December 1, 2005

On World AIDS Day 2005

By Paul Dirdak

There's a monster in the closet.
There's a ghost upon the wall.
So why do you keep on telling me
There's nothing there at all?

Rev. Tom Hunter, circa 1975

A children's song, written by a colleague whose ministry involves both new and old songs for humans just as new, or just as old, has often helped me to focus my attention on the realities of ministry in the face of AIDS.

God's graces are abundant, and some of them are obvious. But we observers are myopic, and only notice some of Gods' blessings. One blessing that we often overlook is the fashion in which children perceive monsters. For kids, monsters are always very, very big. So big, in fact, that the monsters must often fold themselves up just to stay in the childhood closet. Even so, sometimes a bit of monster leaks out, or a monster's shirtsleeve gets caught in a careless door. But adult monsters tend to live microscopically at the other end of the spectrum.

By God's own grace, the little ones ("to Him belong") are often spared this cruelest of the monsters in favor of the huge, closet-dwelling variety. By the time we become adults, we may have stopped believing in monsters, even those that are also less bulky, less apprehensible, and much less strategically targetable.

The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is so tiny that there are microscopes that cannot squint tight enough to capture it. But what a monster! It defeats the armies of cells that our bodies array against invaders. Once our immune capacity is reduced to nothing, we're left prey to things that shouldn't ail anyone. The tiny monster takes us down by subtle, sneaky, and wily strategies. Monster, indeed.

For twenty years, many of us have been involved in various holy interventions in this inexorable pandemic. During that time, we have shifted our attention from our local scene close up to the world scene to distant local scenes. We have labored for prevention, funding, testing, disability status, free condoms, orphans, safe home care, and youth peer counseling.

One of the commonalities in every world-class catastrophe is that human beings get mad. It's more than understandable. Change is slow. Death is unwelcome. Pain is unwelcome. Beauty degrades before one's eyes. Ignorance and neglect exact a heavy toll. Pandemic disease management entails lots of anger management.

My experience has been that the invisible monster makes it too easy to misidentify the enemy. It is quite natural to be mad, and very mad. Part of the evil of this disease is that the virus literally gets away with murder, with too few angry people venting their rage at it-the virus, the true culprit.

After all these years, we still blame the sick for their sickness, we still blame others in the chain of transmission for infections, we still blame ourselves for our weaknesses, and we still blame God for including 'bugs' in the order of things.

Friends, it is a virus, a monster, a very tiny monster. It gets away with too much bad behavior simply because it is too small to see. It has the perfect camouflage, the perfect escape, the perfect excuse, the perfect alibi: it hides in plain sight because it is too tiny a life form to even imagine. It has robbed us of parents and children, of village futures, and many of our churches' innocence. Too often it has gotten away with the theft because we have fallen for its ploy and have blamed everyone except the virus.

On this World AIDS Day, we can renew the programs? refund the social services?, rehire the health workers?, test more blood?, bathe more feverish temples?, caress more trembling hands?, kiss more tears?, buy more protease inhibitors?, clean more needles?, broadcast more condoms?, and counsel wisdom among more sex-minded kids.

And while we're at it, we can pray more prayers. We can find new prayers of blame, if there are such things. I hope we will exonerate everyone we have ever blamed in the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and one way to begin is to reserve the blame for the actual monster itself.

The virus is not in the closet, but then neither are we, nor is God.

Paul Dirdak serves as Deputy General Secretary of the General Board of Global Ministries and directs the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR).

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