the body of christ has aidsResponding to a gendered pandemic as an embodied community
by Denise Ackermann
the body of christ has aids
Responding to a gendered pandemic as an embodied
community
by Denise Ackermann
African theologian Teresa Okure startled her hearers at a theological symposium on AIDS held in Pretoria in 1998, by saying that there are two viruses more dangerous than the HIV virus because they are carriers enabling this virus to spread so rapidly. The first virus is the one that assigns women an inferior status to men in society. The second is the virus of global economic injustice that causes dreadful poverty in many parts of the developing world. Picking up on Okure's observations, I argue that the HIV/AIDS pandemic is a gendered pandemic exacerbated by poverty that is having a devastating impact on our ability to sustain people-centered development.
How can the Body of Christ, itself infected with AIDS, find and bring hope into this context?
First, I suggest that we begin by acknowledging that our social reality is an embodied reality. So is HIV/AIDS and poverty. So is the degrading of our environment. As the Body of Christ we are an embodied community of people. Why is this important? It is the starting place for our sense of community – when one limb of the body suffers, we all suffer. The body carries our scars, our memories, our hopes and the clues to our identities. The recognition that sustainable development is about people's bodies is the place to start.
Stigma and the body
Women who are HIV-positive are at the receiving end of prejudice, social ostracism and violence. Countless women in South Africa who are HIV-positive have been the victims of sexual violence, perpetrated within a cultural order in which power is abused and women are used for male purposes. In a patriarchal system, women's cries of distress are insufficiently heard and they often disappear under a veil of silence. Breaking the silence about one's status can be life-threatening. Gugu Dlamini became South Africa's first AIDS martyr when, in December 1998, she was stoned to death for speaking out about her HIV status.
When the HIV virus enters, lurks, then makes forays into the immune system of a person, life changes forever. The body is not only diseased but becomes the focus of stigmas. Stigmas are socially constructed ways of marking people. Stigmas brand or disgrace individuals or groups, tainting them and making them alien to the dominant culture.
The question of stigma is particularly poignant when it is attached to persons suffering from HIV/AIDS. Ignorance, prejudice, stereotypes, issues of power and dominance all conspire to stigmatize sufferers and in so doing to label them and to distort their true identities. You simply become "an HIV-positive," a statistic whose identity is now subsumed in your status.
Fortunately, within the body of people living with HIV/AIDS there is an increasing band of people who are slowly gaining power by defining their experiences and claiming their reality, speaking out and breaking the silence around the disease. There is also a new brand of social activism emerging in South Africa, as bodies march in the streets demanding affordable treatment for HIV/AIDS. We cannot sustain any form of just development in communities which are a breeding ground for stigmas. As members of the Body of Christ, we ourselves have to demonstrate the truth that all members are equal in value and dignity.
Awakening from virtue
In South Africa today there is much talk, and very necessary talk, about abstinence, prevention and medication in the face of the HIV/AIDS crisis. The Roman Catholics say abstinence is the only answer. The Anglicans say yes, but if you must, use condoms. There is very little being said, however, about the moral and ethical issues raised by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. So far the church has not grasped this nettle. The recognition that the Body of Christ is a community of sexual human beings is slow in coming and centuries of ignoring any matter related to human sexuality is merely feeding the silences around HIV/AIDS. It is simply not good enough merely to preach fidelity and abstinence in sexual relations. This message cannot be heard, understood or followed as long as it is communicated without a properly constructed debate on what constitutes a moral community. This is a debate in which both men and women must take part. Moral choices and moral accountability and a community in which women are respected as equal partners in the church itself, as well as in their sexual relations, are essential to this debate.
What makes a moral community? Christian ethics are communal ethics. How people live with one another and our faithfulness to God are two sides of the same coin.
To put it differently, a moral community is one whose goal is the common good of all. Common good makes sense if it is translated into sustained people-centered development. A moral community upholds the integrity of life, values the dignity of the human person, includes those who are on the margins or excluded, while not avoiding the reality of structural sin.
Bruce Birch and Larry Rasmussen in their book Bible and Ethics in the Christian Life tell the story of Dom Helder Camara meditating in the middle hours of the night about the attitudes of the rich toward the poor and then writing a poem. This poem speaks to those of us in the church who are not HIV-positive and who may be tempted to feel virtuous about our status, perhaps even indifferent to those who are infected:
The bodily practice of grace
I pray incessantly for the conversion of the prodigal son's brother. Ever in my ear rings the dread warning " this one [the prodigal] has awoken from his life of sin. When will the other [the brother] awaken from his virtue?" |
The Eucharist is the bodily practice of grace. Nancy Eiesland writes: "Receiving the Eucharist is a body practice of the church. The Eucharist as a central and constitutive practice of the church is a ritual of membership. The Eucharist is a matter of bodily mediation of justice and an incorporation of hope." Because God chose to live with us in the flesh, sacramentality takes physical reality very seriously. We are bodily partakers of the physical elements of bread and wine, Christ's presence in our lives and in our world. The very bodiliness of the celebration of the Eucharist affirms the centrality of the body in the practice of the faith.
The communion meal mediates communion and true life-giving relationship with the crucified one in the presence of the risen one. It becomes a foretaste of the messianic banquet of all humankind. It is the meal at which the bodies of all are welcome. In Christ's Body, the Eucharist is the sacrament of equality. Only self-exclusion can keep one away. At the communion table we are offered the consummate step in forging an ethic of right relationship, across all our differences. "We who are many are one body for we all partake of the one bread." This visible, unifying, bodily practice of relationship with all its potential for healing is ours.
As long as WWSD [World Summit on Sustainable Development] or NEPAD [New Partnership for Africa's Development] or any other grand design does not address the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa there will be no sustained development for African people. This places a heavy burden on the Body of Christ to be a voice of truth in the midst of denial and prevarication. We can speak into the moment by acknowledging the central role of gender in this pandemic and holding fast to the truths of our faith which we must put into practice day by day. HIV/AIDS is our kairos because as long as we are unable (even unwilling) to deal adequately with this scourge, development that is truly sustainable, gender-sensitive and people-centered will not come about. It is a time when the ordinary rhythm of life is suspended. Will it be a time of doom or will we find a new unveiling of God's presence and love for us here and now?