Now What? - Sermon on World AIDS Day

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 1^st of December, 2002

Mark Belletini, Minister, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
aware of both our compassion and our limits,
our love and our edges,
to celebrate the fullness of our lives together
with story, song, memory, music and silence.
Blest are you, Truthfulness,
who has called us to this time of thanksgiving
that we might harvest a heritage of hope.

(together) And may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become….

Sequence [Next] [back to top]

This week, my friend Babar is looking forward to the feast of Eid al-Fitr when the Great Ramadan fast ends and the feasting begins; presents and joy all around.

This week, my friend Richard submerges in the feast of Hannukah, when the candles are lit in his window and the latkes scent the air with winter warmth; presents and joy all around.

This week my friend Juan Carlos looks forward to the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, when bouquets of roses will deck chapel and home. No presents, but plenty of joy. He will pray in the small church of his home town, Barra de Navidad, on the Mexican west coast in Jalisco, where he is completing a fresco on the half-dome behind the altar. He thinks of his work as a form of prayer for his own healing from his AIDS, which he has had for ten years.

For many people, both those professing these faiths and those not professing these faiths, this week is the up-tempo beginning of the holiday: traffic snarls, shopping cart collisions, the sight of decorated trees everywhere and the sudden despairing realization of how much time it really takes to send holiday letters and cards.

But today, no particular religious festival. Just today, Sunday, now, here at the Unitarian Universalist Church. Simple breathing, in and out, in and out, simple awareness of the gift of life that blossoms in our very hands right now, fragile rose of life.

Blest is this time of silence, which helps us to fast from our words, kindle lights on the inside, and allow the rose-bud of our spirits to blossom fully into the sun; let our wholeness be laid bare in the quiet. Blest is this moment….

(silence)

May we remember and bless those we love in this season, opening our heart to the abundance of love in our life. Aloud or silently, we name those we love, those we struggle to love, those we miss, those who embrace us with their love.

(naming)

Now let all the symbols of the holidays and festivals dissolve for a time into music, which harmonizes, and reveals the beauty of spirit in a manner as dazzling as any rose, candle or feast.

First Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from Susan Sontag's 1989 meditation, AIDS and Its Metaphors.

Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global financial markets, the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate, does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from the famous award-winning play by Larry Kramer, called the Normal Heart, 1986.

We're all going crazy, living this epidemic every minute, while the rest of the world goes on out there, all around us, as if nothing is happening, going on with their lives and not knowing what it is like, what we're going through. We're living through war, but where they're living it's peacetime, and we're all in the same country.

Sermon: What Now? - Sermon on World AIDS Day [Next][back to top]

Today, December 1, is World AIDS Day. In Zaire, in France, in Russia, China and Brazil, in Canada, Togo, it's World AIDS Day. It's a day of awareness. There is nothing particularly festive about it. There are no roses, as for the Mexican Catholic Fiesta de Nuestra Señora de Guadelupe, or candles, as for the Jewish Feast of Hanukkah, or heaping tables of food, as for the Muslim Eid al-Fitr. But it's a terribly significant day nonetheless.

And on this significant day, World AIDS Day, I personally cannot offer you the world. After all, I am only a local man with his own singular and quite little life. I've never even been to Africa or China, for example, where there are more folks with AIDS than there are people in all of Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Toledo, Akron, and Dayton combined…and squared.

So I will mostly just share a bit of my personal journey this morning. It's been a long journey. And I still have far to go on that journey. But I'll try and get to a high pass, an overlook, by the end of today's portion of that journey; an overlook where I hope I can offer you at least a glimpse of the whole world, and the hope I see for it. I promise to try, at least.

I don't remember what day of the week it was when I read it, or even what month it was. I do remember it was the year 1981.

It was a strange time for those of us living on the West Coast in those days, as I was. In the three or four years previous to 1981, there had been so many emotional ups and downs in my life that I could hardly keep count.

