AS WE were completing this issue on HIV/AIDS
word spread through our rural peninsula of a tragic accident: Two workers from a local construction firm were drowned when their skiff capsized on the short trip across Port Clyde harbor from a job site on Hupper Island. Two companions survived.

We could hear the Coast Guard helicopter and watch the procession of emergency vehicles from our house. We considered, sick at heart, if we might know the men who died. Local conversation is now focussing on what happened and why. Was the small boat overloaded? Was it foolish to attempt the crossing, however small the distance, one a day when the winds and sea prevented fishing boats from leaving their moorings? Were they going too fast in their haste to put their work day behind?

None of the answers to these questions will likely lead anyone to believe that the two dead men got what they deserved. The community will enfold their families with love and care and the local clergy (mostly different persuasions of Baptist) will acknowledge the incomprehensibleness of such tragedy and console the grieving with a vision of God's unfailing love.

UNLESS, of course, it turns out
that the two who drowned had been drinking on the job. Or, alternatively, if the two who drowned were hardworking and devoted family men, while the two who survived had a history of incurring bad debts or beating their children or becoming involved in

brawls or frequenting gay bars. I can think of a dozen scenarios that would easily muddy the theological and moral waters, each suggesting a different sort of God and thereby calling the community to a different set of responses.

The powers and principalities of this world thrive on such widespread muddlement, costing lives at every turn.

The theological disarray among both churchgoers and the unchurched in our small coastal community is nothing out of the ordinary. I've experienced it in every community where I've lived, from New York to Washington, D.C., from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Topeka, Kansas. As much of our public policy and private actions testify, the powers and principalities of this world thrive on such widespread muddlement, costing lives at every turn. But with HIV/AIDS the particular consequence is death-dealing in a way that seems especially diabolical. In full knowledge that a cure will not be discovered any time remotely soon, we allow our confused theologies to block the one sure-fire way to save lives: a single-minded, comprehensive and vigorous nationwide prevention program.

AS PUBLIC HEALTH expert Michael Merson points out
in this issue, preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS is possible! But it would require an enormous shift of focus--from accepting death to insisting on life. Instead of telling our young people that we'd rather have them dead than sexually active, a message we convey every time we deny then the opportunity to learn about sexually transmitted diseases, we could entrust them with enough information to keep them alive for the badly needed conversations about just what constitutes "good sex" anyway. And we could use clean syringes to offer a sign of respect to those addicted to injection drugs, rather than insisting that we hate their habit more than we value their lives.

Preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS is possible! But it would require an enormous shift of focus--from accepting death to insisting on life.

SUCH AN AGREEMENT will not be easy
but I saw signs of the possibility at last November's AIDS & Religion in America conference sponsored by the Washington, D.C.-based AIDS National Interfaith Network, in which the National Episcopal AIDS Coalition actively participates. (See www.ANIN.org for more on ANIN and the conference.) Those assembled represented an extraordinarily vast range of faith perspectives, including a wide spectrum within Christianity. Some presenters offered views that made participants squirm with discomfort or seethe with disagreement, but in the face of such a stunning array of difference there was only one possibility: a focus on flesh-and-blood essentials. Like what it takes to save lives while praying for a cure. In such an atmosphere, it was impossible to imagine ever again finding acceptable the sort of infighting and theological hairsplitting that year after year drown so many denominational gatherings in a sea of paper, restraining forward movement on critical life-and-death issues to a geological creep.

If we don't find a way to get our hand on some life preservers soon, whatever our confusion about God, vast numbers of lives will be tragically lost.

Julie A. Wortman