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Many mansions personal witness on the challenge of AIDS
David Randall
After a number of years as Vicar of St. Clements, Notting Dale and St. James Norlands in London in 1987 I spent a sabbatical of 8 months learning about ministry with people with HIV/AIDS in hospitals and other institutions in New York, San Francisco and West London. Recently I have taken up an appointment as a priest working with people with HIV and AIDS in West London under the auspices of a charitable trust entitled CARA (standing for Care and Resources for people with AIDS and HIV). AIDS and HIV have transformed my life! I have found inspiring teachers and spiritual mentors in so many friends who, in spite of an incurable virus, are learning to live well, with a quality, a depth of loving the more impressive as many of their lives have been led under the shadow of prejudice, fear and oppression because they happen to be gay.
I know that AIDS is not a gay disease, although in London it has largely hit gay and bi-sexual men. It is a human disease, a viral illness, yet we can only rise to its challenge by acknowledging the homophobia and racism it engenders in our society. The African and Haitian connection so often highlighted by even the most liberal commentators, and the fact that a disproportionate number of intravenous drug users come from the black and Latin communities of the western world is fuel enough for those who seek to marginalise AIDS, and seek moral scapegoats. In dealing with homophobia we need also to remember that racism is an equally powerful element in our society's attitude to the disease. It is also an element that the gay community has to be aware of, as the scope of the virus affects more and more different kinds of people.
Tribute needs to be paid to the gay response to AIDS, for it has been one of the most remarkable phenomena of the whole situation. It is gay people who have pioneered community organisations to care, educate and support those affected and the church has much to learn from them. It is also heartening to find a coming together of gay and lesbian people, not only in the wake of AIDS, but as government and ecclesiastical powers are creating a new climate of fear, and withdrawal into ghettoes.
The church has to learn repentance for its centuries of homophobia, and this can only happen when gay and lesbian people are embraced as beloved of God and enabled to celebrate their humanity – which surely must include sexuality. The church has so much to learn from the gay and lesbian experience, for as a community we are learning so much that is new about love' and what it means to be a lover. To be a lover means learning again the true nature of friendship, and friendship must surely involve the search for justice. A friend cannot oppress his or her friend, and this spiritual reality is a profound gift that Christians must learn anew.
One of the great problems the General Synod debate evaded was a theology of human relationships. A truly incarnational theology will seek to recover a number of aspects of love which seem to have no place in current Christian thinking. Homophobia feasts on theologies which separate people from their bodily feeling and divides reality into opposites, and especially those encouraged by notions of manhood based on proving one's worth through potency, competition and success. It is not surprising that homophobia is on the increase in a hierarchical church and society in which you must have another beneath you to establish your own worth, and where compassion is dictated by market forces.
Our theology must surely include within its scope eros as well as agape if our wholeness is to be complete. Homophobia also thrives in an atmosphere which denigrates pleasure and physical expression, for only God's grace does not exclude these essential elements in our lives. An ancient prayer reminds us "It was God's good pleasure to take on human flesh". Has this changed?
Above all, we need a theology of life, which restores death as a natural and everyday part of being human. I do wonder if our failure to face death as part of life is at the heart of our fear, and whether our attempts to grasp, dominate, possess and control in a certain present are a huge evasion of an uncertain future. As my friends with HIV and AIDS teach me, when we begin to live in a new way resurrection begins now.
The church talks much of repentance, confession and forgiveness. I have found these essential things lived often so profoundly in the lives of those affected by HIV and AIDS that the words and practices of my conventional church background appear hollow and empty compared to the transformation and changed lives of those, often making no claims to religious labels, learning to live their full potential – even when dying.
"I realise that this diagnosis of AIDS presents me with a choice: the choice either to be a hopeless victim and die of AIDS, or to make my life right now what it always ought to have been. "
Graham Gardiner 1985, RIP 1987
During 1987 it was my privilege to work as a chaplain on the AIDS/HIV units of San Francisco General and St. Stephen's Fulham hospitals. In the course of that experience I met so many wonderful people –people with AIDS/HIV, friends, lovers, families, volunteers and carers – radiating the fruits of the Holy Spirit so much more obviously than many church people with whom I have been involved in my seventeen years as a priest. I say it often, but make no apology for repetition, that if you are up against a life-threatening disease for which there is no cure it does do something for your priorities] I imagine that this was the desert experience of the people of Israel in the wilderness, and of Jesus as his ministry reached its devastating climax. AIDS, if we allow it, can reset the church's agenda radically.