Personally, I was called to my first church, which ordained me, and then went on to my second church over in Hayward, which installed me. The upheaval caused by these moves was immense. And, both of my beloved grandfathers died in those years, too. These transitions were already sufficiently intense emotional experiences for me, but the political world in which my life was taking place was absolutely wild and made it all strange. First, in impact, were the assassinations of the gay City Councilman Harvey Milk and the popular Mayor Moscone, in San Francisco. Then there were the fiery riots, with overturned cars on fire, when their convicted killer, Dan White, got off with only a seven-year sentence. Why? Because he said he had eaten too many Hostess Twinkies and was sugar-crazed at the moment of the double murder. Next, there was the suicide of hundreds in Guyana at the command of the fanatic preacher, Jim Jones; many of you probably remember that unbelievable and chilling event. At that time, there was increasing homelessness everywhere in San Francisco. You could suddenly see thousands of people on the street, huddled dark and shivering in every doorway. Conservative Christian singer Anita Bryant had caused a big uproar in Miami about "gay rights" issues, which elicited painful editorial ranting on all sides nationwide, but especially in San Francisco. Ronald Reagan became president then, and many political liberals were so depressed and dazed by that fact, they were slinging mud everywhere.

So, in the midst of all this, I am reading the New York Times one day, at a little café on Piedmont Ave. in Oakland. The afternoon sun was shining through the windows onto my table. It lit up the paper so it was easier to read.

I read the headlines first, or course. Then I read the interesting articles on the first couple of pages. After five minutes of reading, I started to skim the rest. Suddenly my eyes fell upon the headline on page 17: "Rare Cancer Hits Homosexual Men." The brief article told me about the confusion of clinic doctors when they realized that a rare form of cancer, Kaposi Sarcoma, usually only occurring in men over age seventy, was suddenly infecting a large group of otherwise healthy young men. All they had in common were their youthfulness, their maleness, and their claim to be in relationship with members of the same gender. As I read the article, I was deeply struck by the strangeness of this medical fact too. What could being gay have to do with a form of cancer? Thus, still wobbly after all the events I just outlined for you, both personal and social, I remember that I said right out loud in the café, "Oh brother, now what??"

Well it wasn't very long before I found out "what." My friend John Zimarowski got "what" first, back in 1984, and then my good high school friend, Frank Siskowski came down with it. Both were dead in just over a year. Then my former intern and one of my closest friends in the ministry, Mark De Wolfe, got diagnosed with it…he was a Unitarian Universalist minister up in Missasauga, Ontario at the time. He managed to thrive for a few years, then died. John Sikes was next, and then my friend Alex Stevens, who always used to say he wanted to grow old with me and sit on the porch of the retirement home and be cranky with me just for fun. He died at his home in Hollister, his mother once again having to change his diapers at age 33. My friend Dallas, the Trotskyite nurse with two-foot long dreadlocks, died suddenly in 1988 from weird AIDS complications, even though he looked healthy enough to bench-press a Mack truck. Then, in quick succession, Juan Carlos, Scott, Jim, Steve, Gary, the other Steve, Marcos, Tom, and so many others told me they were positive. Finally, my best friend, Stefan, called me one day to tell me he had gotten his HIV test back and it was positive. We talked on the phone a while after he told me, but I felt like I had a goiter in my neck; I could barely breathe. When I finally hung up, I literally dropped to the floor, and crawled on my hands and knees to my bedroom and wept into my pillows for two hours. I knew Stefan and I would face this reality together. But I also knew that it would be impossible and more than impossible.

