Humanists” who do not believe in God, but the good values of the Christian evolutionary corpus.

I took this quote from the first words of the Christian Humanism website:

Is it possible to be a Christian without a belief in God? I believe the answer is yes, that in our time being a Christian without a concept of God is both possible and necessary for those who find the life and teachings of Jesus compelling but have difficulty with the concept of God in traditional Christian theology.

Yes – compassion, concern for the poor, the sick and the oppressed, opposition to exploiters, love of “neighbor” and so on, are all values that we share or have inherited from Christianity (other religions too). The golden rule exists in some version in every religion and I certainly consider it a Humanist value as well.

All these values we can express in secular or Humanist ceremonies by civil celebrants. So should we not invite those with this approach i.e. free of belief in supernatural forces, to be in the Humanist Society?

In my list of achievements, (let’s skip my failures for the moment) was the ceremony I created for Humanist of the Year, Diane Warnock in 1999. The very proposition of a ceremony caused an immediate and strong reaction in some Humanist quarters – I was quite shocked – I thought we had got over the all-ceremonies-are-reminiscent-of-religion syndrome.

But with the strong support of Ray Dahlitz and Rosslyn Ives, we went ahead and conceived a most wonderful ceremony for Diana. We played her favourite music from La Boheme. We read out an account of her achievements in getting the free choice (abortion) bill on a free vote through the West Australian Parliament. Different readers read words which had inspired her in her life of public service – Nelson Mandela’s speech at his trial, and Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream”. The most moving part of the ceremony was a researched thank-you speech from a young woman, Sarah O’Donnell, who thanked Diana and her predecessors for saving her generation from backyard abortionists. We read out the list of predecessor honorees (starting with Lionel Murphy) and then Diana Warnock was presented by Ray Dahlitz with her framed citation as Humanist of the Year. I am still moved when I think about it.

There have been two corollaries to this. The bad news first – another Humanist of the Year told me how brief and awkward her presentation ceremony was. She told me how she wished she had had something as planned and honouring as Diana Warnock had.

The good news corollary (albeit in sad circumstances) was the wonderful funeral ceremony Diana organised for her husband Bill Warnock, who died about a year later. Diana wrote to me and told me how she had been inspired to do this because of her involvement with her own Humanist of the Year ceremony. Bill was given a wonderful secular send off – one unequalled in the world of religious liturgy. Driving the point a little further – the work of the Funeral Celebrants of Melbourne reached such a high point at one stage, that many religious people preferred a personally prepared Celebrant Funeral, to their own church ritual. I think many still do.

A certain type of religion got such a destructive grip on American society a decade ago, that they threw up the unarguably failed presidency of George W Bush. These people were conned into believing that gays in bed, nascent embryos, and stem cells were much more important than war, territorial ambition, poverty and starvation, the spread of AIDS, terrorism and injustice on grand scale.

The empire of non-believers, in the person of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, A. C. Grayling and others struck back. They produced absorbing TV programmes, marvellous books, and dynamic speeches. But to me they missed one essential element – emotional fulfillment.

My Great Aunt Daisy Laudenbach, a declared atheist, went to church every Sunday for the emotional joy of singing with other people. The author Robin Fox in his book, The Passionate Mind, argues that the human psyche demands the emotional satisfaction that comes from either human artistic beauty or religious experience. The human psyche has a deep need for one or the other.

I do not have to work out which one of those two options you choose! Ceremonies are needed by Humanists just as much as they are needed by believers.

With your support, we can do our ceremonies much better. So I am now laying it on the line that, as Humanists, we should demand from civil celebrants ceremonies that are well prepared, emotionally satisfying, definingly memorable.

If you go for the “cheap” celebrant or if you let a civil celebrant off the hook by saying’ “I just want something short and simple” – think what disservice you are doing to Humanism, society and the culture. The best ceremonies must come from us.

Dally Messenger1III is Foundation President and Life Member of the Australian Federation of Civil Celebrants