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Given the fact that the AIDS
virus has found some forty million people
and left in its wake 16 million (or so)
orphans, numbers are bound to be part of the
story. But massive numbers can also stymie
helpful responses. Big, grim numbers may
evoke more sighs than prayers. A reasonable
person may conclude that he is helpless
against such a tidal wave of suffering. If
she knew the numbers on AIDS, Pollyanna
would be hospitalized for clinical
depression. Numbers
may convince us that doing nothing is
nothing short of doing evil. But we must not
imprison ourselves with the belief that the
numbers are too big and we are too small to
make a difference. Because the truth is, you
and your congregations can make a difference
far greater than the statistics that measure
this plague.
I was a young mother, two
preschoolers playing near my phone, the hour
I learned that I was HIV-positive. It was
1991. Everyone infected with AIDS was headed
for the grave. We knew it. Our doctors knew
it. We all knew we were a sorry company of
pilgrims marching to our deaths. So I spent
those early years doing the only
common-sense thing I could do: preparing to
die.
The first two collections
of my early speeches, published in 1995 and
1996, are full of death and funeral
meditations. I started journals for my sons
so they would know I had loved them. I wrote
and rewrote wills and worried deeply about
guardianships. I took on dying as I took on
everything: as a project. I accepted it,
organized it and planned for it.
After nearly a year of
angst, I decided to speak out publicly.
Since I had only a short while to live, I
needed to make an impact fast. Besides, if
people didn't like what I said, what could
they do – kill me? So I took to the stage
with the hope that a dying woman could make
a difference for the living.
Early on, I and others
expected charismatic leaders would bring to
us what Martin Luther King brought to the
American Civil Rights movement. But it
didn't happen. The church that had birthed
powerful preachers like King was eerily
silent, often judgmental, almost never our
champion. Without spiritual support, hope
became a fragile creature.
And without a strong
leader carrying strong messages, even since
1996 when life-prolonging drugs turned dying
back into living, hope faded. We have drugs,
but Africa is still poor, Asia is still in
denial, America has pursued other wars.
Young people in America think AIDS has been
cured. Communities of color, of women, of
immigrants, of drug users, of trafficked sex
workers, of the rural poor and urban
ghettoes – all have something in common:
They lack prestige, they lack power, and
they therefore they lack hope. What they do
not lack is AIDS.
When the church has stood
tall and spoken the truth, despots and
tyrants fell in nation after nation. From
Poland to South Africa, congregations were
transformed into freedom-seeking crowds. But
we are today creeping into this 21st century
facing the greatest health crisis in human
history, so far, without a spiritually
persuasive voice or a broad, church-based
movement. Perhaps today marks the beginning
of a new era.
In the West, vertical
transmission from mothers to infants is
virtually eradicated; in Africa and Asia,
vertical transmission is a relentless
killer. The epidemic traces trucking routes
in one nation and drug routes in another,
trafficking in this country and sexual
taboos in that. In the West, governments are
increasingly unwilling to pay for the
treatment of those who previously died but
now stay alive. In Africa and Asia, dying
predominates, devastating workforces,
economies, families and nations – and
governments, unable to stop the epidemic
with public policy, adopt a stance of public
denial. Thus, globally, while we have one
epidemic, it takes as many forms as the
cultures that host it. But look: The church
is already at work in as many cultures as is
the virus. While governments divide, the
church could unify. While policies are being
debated, preachers could speak the truth to
power. While nations war over the price of a
barrel of oil, the church could point out
the price of human life.
In his text on the
American pilgrims, scholar Perry Miller
tells this story of sturdy pilgrim faith. A
heated battle has broken out between
hundreds of Native Americans and forty
pilgrims. Eventually, thirty nine pilgrims
are dead and the Indians are closing in for
the final kill. At this point the lone
surviving pilgrim puts down his blunderbuss,
folds his hands, looks heavenward and offers
this prayer: "I thank Thee, God, that Thou
hath given to me alone this victory."
This is the kind of
faith-born confidence needed to defeat a
virus as stubborn as AIDS. We need, if we
are to win, people driven by a better
spiritual vision. It enables us to climb
over the debris of the first fifteen years
of this epidemic when gay men were
stigmatized and shunned, when children were
"innocent victims" meaning adults were
"guilty." Confession and commitment are
doors out of this era. We can acknowledge
that our silence was an act of fear, not
piety; of ignorance, not faith. And having
done so, the church can take up the battle
against those still motivated by fear and
still armed with stigma, protecting – rather
than judging -- those who are most
vulnerable.
Science is our partner in
this epidemic, our friend, a gift of God.