My priestly ministry has been built upon an ongoing building up of relationships and community development centred on the Eucharist. I am not ashamed of that, yet involvement in AIDS ministry has exposed me to the powerlessness, the fear and the degeneration which this dreadful disease brings to innocent sons and daughters made in the image of God. I have had to learn that every encounter must stand on its own, that each opportunity is special, and that the false god 'time' is not on my side. Learning just 'to be' exposes me to my own frailty, loneliness and nakedness. I am a great fixer, both as social activist seeking to change the world and as a priest-actormanager, offering a sacramental merry-go-round of exciting worship and meaningful spiritual comfort. Now I am trying to learn, falteringly and fearfully, the challenge of staying where the suffering really is; of not knowing the answers and being honest about that; of allowing others to teach and lead me; above all to freely admit that I receive from them more than I can ever give. St. Francis' prayer has always meant so much to me, yet now I find myself often saying, "Lord it is in receiving that I begin to give, it is in learning to live that I learn to die." It is still a road to Calvary for I have to stay with the pain as it really is with the rotting bodies, the fading physical beauty, the decaying brains, as well as the breaking hearts of doctors and nurses, and with the dying and their loved ones; the terrified youth dying before beginning to live. Yet it is a road on which I must learn to be true about myself – my sexuality, my prejudices, my own failures at relationships. my own low self-esteem –and in so doing give them to God as pan of my priesthood, my humanity, in total need of redemption, forgiveness and liberation.
In all this there is miracle! My friends who are learning to live, and to live well, are the gift. The gift of love shown, offered and shared. In Tillich's memorable phrase, "Love, not help, becoming stronger than death". Love bringing new things out of rotting and decay; love at work in oppression and death. Love giving me the courage to be fully human – gayness and all!
Above all a new relationship with Jesus Christ who hung alongside humanity on the Cross and who calls us to begin our care for others with a facing of our own pain and brokenness. There is not a cosy prescription offered by the Cross, but much more powerfully a description. On Palm Sunday the people had ;found an answer, a hero to put it all right. By Good Friday they found only a dying criminal who described by example that the true way of liberation is to follow – to face suffering and death. So the true resurrection is about transformation of these things. The marks of Jesus' suffering were not wiped out by Easter; they were transformed, and are seen today in the sufferings of his people, of all of us who share the AIDS/HIV experience. Through those I have known and loved, the marks of pain and death become signs of hope and transformation, of healing and new life. There is a new found confidence in the true liberation which is found in the unconditional love and liberation of God. It makes for a different kind of prayer life summed up in the words of Rabindrath Tagore in his poem 'Fruit Gathering':
"Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone, but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure."
My friends with AIDS and HIV have been wonderful teachers, for I now know that there is no escape from pain and loss. The haunting grief is still present, alongside the hope and inspiration. The memories, the tai led relationships, the celebrations and laughter, the unuttered words of love; the joy of physical encounter; the lonely longings of the night; the quiet grief of a parent in a respectable suburb; and so many more moments of intimacy and stupidity so easily forgotten.
They give a spiritual legacy, not just to me, but to the church. And I wonder if we are a church ready to receive. Their witness is crucial to our well being, and I pray to be part of a community of faith ready to hear. To hear not just the voices of the dying, but of the gay and lesbian presence in our midst. In this world of oppression, prejudice and fear our closets must be pulled down in order for the mansions to be built, and I do believe that in our Father's house there are indeed many mansions!
It wasn't that long ago that our sisters were burned at the stake for daring to offer spiritual food apart from a male dominated establishment. In recent times our brothers were taken to gas chambers for daring to be true to themselves. In our own age we are called to energise the spiritual power of the oppressed communities, in whatever form they exist, to proclaim the Kingdom. Neither the history of oppression, nor AIDS or HIV can overcome the way of love. AIDS and HIV, a terrible disease, takes so many of those we love and now threatens the whole world, fueling the fires of the evil one who would render us helpless victims on the margins of society. We cannot leave the struggle in the hands of medics or scientists, for the force is beyond their creative or destructive wisdom.
It is the responsibility of every Christian to see that every brother and sister with AIDS/HIV does not live and die in vain. For everyone who died rejected and alone there are those adopted by strangers, providing compassion and welcome for the little time left. For every person with AIDS who has shut him – or herself off from lover, friend and carer there are others who face their illness with dignity and hope, and fill us with pride and inspiration. For all those relationships which have fallen under the weight of the catastrophe there are others which are given new purpose and deeper love. For every community across the nation which insists on ignorance, prejudice and fear there are other communities of unconditional loving and compassion. Will the Christian church ever be there? Yes it will, all the time lesbian and gay Christians proudly acclaim that they are people of faith and are part of the church. The challenge of AIDS and HIV encourages us to do just that.
AIDS/HIV is a nightmare, yet it is a challenge which can, and will enable us to become more truly what we are called to be. Jesus taught us the true meaning of 'abundant life', and proclaimed the Kingdom of God as being here in the midst of us. Far from being the 'wrath of God', it and its prophets can be a means of rediscovering the resurrection hope which is at the heart of the Christian faith. My friends with AIDS and HIV have been wonderful teachers!
* Rev. David Randall, an Anglican priest, is the Pastor at CARA (Care and Resources for People affected by AIDS/HIV) in West London, England.
