Hear what AIDS says to the churches

Extract

Even though, as these years of AIDS go by, knowledge accumulates, experiences circulate and piles of books about the subject are written, nevertheless everybody seems to advance into an unknown territory, without maps or compass. Humanity has not got this landscape printed in its memory and each person who is HIV positive must rediscover for himself or herself how to cope with life and death, with time and with love, with the future, with sex, with money, in short with all those relations that human beings do not stop more or less consciously creating so that their lives have meaning, and which, among those that that the virus overtakes, are overthrown from top to bottom.

Often the man who is HIV Positive must live very much alone, so much is incommunicable. Moreover, he must often live with rejection and avoidance and fears—his own and others—in a society in which (to quote an observation of Olivier de Dinechin’s) it is many people’s opinion that ‘they brought it on themselves’ or even that ‘they have only got what they deserved’ ... whereas cancer is seen as a calamity and a heart-attack as almost an honour: ‘He worked too hard’. It is in a general silence or else censureship that some whole families are going into extinction, as Simon Robson describes in ‘Through the eye of a needle’. And, at least in some countries, to this rejection by public opinion very often is added exclusion from work, from one’s digs, from insurance coverage, from school ... the list goes on and on.