When I first came across the quotation from Larry Kramer's play, The Normal Heart, which you heard this morning, my heart skipped a beat or two in recognition. I knew that I had said those exact words many times myself, expressed those precise sentiments. I used to say to my congregation back then that I felt like I was in the trenches of a terrible war. I told them I saw my comrades falling everywhere, while all around me nobody even noticed that anything was going on. Blockbuster movies opened apace. The Forty-Niner's played out their seasons. Classy new Vietnamese restaurants were reviewed in the paper. Space shuttles took off and landed. Affluent United States tourists visited the Taj Mahal and the busy streets of what was then called Leningrad on so-called Peace Missions, and every school in the United States was in session day after day. The malls were filled with folks buying new colors of Fiesta dinner ware and trendy hair care products. If there was any news about AIDS in the early-to-mid-eighties, it was always on page 17 or beyond; the great New York Times itself couldn't even bring itself to use the word "gay" in print back in those days. And President Reagan didn't so much as mention the word AIDS once in any of his speeches. But then, no one else did either.

I suppose I'll have to admit one day that things are only real when pop-culture mentions them, and not before. The first pop-culture expression to mention the word AIDS was the film Parting Glances, back in 1986. Only a handful of people saw it. After all, it was an Indie film, and hardly anyone was interested in those sorts of pictures back then. But I was one of them, fortunately. I felt sane after I had seen the film. I had not realized how much the silence of the larger culture had exhausted me and made me feel crazy.

Yes, it was the gay male community that got hit the hardest in this country, at first. What amazed me about this community out on the West Coast was how we came together over this issue, how we took care of ourselves, covered all the bases. We did it all, with precious little help from folks not directly affected by the illness too.

There was no medical research on the syndrome until the gay and lesbian communities started raising the money themselves… millions and millions… to get that important ball rolling. Folks like Larry Kramer of the second reading, whom I personally know, through a few letters, to be just about the sweetest man imaginable, had a fierce and rude public persona that he used to get the issue of AIDS onto the larger social table. He irritated everyone, wrote furious plays, and made enemies all around, but I have to admit he accomplished what he wanted to do…make people vibrantly aware and ready to get down to work.

As patients with the syndrome died, our community formed a thousand service groups like Shanti to help them finish out their lives with dignity. The Lesbian community was especially magnificent in this regard. Food delivered, bedsides visited, hospitals staffed with helpful lay chaplains, since few family members would come to visit. People with no religious bent whatsoever learned to conduct magnificent memorial services, since so many of the churches refused to even mention the names of those who had died of the disease. And if they did bury them, they simply lied about the cause of death. Sadly, many families supported these decisions, mortified that their children had died of an illness regarded as a moral lapse more than a species of plague. Vicious pastors decried "the evil" of the people who had come down with AIDS because of the sexual component involved. Some actually harangued dying men at bedside, others spread their lies through the air waves. Many people in Columbus still believe that this syndrome is a curse from their particular nightmare version of God.

If so, their pestiferous God must be working overtime, because over seventy million people in the world are affected by the HIV virus that culminates in AIDS. 70,000,000. That's more than three times the number of the population of Australia. Now, listen to this: every single 24 hours, 15,000 people world wide are infected by the HIV virus, and most of those are between the ages of 15 and 24. By the year 2020, the largest AIDS populations in the world will be found in China, Russia, and India, and Africa, not Western Europe or North America. And more than half of all new cases are women, the United Nations tells us. World wide, the gay men who seemed the center of the AIDS world fifteen years ago are really now rather far from that center.

Now obviously, the spread of AIDS has nothing to do with God's will, or sexual moralism. These notions are perverse all the way to the bottom. Like any other disease or plague that has affected humankind during its million years on earth, HIV disease has a biological origin, going all the way back to 1926, we now think. Like other plagues that have decimated humanity, (The Black Plague, The Bubonic Plague, etc) it started small…the first known death attributed to it was in Africa in 1959. By the time Larry Kramer was raising his voice twenty-five years later, almost 2000 had died in this country alone. By the year 2050, when most people in the know, including Larry Kramer, seem to think that we'll have found a cure, the death toll will be about one billion. That's one seventh of the population of the entire earth.

