Advent Starts at Midnight
Today (1 December) is World AIDS day. Here Richard Carson, CEO of ACET Ireland brings a guest blog, reflecting on advent, AIDS and lament.
Why remembering and lament are a necessity to end AIDS
The AIDS memorial quilts on display in Washington DC in 1996
Sunday, 1 December"And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death.” Revelation 6:8
Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On, the seminal and controversial text on the early days of AIDS in the USA, opens with these apocryphal words from the Book of Revelation. The context was the extraordinary death toll at that time. Death was seen most profoundly in communities that were already marginalised; in many cases these communities continue to experience profound under resourcing. The present day reality is far removed from that context with an end to the pandemic of AIDS in sight within a decade. However, the grief and loss of that time seem to linger more strongly than ever between the lines of this good news story.
This year World AIDS Day falls neatly on the first Sunday of Advent - the Christian tradition’s New Year’s Day. Fleming Rutledge’s stunning collection of sermons and writing on Advent challenges the conflation of Advent into Christmas. She asserts that the season does not exist merely as a passive waiting platform for Christmas. Rather it is the liturgical season that most reflects our current everyday reality of waiting for the Second Coming. It is a time to be present to the gritty reality of our dark world and the absence of light. Rutledge illustrates that “Advent starts at midnight” by reminding us that:
“The Medieval church designed the four Sundays of Advent around the themes of the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell—in that order, so that the subject of hell was preached on the Sunday just before Christmas Eve. That was no accident. The idea was—and is—to show how the light of the birth of Christ appeared against a backdrop of darkness, depravity, and despair.”
We need this understanding of Advent because we forget. We forget the injustices that line our streets. We forget our complicity in them. We forget that anger, not pity, should more often be our response. We forget that our centre is not the centre and the lost are not ‘out there’. We forget that the poor are with us. We forget that we have been here before. So our philanthropy keeps the wealth disparity intact. The book or blog post about the ‘issue’ keeps the neighbour on the street or in the pew at a distance. The cultural competency workshop keeps the Board/Staff team/Leadership Team all-White. Maybe Oscar Wilde was onto something when he said that “the worst slave owners were the ones who were kind to their slaves.” Maybe they just forgot.
HIV & AIDS have always had a relationship with remembering. Unlike many other viruses HIV doesn’t directly disrupt an organ such as the liver or the lungs. Rather it attacks the body’s remembering system, dismantling it so that we forget how to defend ourselves. AIDS is internal amnesia fulfilled. The treatment for HIV disrupts this process, keeping our remembering and therefore our health intact.
The Paris Declaration is the roadmap for cities to end AIDS by 2030. It is a fascinating document that on the one hand names the ruthlessly quantifiable targets of 90-90-90 in a way that seems fundamentally at odds with how other voices have handled similar ratios and percentiles. It targets 90 per cent of people living with HIV knowing their HIV status, 90 percent of those people on effective treatment and 90 percent of people on effective treatment having an undetectable viral load. Its urging for cities to be “fast, smart and more effective,” is a clarion call to keep amnesia intact if ever there was one.
But on the other hand its text is rich with the language of leaving “no one behind” as it points to genuine equity and inclusion. Whether the latter is informed by recent commitments of the United Nations or by the input of Paris’s socialist Mayor, herself a primary signatory, is unclear. What is more certain is that we are left wondering if such words of hope for those who experience injustice will ever come to anything. The Lord Mayors of Dublin, Cork, Galway and Limerick, backed by the Government, have signed the Paris Declaration.
The Quilt of Hope memorialised by ACET’s quilt group in Rialto, Dublin at on their own community quilt.
My concern for my own city of Dublin is that we will press forward with the incredible technological advances such as rapid HIV testing and effective treatment with the amnesia that allows so many to be left behind remaining untouched.
In our capital, some of those most vulnerable to ceasing their adherence to HIV treatment are systematically moved out of the city in favour of the economic imperative. Our housing and rental crisis is another adopted system that steadily moves both families and supportive community spaces (including churches) to the fringes of the metropolis and beyond.
A ‘Great Migration’ among Black-African communities out of Ireland at the start of this decade, itself driven in part by racial stratification in the labour market, is almost totally forgotten as history repeats itself. Since 90-90-90 for Dublin is based on a distinct geographical area, the risk is that this rate will be achieved, not by better healthcare alone but by sustaining an unaffordable city. To put it bluntly, those impacted by poverty, addiction or trauma who have been also geographically marginalised, are no longer counted, making our numbers look better than they really are.
Peter Okaalet reminds us that “HIV exposed the fault lines in the theology, ethics and actions of the church.” Not just for church but for broader society, the fault lines run deep. A global pandemic need not expose this for Christians as we have been handed down a practice that allows us to embrace our darkness, to overcome the amnesia and remember again.
Lament is the long lost practice which needs resurrecting. Lament at Advent allows us to “take an unflinching inventory of darkness” (Rutledge), to repent of our part in it and allow the Light, which shines much brighter than our amnesia tells us, to transform us.
Rather than a carol associated with the “Christmas creep” into Advent, consider this hymn as a soundtrack to the season: www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9IfHDi-2EA