Scientific researchers have given us
life-extending therapies for which we, in
turn, give thanks. But human beings are more
than bodies: We are fathers and sons,
mothers and daughters. We have callings and
responsibilities. We need purpose as much as
pills. We are more than survival-seeking
organisms. We are outfitted with souls that
matter. And this is where the church has a
special contribution to make.
Let me illustrate, if I
may. In Zambia we are setting records for
testing and enrolling people at risk of
AIDS. But once we have mothers on
life-prolonging therapy, they are often
unwilling to take the drugs that will stop
their wasting because it gives them an
appetite, and an appetite demands food, and
there is not enough food. They do not want
to starve their children, so they quietly
put away their pills. Their souls are bent
toward their children. We are not mere
survival-seeking organisms.
So, we are creating new
resources for women in AIDS support groups,
teaching them to create products for sale in
the West. Macy's is selling a line of
Rwandan baskets this holiday season; Oprah
Winfrey's magazine will promote a line of
bracelets in a few months. By creating a
local economy, we promote the possibility of
life not only for women but for their
families. We nurture souls as well as
bodies…
I've spent years in wards
where the stench of death is inescapable,
stumbling through hospices and orphanages,
numbed by the suffering and the dying. But
here's a miracle of irony: For those who
truly understand the work of the soul, the
AIDS crisis offers an unprecedented
opportunity to do God's work – producing not
only satisfaction but joy.
Psychotherapist Thomas
Moore taught us all, in his landmark Care of
the Soul, that the "great malady of the
twentieth century" is "loss of soul."
"Emptiness, meaninglessness, vague
depression, disillusionment – we yearn
excessively for entertainment, power,
intimacy, sexual fulfillment and material
things, and we think we can find these
things if we discover the right relationship
or job, the right church or therapy. But
without soul, whatever we find will be
unsatisfying…." We can be kept alive with
drugs if we have AIDS. But we come to life
as full human beings when our souls, not
simply our bodies, are nurtured. We can prop
up our egos, and our marriages, and our
flagging self-images with alcohol too – but
until we nurture our souls, we will not be
well. Until souls are well, we are broken,
whether we are in an AIDS clinic in Zambia
or a board room in Kansas City.
No crisis in history has
produced so much opportunity for people of
wealth, knowledge and power to find purpose,
meaning and satisfaction in life. The church
is the ideal bridge from here to there, from
safety to satisfaction. Is each human being,
indeed, a child of God? Do you believe that
with pilgrim-like faith? If so, you will
know that the global epidemic is not a mass
of numbers, not a ledger of the dead and
dying, not one story of tens of millions of
people -- but tens of millions of stories
told one soul-filled person at a time.
"Now I lay
me down to sleep
I pray
Thee, Lord, my soul to keep…."
One by one, they kneel and
pray, orphans at their bedsides at Mother
Teresa's on the edge of Lusaka, Zambia. One
by one they call back words from our
childhoods, calling us to nurture our souls
for God's safekeeping during sleep. My soul
ached, and was filled, when I lifted
two-year-old Martin to my breast last month
in Zambia: a skeleton of a child, his face
all eyes and eyelashes – I knew, then, that
it was love that nourishes the soul. Holding
Martin, I see Bupe, the fragile child I held
years earlier who died before I could adopt
him. And I finish the childhood prayer:
"If I
should die before I wake,
I pray
Thee, Lord, my soul to take."
I wish you would come with
me, alone or with your congregation, in
person or in prayer, to blend the work of
the church with that of UNAIDS and others.
Come whisper to Medicine his life is not
over, that his family still needs him. Come
laugh with women in the market and men
teasing their wives. Come learn from orphan
families where the oldest sister plays
mother; where the oldest brother will carry
the youngest, give up his food for the
hungriest, and gently bury his little sister
when she dies.
Come with me to the dark
corner of your city where AIDS is at home,
or the teaming squalor of a distant compound
where AIDS is king. Come with me, and your
souls will be nurtured in ways you can
barely imagine. You will suffer the
suffering, if your soul is healthy. You may
grope for words, hide your tears, look away
until composure returns. But at days' end,
you will hear the orphans' echo – "Now I lay
me down to sleep" – and you will joyfully
commit your own, well-nurtured soul to God
for safekeeping.
And in the morning, when
you rise to face AIDS another day, to be the
church another day, listen in dawn's silence
and you will hear an ancient rabbi promise
you what he promised another congregation
long ago: "Grace to you, and peace."
©2006, The Mary Fisher
Clinical AIDS Research and Education (CARE)
Fund at the University of Alabama at
Birmingham. |