So no, AIDS has nothing to do with God, anymore than the Bubonic Plague in late medieval Europe had anything to do with the presence of Jews or heretics there. Such thinking is what it has always been, vile and pernicious prejudice and superstition. AIDS, however, though it is not spread by God, does spread with the help of many members of the human race. They help spread it with their willful silence, fearful and cherished ignorance, and the very strange idea that talking about sex somehow makes it less sexy.

Oh, yes, true, we have medicines now, protease inhibitors which make AIDS somewhat survivable if not curable. My friend Stefan might still be alive, probably, had he managed to survive just one more year, when these medications were initially available. But there is no cure yet, and there won't be for a long time.

So, until then, I think that we Unitarian Universalists have a religious obligation to speak out against the superstitious and false and hurtful beliefs of those who malign God by their teachings. Our theological history has given us a much more humane and compassionate understanding of divinity we'd best not be ashamed of. We also have an obligation to educate ourselves more and more about sexuality, since sexual transmission is the usual form of HIV transmission. This education is to one purpose…so that sexuality loses all of the negative mystique given it by Western culture, and we can divest it of shame. There must not be and cannot be, anything which should be weird or embarrassing about discussion of any aspect of sexuality. No matter what. And frankly, we Unitarian Universalists should be proud of our sexuality curriculum, the Our Whole Lives (OWL) program, which is designed for all ages, very young to very old, and which is AIDS sensitive. We are leading the way in this regard, along with the United Church of Christ. For I say, that unless we can talk about sexuality, responsibility, and HIV testing openly and frequently, we are contributing to the crisis of world wide AIDS, not diminishing it.

It would be great if we could help other churches to move off the mark on this topic too. Call it missionary work if you want, but with 70,000,000 people living with HIV infection, de-stabilizing whole population centers and economies, we can hardly afford to hide behind decorum and social stigmas against speaking out in religious favor of complete sexual education. I believe we have to speak out rationally and carefully, but also loudly and clearly. Not talking about the sexual activities that transmit HIV, even to our children when they are ready, is to contribute to a world-wide disaster. Making HIV testing as routine and shameless as an eye-exam, or dental cleaning, is central too. I read in the Dispatch Friday of an American Baptist minister in New England who is having himself tested for HIV in the pulpit today, right before the disbelieving eyes of his congregation. I wish I had thought of it, and beat him to it, frankly.

Encouraging the United Nations to continue its present tack of AIDS studies is also a significant process for churches such as ours to encourage. Right now, the United Nations seems to be far more cognizant of what the first reading by Susan Sontag makes clear than any of its individual member nations. AIDS, like pollution, and global markets, doesn't recognize national boundaries or respect nation states. It has no use for nationality or what is called "race," and it certainly doesn't care what a person believes or doesn't believe. AIDS is an issue for the whole undifferentiated world. It's a now a solemn part of the journey we are taking together into the future. I can no longer have the luxury of thinking of it as the most significant part of my own personal journey.

But I want to end with that personal journey nonetheless.

On the day when my best friend Stefan was lowered into the ground at the Jewish Cemetery at Colma, we all recited the Jewish Kaddish prayer, Yit gadal v'yit kadash, shemei raba … and heard chants and readings which the rabbi used to soothe our broken spirits.

That night, I had tickets to go see Bill T. Jones, the great American choreographer and dancer, who himself has HIV disease, AIDS. I have always loved his work, and I decided that I might benefit from his artistic ministry, even though, naturally, part of me just wanted to stay home that night.

The piece he performed was called Still/Here. Interestingly, it was a piece he had created and choreographed during a six month stint while he resided here in Columbus Ohio, working with the famous OSU Dance Department. It was a piece, appropriately enough, about the effects of terrible illness…specifically breast cancer, prostate cancer and AIDS.

The stage was set up much as I set the chancel up this morning… there were huge black and white videographed photos of people with AIDS and large architectural structures similar to our painted altar boxes. The color blue was prominent in the lighting, I seem to remember.

The dancers danced Bill's electric choreography with a passion I had never thought possible. The music, the spoken words, the colors, the beautiful movements of arms and torsos…I was moved more deeply than I had ever been before by any work of art. You're right, I was especially raw and vulnerable because of what had happened that morning, but nonetheless, it remains in my experience the single most moving piece of art I have ever witnessed.

When the piece was over, Bill held his usual question period. Folks who wanted to stay after could talk to the dancers and Bill about their observations or ask technical questions. I stayed for it. I did have a question, after all. About three hundred other folks stayed.

Bill eventually noticed my raised hand. I said, "I have a question and a statement." I asked him my technical question which he answered. Then I said, "I have a statement to make, too. I want you to know that I laid my best friend in the ground this morning. He died of AIDS. We said Kaddish for him." I paused to catch my tears. Bill said, "Oh I know about Kaddish. I said it for Arne when he died." Arne Zane was Bill's partner in life and dance for many years before he died of AIDS. The dance company is still called the Bill T. Jones /Arne Zane dance company to this very day.

So then I said, "I want you to know what you did for me this evening. My grief is great tonight, as you might expect, but your piece offered me an invitation. It gently bid me climb up into a high place, a high place where all the other people in the world who had ever grieved were assembled. Then you invited us, if we were willing, to take their hand in my own. Then you asked us to look down below, and to see the whole world from that vantage place. I suddenly didn't feel alone anymore, but joined to the great cloud of witnesses who had seen what I had seen, and witnessed what I had witnessed. And I found great strength there, more strength than I thought I would ever feel again. I no longer felt personally defeated, but greeted hope for the first time in ages. I knew there were things we grievers could do together that could change the world. And I knew I wanted to be part of that congregation of lovers. That's what your piece did for me tonight. You restored my soul. I thank you from the bottom of my heart."

"Did you feel manipulated at all?" asked Bill, clearly still wounded by a stinging and unfair criticism of his work which the New Yorker magazine had infamously printed.

"No, I did not feel manipulated. Remember I said you invited me to join hands with others. You did not force me. I did so willingly and gladly. So thanks."

Later, when the question period was over, I went up to shake his hand. After that moving conversation, I wanted to make contact with him. He somehow recognized who I was. He excused himself from the woman to whom he had been talking on the stage, and came over to me and put his arms around me and rocked me ever so gently. "I am so sorry about your friend." He didn't have to do that, but he did. And I wept and wept in his arms, the arms of someone who knows and remembers, and thus remains strong, defiant, honest and vulnerable, to this very day.

It's that high place I offer you now. Join me. Look down. See how small our world is? See how little the planet that is our home is? Can you see that we are all in this world together? When you see that lovely sight, can you tell that no one will magically whisk away our biological and social problems like AIDS and sexual superstition…that we will have to do such things ourselves? And maybe you can see that we can only do it if we proceed from the strength that is found in our honesty, our grieving, and our willingness to face reality divinely and not paint delusions on it like a mask.

Such facing of reality is the work of a powerful religion and a strong people, folks willing to roll up the sleeves of their compassion and realize that AIDS is never someone else's problem, but our own.

And if, when you look down, you cannot yet see the whole small world, look down and see your own hands in your lap! I tell you hope blossoms there like a bouquet of winter roses at Guadalupe, like a menorah brilliant against the night, like a noisy feast that ends the fast and begins a celebration of life. Look down and be glad. It's in our hands.

Closing Prayer: A Kaddish [back to top] written by my best friend, my true brother, Richard Sinkoff, two months exactly before his partner in life and my closest friend died of AIDS. It's a beautiful, simple, haunting piece that has not let me go from the first time Richard read it to me. He calls this kaddish Staff of Life. Kaddish is, of course, the Jewish memorial prayer for those who have died.

Cells and water
air
cells and water and air
morning and evening
night
morning and evening and night

touch and smell
taste
touch and smell and taste

heart and brain
kidney
heart and brain and kidney

bread and oil
wine
bread and oil and wine

sleep and quiet
rest
sleep and quiet and rest

birth and death
life
birth and death and life

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